#BTColumn – Unity in the battle against COVID

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by David Comissiong

On Friday 22nd January 2021, I had the honour and privilege of being a member of the welcoming party that was on hand at the Grantley Adams International Airport to welcome to Barbados a team of some 15 Cuban doctors and laboratory specialists that had made its way to Barbados on an Air Antilles charter flight, in order to bolster the human and technical resources available to our country in its herculean fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

And, of course, this team of Cuban medical specialists was the second such medical team that had made its invaluable services available to our country in the fight against COVID-19.

Indeed, way back in April 2020, a one hundred member strong contingent of Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade – 99 specialist nurses and 1 doctor – had come to Barbados to help man our newly established COVID-19 Isolation Medical Facility and to provide other crucial medical services.

Some nine months later, that first medical team is still in Barbados saving lives.

But, as impressive as this is, this is only the Barbados chapter of the story of Cuba’s medical assistance to our Caribbean Community.

It needs to be recorded that our sister Caribbean nation of Cuba has sent medical teams to virtually every single independent CARICOM member state over the past ten months to assist in the life and death struggle against the coronavirus.

And it is precisely because we in the Caribbean are so conscious and proud of Cuba’s decades-long record of regional and international humanitarian service, that our CARICOM Heads of Government have so trenchantly rejected and denounced the ignoble effort that a number of members in the Senate of the United States of America have been making to legislatively characterize the Cuban medical brigades as a form of human trafficking.

When this wicked and mischievous notion was first raised in the US Senate early in 2020, our CARICOM Heads of Government grasped the opportunity of their February 2020 Summit in Barbados to express:-

“their deep appreciation for the medical assistance provided by Cuba … over the years … (and) acknowledged … of their own first-hand knowledge that the persons sent have added tremendous value to helping their citizens. They repudiated the statement that this medical assistance given by the Cubans was a form of human trafficking.”

And then, later in the year – at the 8th of December 2020 CARICOM-Cuba Summit – our heads of Government embraced the opportunity to reiterate their message as follows:-

“We reject any attempt to discredit, distort or disrupt the Cuban medical assistance to the region; an important aid to the Caribbean healthcare system.”

It is therefore to be fervently hoped that these two forthright, principled and trenchant CARICOM declarations have sent a righteous Caribbean message to the US Senate, and that the shameful efforts of Republican Senators Cruz, Scott, Rubio and Menendez to defame Cuba’s highly respected international medical brigade programme will be heard of no more.

But it is not only Cuba’s medical teams that are of such critical importance to our Caribbean Community. There is also the other little matter of a COVID-19 vaccine.

As we all should be aware, our Caribbean Community – the most tourism and travel dependent region of the entire world – is in desperate need of COVID-19 vaccines to protect – first of all – our frontline health and tourism workers, and then the rest of our 18 million strong regional population.

And so, in a situation in which a number of the world’s wealthiest nations have engaged in actions that have had the effect of monopolizing much of the world’s current supply of COVID-19 vaccines, our CARICOM governments have been proactively seeking out every possible source of such vaccines.

Not only have we signed up to the World Health Organization (WHO) COVAX scheme and made down payments for vaccines that we expect to receive under that programme, but we have also reached out to the African Union (AU) to secure participation in their “Africa Medical Supplies Platform”; to China; to a number of the relevant pharmaceutical multi-national companies, and the list goes on.

But even in this advanced, high technology sphere Cuba is proudly flying the Caribbean flag and is offering us much cause for hope.

You see, on Wednesday 20th January 2021, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Cuba has commenced upon the second part of Phase II of a trial of the “Soberana 02” COVID-19 vaccine that has been developed by Cuba’s world famous Finlay Vaccine and Serum Institute. And, according to Dr. Vincente Verez, the Director of the Institute, the plan is to manufacture some 100 million doses of the vaccine.

It should also be noted that Soberana 02 is not the only COVID-19 vaccine that our Cuban brothers and sisters have developed. There are also the Soberana 01, the Adbala, and the Mambisa vaccine candidates.

It is fair to say, however, that the Soberana 02 offers the greatest promise and is the most advanced where research and testing is concerned.

We Caribbean people can therefore take comfort from the fact that we possess our own indigenous and autonomous sources of strength in virtually every field of endeavour, inclusive of the critical life and death sphere of public health.  The key, however, to those “sources of strength” is our integration and unity – our Caribbean integration and unity!

As mighty and as deadly as this COVID-19 pandemic is, we can be confident that when we combine the resources of such CARICOM institutions as our Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), and CARICOM Implementing Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS), as well as such associate institutions as the Regional Security System (RSS) and the University of the West Indies (UWI), along with such powerful Cuban entities as the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade, the Finlay Institute, the Cuban Civil Defence, and many others, there is virtually no emergency that is beyond our collective capacity to respond to and to overcome.

Indeed, the late great Errol Walton Barrow – national hero of Barbados – put it succinctly and eloquently when he stated – “the Caribbean is, after all, a civilization”.

This is the self-belief and self-confidence that we must arm ourselves with as we march forward shoulder to shoulder with our Cuban compatriots, determined to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.

David Comissiong is Barbados’ Ambassador to Caricom.