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Cuba Stands Firm. It Works, Creates, and Fights Against the Threat of Imperialism

Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World

Imperialism coldly calculates its timing. Every step is part of its historical obsession with seizing control of Cuba.

To the historic blockade—the longest in history—it added a fuel blockade, using blackmail and threats against anyone who attempts to sell oil to Cuba. To this, it added a series of sanctions between January 29 and May 7.

Amid this landscape of calculated deprivation bordering on suffocation, and amidst the titanic efforts of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba to install solar energy sources, a ship arrived in April, sent by Russia, which helped alleviate the severe energy crisis.

It is no coincidence that as fuel ran out and summer approached, the Trump administration played two cards: requesting permission for the CIA director’s visit and offering $100 million in humanitarian aid.

Amid enormous pressure, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement has become a mantra: “Cuba is a failed state.” Added to this is Trump’s belief: “They will come to us.”

Marco Rubio pulled the warning out of his bag of lies: “Chinese and Russian bases established in Cuba are a threat to the Western Hemisphere.”

It is all absolutely false; they all know it: from the Congressmen who visited Cuba to the mainstream media.

It is not a diagnosis; it is the perverse planning of a decadent empire that believes it has found its ripe fruit. Now, the new narrative has begun: “Cuban drones would be activated.” They are trying to prepare the final blow.

Their defeat in Iran, the approaching midterm elections, the solidarity of more than six million Cubans ready to defend their sovereignty, their failure to spark an internal uprising, and the realization that the people continue to work and resist have them desperate.

The anti-Cuban fascist minority based in Florida has finally found a government to ride roughshod over, pressure, and try to subdue by blackmailing with their votes. They want a quick victory. They want to bring back the casinos, drugs, and prostitution. They want the port, the schools, the nationalized properties.

It is the empire’s rush when it feels time slipping away.

A fierce blockade lasting more than six decades has not helped them understand the cost of their punitive and failed policy. They do not understand what kind of people they are dealing with.

This is the same people and the same Rebel Army that, after years of internationalist struggle in Africa, sat down at a negotiating table where imperialism sought to wring from them the certainty of whether or not they would cross the Namibian border. And the Cuban leader replied: “We cannot say that we will do it, nor that we will not do it.”

“They will never know our silent decision. They will never know the sacrifices we are willing to make.”

That internationalism, the legacy of Fidel and Raúl, did not expand our geographical borders, nor did it bring back gold and silver; it only brought to our soil the dead we gave up. But it forever expanded our political borders, of unparalleled solidarity and respect.

And that is the fact that the empire, in its desperation, fails to grasp: that an invasion of Cuba will not be directed solely against Cuba. It will be against all the peoples of the world who are beginning to sign up and enlist, just as they did at the Bay of Pigs to defend Cuba against aggression.

The resistance will not be confined to a single trench: it will multiply in every corner of Our America and beyond.

Cuba knows the script because it has endured it for more than sixty years. It knows that behind every accusation lies a plan for domination, behind every fabricated “threat” lies a fleet ready to set sail, and behind every “failed nation” lies the greed of those who dream of dividing up its spoils.

But this people is no stranger to resistance. It comes from far back and remembers where its first mission began.

When U.S. rockets fell on the home of the humble peasant Mario Sariol in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel spoke the words that still ring with the same urgency today:

“When I saw the rockets they fired at Mario’s house, I swore to myself that the Americans would pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over, a much longer and greater war will begin for me: the war I am going to wage against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.”

That certainty was not an emergency slogan; it was the founding compass of the Revolution. And that compass is what continues to guide us. They want our collapse. They want our humiliation. They have the wrong people. They have the wrong history.

Only when they attempt the final blow will they know that Cuba still stands, clinging to its first mission, which is also its last line of defense: the fight against imperialism. Onward to victory always!

[Source: Cuba en Resumen. Courtesy: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World. Resumen is a newsletter whose focus is news and analysis coming primarily from Latin America by writers, researchers, and activists living there.]

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Raúl Castro Is a Hero: The Real Criminals are the U.S. Imperialists

Nikos Mottas

Raúl Castro is certainly not a criminal, regardless of how desperately the Trump administration attempts to portray him as one. He is a revolutionary who dedicated his life to the struggle against dictatorship, foreign domination and capitalist exploitation in Cuba. The renewed threats surrounding a possible U.S. arrest warrant against him are nothing more than another act of imperial arrogance by a state that has spent more than sixty years trying to suffocate the Cuban Revolution through blockade, sabotage, economic warfare and permanent political aggression.

Washington’s hypocrisy is difficult to overstate. The same United States that invaded countries, organized coups, armed reactionary forces and destroyed entire societies in defense of its geopolitical interests now attempts to present itself as a defender of “justice” and “democracy.” The same political establishment that finances wars, supports collective punishment and openly backs criminal regimes across the world suddenly claims moral authority when it comes to revolutionary Cuba.

The United States also has a long history of protecting and legitimizing violent anti-Castro extremists operating out of Miami–individuals and networks tied to sabotage, bombings and decades of terrorist aggression against Cuba. That same political establishment now attempts to lecture the world about “justice” and “democracy.”

Raúl Castro belongs to the historic generation that overthrew the Batista dictatorship–a regime of repression, corruption and total subordination to U.S. economic interests. Together with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and thousands of Cuban revolutionaries, that generation transformed Cuba from a playground of American corporations and mafia interests into an independent country that guaranteed healthcare, education, literacy and dignity to millions of ordinary people.

This is the real reason Cuba has been targeted for decades. As Fidel Castro once famously said,

They can never forgive us for having made a socialist revolution under the very nose of the United States.

For more than sixty years, the United States has attempted to break the Cuban Revolution by every possible means. Economic strangulation, diplomatic isolation, assassination plots, destabilization campaigns and endless sanctions were all meant to force Cuba back into dependency and submission. Yet Cuba endured. Despite enormous difficulties, socialist Cuba achieved social gains that remain out of reach for large sections of the population even inside the wealthiest capitalist countries.

Donald Trump and the increasingly reactionary forces surrounding him represent the most aggressive face of contemporary American imperialism. Their obsession with Cuba has nothing to do with “human rights.” Cuba remains a target because it represents a historic act of defiance–a small country that resisted the power of the United States and survived. That reality continues to infuriate the imperial establishment in Washington.

The campaign against Raúl Castro is therefore not simply directed against one individual. It is an attack against the entire historical legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution. It seeks to criminalize anti-imperialist struggle itself while erasing the long record of violence, intervention and domination carried out by the United States across Latin America and the wider world.

But there is a historical memory that imperialism cannot erase so easily.

Millions of people across the world still view the Cuban Revolution as a symbol of sovereignty, resistance and international solidarity. Whatever debates may exist around Cuba’s path, one fact remains undeniable: the Revolution broke the chains of foreign domination and proved that even a small nation could stand against imperial power without surrendering.

No matter what happens, Raúl Castro will remain part of that glorious history. On the other hand, the architects of sanctions, aggression and imperial domination will remain part of the long historical record of imperialism, oppression and violence.

[Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism. Courtesy: In Defense of Communism, a blog edited in Greece, that aims in supporting and promoting the continuous advancement of the class struggle against capitalism.]

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Why Hate Cuba, Especially Its Medical Practices?

Don Fitz

An assault on Cuba needs excuses for hating it. But given that any exchanges between the US and Cuba has been blocked out of the news for decades, it’s a bit difficult for a lot of folks to figure out why they are supposed to hate it and starve the people there. Let’s look through the eyes of those who promote an attack to find the real reasons.

Going back to Cuba’s 1959 revolution we can see that it occurred during the cold war anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era which permeated that time. Though the Cuban revolution was (and continues to be) portrayed as a “Communist” revolution, it was not. When Fidel Castro visited New York in April 1959, he described it as a “humanist revolution” which focused on land reform, literacy, and of course, the hostility of the Batista regime to granting those.

However, then vice-president Richard Nixon played no small part in converting Fidel to communism. When Fidel met with him in New York, Nixon showed no interest in the social reforms that Fidel tried to explain. Being “gratuitously snubbed” by Nixon, Fidel left convinced that Cuba would not receive any support from the US.

Defeat of the US and Its Proxy Forces

Today’s hostility toward Cuba is part of a broader onslaught by by US against any country that fails to submit to its imperial power. The US has been outraged that it and its proxy forces have been defeated by popular movements. Three stand out.

The backbone of Cuba’s revolutionary alliance was the July 26 movement headed by Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara. It was only when the fanatically anti-Communist John and Bobby Kennedy gave the green light to the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that Cuba first announced that the revolution was “socialist.” That attack from Florida by Cuban counterrevolutionaries was soundly defeated by Cuban forces under Fidel’s leadership.

The second victory of a popular movement was in Vietnam from the 1960s and early 1970s. That US onslaught was defeated so badly that Nixon had to order the last troops to run out as fast as they could go in 1973.

Che Guevara helped set the stage for the third defeat. Beginning in 1964 he made multiple trips to get a first-hand look at African movements in Algeria, Ghana, the Congo, Guinea, Mali, Benin, Tanzania and Egypt. In April, 1974 Portugal dictator Marcello Caetano fell, unleashing a wave of popular movements in its former colonies. The greatest struggle occurred in Angola. Revolutionary forces were backed by Cuba; South African forces did the dirty work of the US.

Though not often recognized, Vietnam became a spectacular win for Africa. The Vietnam war and military draft were despised so much by American youth that not even southern racists could envision US ground troops in another war at the time of Angola. Terrified that its youth would refuse to participate in a war to suppress Angola and defend apartheid, the US let South Africa do the fighting.

Suffering a tremendous defeat at the hands of Angolan/Cuban troops, South Africa withdrew in August, 1988. South African society changed and elected Nelson Mandela to head the country in 1994. Cuba had been the critical actor in the victorious struggle. When South Africans opened Freedom Park in Pretoria in 2007, its Wall of Names recognized the more than 2000 Cubans who lost their lives in the Angolan war. Cuba is the only foreign country represented on the Wall.

US had first experienced a defeat by proxy invaders at Bay of Pigs, second by a Vietnamese peasant army and third again by proxy forces of South Africa as US vigorously supported the apartheid regime. The US military brass seethed at the thought of a people’s army defeating one with vastly more weapons and resources.

A Special Hatred of Blackness

It is hardly an accident that victimization by American imperialism is against people of color in whatever corner of the world where they live. Yet there has always been a particular loathing of Black people, whether they were in Africa or were their slave descendants in the Americas.

The most extreme early hatred of the Cuban revolution was from white southern aristocrats and politicians who went berserk at the spectacle of Black Cubans taking up arms against their oppressors. It was much like the vitriol of their wealthy ancestors who had glared at images of Toussaint Louverture leading slaves to victory over masters and muttered that they would destroy Haiti for that outrage.

Shortly after 1959, Black Cubans, especially those living in the most impoverished rural areas, glared back as they were the first generation taking their children to see doctors and saw clinics and hospitals being erected for them. For Black Cubans during the early 1960s, these were simultaneously part of their realities – press portrayals of Black Americans in the South who demanded the right to sit at lunch counters being beaten and bitten by dogs as police put cattle prods to the breasts of Black women.

US rulers had long felt an affinity for South African apartheid. Trump revealed this openly when he announced that whites in that country deserved special immigration status due to the supposed mistreatment at the hand of Blacks. It was not unlike France demanding money from Haiti for the financial “loss” of their slave property as the price for recognizing the revolution.

What Medical Care Has Meant for the Cuban people

Another reason that the rich and powerful hate Cuba is the way it does so much better than the US in caring for its own people. Intentional efforts to destroy the Cuban medical system have occurred without documentation of any harm to any American from the island nation.

The revolution continued to be very real for Cubans as thousands received land and learned to read and write. Cuba greatly expanded non-toxic agriculture during the post-1991 embargo. But nowhere has Cuba exceeded more spectacularly than its medical revolution. Soon after 1959 pharmaceutical production was nationalized so people could afford medicines; clinics opened where there had been none; and a series of redesigns transformed the entire medical system.

Cuba greatly expanded medical education, admitting students who had been previously been shut out. When students graduate from medical school they have no debts to repay, unlike in the US where debt forces graduates to search for high-paying jobs in the sickness industry.

For the first few years after the revolution infant mortality increased. But as the new medical approach took hold it dropped, and, by 1998 the infant mortality rate in Cuba was down to 7.1 per 1000 live births, overtaking that in the US, which stood at 7.6 per 1000 live births. Life expectancy (LE) also surpassed that in the US. By 2016 Cuba’s LE was 79.0 years when it was 78.5 years in the US.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving Cuba without its best trading partner. During the extreme hardship of the “Special Period” of the 1990s, Cuba’s economy shrank by 40-45%. Tightened sanctions from the US left Cuba with serious damage to its economy, including higher costs for drugs, including those for treating HIV/AIDS. The US Toricelli law of 1992 and Helms-Burton law of 1996 were designed to isolate and strangle Cuba by limiting its trade.

Cuba’s extensive medical research allowed it to have a rapid response to the HIV/AIDS crisis that arrived in the 1980s. The nation focused its resources on developing treatment which was provided at no charge to everyone infected. At the same time that New York City (with a population similar to Cuba) had 43,000 deaths from AIDS, Cuba suffered 200 deaths.

Its research also prepared the island nation for Covid 19 even before its first fatality. Without a nationalized medical system, the US was woefully incompetent in responding to the epidemic. US LE dropped by 1.36 years for whites, 3.25 years for Hispanics, 3.88 years for Blacks, and an incredible 6.6 years for Native Americans. Meanwhile, Cuba had a slight increase in LE by 0.2 years. This difference was a testimony to the extreme racism which persists in the growth-oriented US.

Cuban Medical Care and the World – Routine and Crisis Care

Another reason that the rich and powerful hate Cuba is the way it cares for people throughout the world. Both the US and Cuba have sought to influence other countries. But their techniques have been quite different. The US seeks to prove that it is better at killing than any other nation. Cuba seeks to show the poor world that it can help them develop health care for all of their people at an affordable level. Both the US and Cuba both have been succeeding at their goals.

Shortly after its revolution Cuba began sending doctors and nurses around the world. In 1963, Cuba’s first official medical brigade went to Algeria with 55 staff, including 29 doctors. Brigades soon expanded across the globe, especially in Africa and Latin America. By 2014, 135,000 Cuban medical staff had worked in 158 countries.

For countless people in many countries, the first time they have seen a doctor has either been one from Cuba or one trained in Cuba. In fact, as of 2009, “almost 2 million people throughout the world owe their very lives to the availability of Cuban medical services.” By now the number of patients far exceeds 2 million.

A second form of Cuban medical internationalism has been responses to crises. Even before going to Algeria, during the year following its revolution, Cuba sent medical aide to Chile for earthquake assistance. Just a few of the large number of Cuban crisis interventions include an aggressive anti-malaria campaign in Africa in 2002-2004; medical teams going to Sri Lanka and Indonesia after a massive tsunami of December 2004; and 2000 personnel assisting Pakistan following a huge 2005 earthquake.

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown resulted in 125,000 deaths and 150,000 being evacuated. In perhaps its largest undertaking, Cuba supported victims throughout its harsh “Special Period” – in March 1990 it took in a group of 25,000 patients, mostly children.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti brought medical staff from both the US and Cuba. However, US physicians practiced “medical tourism” as they stayed in luxury hotels at night and did disaster relief during the day. In contrast, Cuban doctors had been in Haiti before the crisis, stayed after disaster recovery was completed, and, during the crisis, lived and slept in the same camps as earthquake victims, smelling the smells of non-sanitation and attending to the dying even at night.

As decades went by Cuba developed an internationalism that outshone US by far. Cuba’s sending doctors even to aid richer countries like Italy during Covid inspired suggestions, such as that from Code Pink, that they should receive the 2021 Nobel Prize for their medical aide.

Of all countries needing help, only one totally refused assistance from Cuba. Following the 2005 Katrina Hurricane, George W. Bush ignored Cuba’s offer to send 1500 medical staff to New Orleans.

Cuban Medical Care and the World – Education and Medications

The rich and powerful also hate Cuba due to its knowledge-based sharing. By the late 1990s the small island nation had often brought students from overseas to study to become doctors. In October 1998 Hurricane Mitch wrought incredible destruction to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Beliz and El Salvador. Mitch was a unique event because it sparked the creation of ELAM, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (Latin American School of Medicine). After the hurricane Fidel decided to bring students from other countries to Cuba to study medicine. ELAM began in 1999.

ELAM aimed to reverse the “brain drain” of medical student graduates leaving their homes in poor countries to earn far higher salaries in the rich world. After its 1964 independence only 50 of 600 doctors trained in Zambia remained there. A student in Sierra Leone could earn 20 times more by practicing in South Africa as would be made by staying home.

At ELAM, students prepare to to return as doctors in their own under-served communities. Cuban medical training focuses on public health and primary care to provide what the poor world needs most.

In January 2014 there were 11,000 students from 123 countries at ELAM. 75% of students accepted for ELAM come from worker or campesino families. ELAM students are integrated into 21 faculties and 444 polyclinics throughout Cuba’s 15 provinces. All have courses in traditional and natural medicine which proves invaluable if they practice medicine “in indigenous communities where shamans are often the trusted health providers.”

When visiting my daughter at ELAM in 2009-2010, I spoke with students from Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, Peru, St. Lucia (in Caribbean), Sierra Leone, Kenya, São Tomé and Príncipe (off African coast) Lesotho, and Tuvalu. I found that many students have arrangements with their governments to pay for their medical training. In exchange for having it paid for, they will work for several years (often 5) at a public medical institution. Students from Latin America and Africa typically attend ELAM immediately after high school.

No student I spoke with ever raised the possibility of becoming wealthy by studying medicine in Cuba. Most of them would not have been able to go to medical school had it not been for ELAM. This indicates that the shortage of doctors in impoverished areas has nothing to do with a lack of young people willing to become doctors and working in those communities.

Cuban medicine has been critical to the poor world due to the way it makes drugs available. Though Americans are highly unlikely to learn it from the corporate press, Cuba spreads medical assistance by providing drugs to the poor world at low cost.

Before the revolution, 70% of Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry was foreign-controlled and only 1,000 of 4,000 medications in use had therapeutic value. In 1961, the new government nationalized 35 warehouses and 370 pharmacies. By 1968, urban pharmacies had decreased by more than half, but rural pharmacies, where the poorest Cubans lived, had increased five-fold.”

Cuba has produced new medicines and shared its knowledge about them in ways that empower rather than subdue poor countries. Use of Heberprot B to treat diabetes has reduced amputations by 80%. Cuban researchers have created an effective vaccine against type-B bacterial meningitis. It has developed the first synthetic vaccine for Haemophilius influenza type B (Hib). Providing vaccines such as these has resulted in the immunization of millions of Latin American children.

Collaboration with Brazil has resulted in meningitis vaccines at a cost of 95¢ rather than $15 to $20 per dose. Cuba and Brazil are also working together on Interferon alpha 2b for hepatitis C and recombinant human erythropoletin (rHuEPO) for anemia.

In contrast to this international medical solidarity, the US sickness industry has the compassion of a school of leering sharks about to begin a feeding frenzy. The US is one of many rich countries expanding the length of patent protection for pharmaceuticals as happened with the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2011. The result is increasing death tolls in the poor world because generic drugs cannot be sold at a vastly cheaper rate during the protection period.

Cuba stands as a significant barrier to the US’ pushing a high-cost, insurance based-sickness model that leaves out the poorest people on the rest of the world. US corporations do not smile at this.

Efforts to Destroy Cuban Medicine Are an Attack on the World’s Poor

When Trump imposed the most vicious tariffs ever visited on Cuba in early 2026, racists were not-so-secretly grimacing with glee as they wondered if the US president could turn that nation into a second Haiti for the crime of resisting its would-be masters. The “US has effectively imposed a total fuel and financial blockade by threatening punitive tariffs on any country that supplies fuel to Cuba.” The amount of food that must be imported has zoomed upward as fuel supplies have plummeted. This has cut services to primary schools and elderly care homes and wrecked transportation. Sources of financing have been deeply slashed as international festivals are without fuel. Cuba’s most important source of foreign revenue, tourism, is all but destroyed. Probably the most vile aspect of the blockade has been sharp reductions forced on hospitals for medical supplies, regular care and emergency services.

For Cubans, this is their lives. For the elite of the US, it is little more than video game entertainment as they ponder if they can actually force a collapse on Cuba. A major factor threatening the US medical-insurance complex is that Cuban healthcare concepts have spread not only to poor countries but to many low income communities in the US.

Graduates of ELAM do the best job of spreading its message. Kathryn Hall-Trujillo founded the Birthing Project USA (BPUSA) in 1998 as the first community-based birthing program for African-Americans in the US. She explains that “It trains people to work with pregnant women and to connect with them during the first year of the life of the infant.” Hall-Trujillo is grateful for the BPUSA’s partnership with Cuba, saying “We are a coming home place for ELAM students.” By 2019 BPUSA was replicated over 70 times in the US, Canada and Honduras.

Similarly, ELAM graduate Dr. Melissa Barber looked at her South Bronx neighborhood during Covid-19 and realized that though citizens were typically told to go to public health agencies, what people need is a community approach that recruits trained organizers to go to the people. Dr. Barber worked with tenant associations that identified those who are most vulnerable. The coalition went to homes to ensure that people did not fall through the cracks. As they concretized what is truly needed, both BPUSA and the South Bronx communities have been in sharp contrast with big money in the US.

For most people who think rationally with at least some human compassion, Cuba’s success in international health solidarity has been outstanding. But those who profit from medicine may be aghast when they see it. The Cuban model could well become a serious drain on investment opportunities in the sickness industry and its insurance accomplice.

Trump’s attack on Cuba is more than the fantasy of a demented mind. His actions are the culmination of US policy since 1959. From the very first days of vice-president Richard Nixon and the Kennedy brothers, the US has sought to destroy the promises and accomplishments of the Cuban revolution. This has nowhere been more clear than hostility toward its medicine.

It is not only the US that despises Cuban medicine. When many ELAM graduates return home they face hostility from medical associations who do not want their monopolization of service-for-cash systems challenged. For example, when Dr. Patrick Dely returned to Haiti in 2010, he heard the complaint that “I’m taking money directly from the established doctors.”

The US realized that it could incorporate this tension into a plan to undermine Cuba’s international medical work. Under the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole,” in 2006 the George W. Bush administration announced that it encouraged Cuban medical staff on international missions to desert and move to the US. Of roughly 40,000 employed medical staff, 500 accepted the asylum, becoming some of the few US doctors with no student debt to pay. The “Parole” program reflects awareness that Cuba depends on income for medical services and student training. Trump’s actions in 2026 are an expansion of what Bush did 20 years earlier.

Cuban medical services bring in more income than tourism and nickel. Knowing that Cuba has trained roughly 60,000 Venezuelan physicians, the US seeks to economically paralyze the island by destroying the exchange of oil for medical training that exists between the two countries. The South African government pays Cuba $60,000 per student for each of the 1200 enrolled at ELAM.

Several Latin American countries have caved into US pressure and canceled arrangements to pay Cuba for its medical services. These efforts to eliminate international medical solidarity result in an unknown increase in sickness and death.

In spite of never ending US attacks on Cuba it has remained dedicated to the ideals of the revolution. There are strong interconnections that manifest hatred by the US elite for Cuba. Where does hatred of liberation struggles give way to a special hatred of Blackness? When does ultra racism kneel before greed for profit? Or, when does monetary greed become secondary to idolizing acts of oppression? It is impossible to say because all are so woven into each other that Cuba actualizes all of them. That is the true nature of hatred of Cuba. It is why defense of Cuba must be core to efforts at fighting racism.

[Don Fitz has taught Environmental Psychology at Washington University and is author of Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution. He is Outreach Coordinator for the Green Party of St. Louis and on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought.]

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Cuba’s Miracle Breakthrough for Alzheimer’s Amidst the Genocidal Oil Blockade

Macdonald Stainsby

I spent approximately eight and a half years as a one-on-one caregiver to my mother after she developed vascular dementia. In her years as an independent retired teacher, she had visited and fallen in love with Cuba, returning multiple times with her brother (as well as with me after her brother’s death). After she passed, I both donated her ambulatory items (two different walkers and one wheelchair) to Cuban veterans retired and living in care, as well as spreading her ashes (with her brothers) on the beach, both in the village of Playa Giron, Cuba– where the revolution defeated the American invasion of April, 1961, and where I had visited along with my living mother during the year of the 50th Anniversary of the great victory of “The Bay of Pigs,” in 2011.

To spread family ashes in revolutionary Cuba was an easy decision; To take care of my mother when she first had developing vascular dementia in 2014 was not.

There has never been something that more people tried to prepare me for, and failed more absolutely, than being a full time caregiver to one of the most important people in my life. So, if you have never experienced a situation where someone close to you in your life developed dementia, you will be like I was and appreciate my words while not really understanding them.

The ways people try to prepare you are deep and immense. The darkness and stress of it. They try to impart the utter relentlessness of someone’s needs when they can’t fully take care of themselves. That’s the real destroyer of health for the caregiver: I literally begged my mother more than once to “not be nuts” for ten minutes so I could catch my breath.

Caregiver wisdom talks about the unpredictable nature of it all; How one minute you are talking to the same person you have known for so long, and the end of the same moment has them utterly forgetting who you are, or where they are physically.

You will be warned about their personality changing to seemingly another person (though I dispute that; I believe they become exactly who they would be like with dementia– “Oh, that’s how mom deals with dementia…” etc.), and how painful those changes are.

And, most impossibly? The warning to your psyché that no caregiver can really accept.

That no matter what you do, no matter which regimen you follow, how well you set up their environment, no matter how exceptional your ability to give care is?

They will keep getting worse, there is little you can do to even slow it down, and the quality of your care is about the here and now– with no guarantee in the future. The future is bleak, and a certainty.

That is, it was a bleak certainty until the Cuban Revolution got involved.

Now? We are potentially in an entirely different place.

Cuba’s medical system is world renowned, beyond the amazing doctors who work in the most adverse conditions to bring basic health to people who have never been seen by a doctor in the decades of their lives.

The large Cuban research facility called Centro de Immunología Molecular (CIM) has been conducting research into drugs for treating dementia in general– and Alzheimer’s specifically, as well as Parkinson’s.

I heard about this, and wanted to know more. Among the people I have spoken with is Doctor Bill Blanchet, an internal medicine physician in private practice in Boulder, Colorado. Before we even got to speaking about the treatments for dementia, he started off by telling me about cancer vaccine treatments and even Covid vaccines. All from Cuba, all from this centre.

First he spoke about a patient of his, dying from cancer, who decided to try a ‘hail mary’ in an attempt to survive and had heard about Cuban cancer treatments.

They decided to go together; If it worked, the doctor needed to know about it, and if it didn’t the patient needed to have someone to be blunt with him about it. He explained to me what happened:

So we go to Cuba in 2017 [and] he gets started on a monoclonal antibody for lung cancer, and he has multiple metastases in his chest, multiple metastases [in his] abdomen. Nine months later, doing nothing else but adding this drug, all his cancer is gone. He has no detectable cancer by any means of detection. So at this point in time, I’m forced to conclude Cuba knows stuff.

It didn’t wear off, and his patient returned to a non-cancer life. Then Donald Trump was elected for the first time, and did away with the opening to Cuba of the Obama administration:

[His patient had] exercised, he worked full time, he ran the ‘BOLDERBoulder.’ He did fine. He did great for a year and a half, and then the US administration increased the embargo to Cuba. He lost access to the drug and his lung cancer comes back.

He gets three rounds of chemotherapy. Each one makes him sicker than the one before. And a year and a half later, he dies. So this drug worked really well for a year and a half, until it was taken away from him.

So that was how this Colorado based doctor ended up involved with Cuban medical research. But he continued, still not yet discussing the NeuralCIM medications and protocol for dementia.

Shortly after that, covid was a thing, and with covid, we couldn’t go to Cuba anymore, and I hear that Cuba is making their own covid vaccine. And it’s like, once again, still stuck in my egocentric world. I was like, oh God, why are they doing that? Why don’t they use one that works? Why don’t they use the one that we’re developing? Well, as it turns out, the Cuban covid vaccine is the world’s best covid vaccine.

I personally blinked more than a wee bit at him on the other end of my zoom call, as I have been a ‘mask-vaccine-listen to your doctor’ proponent on the question of Covid19 up until and including today in April of 2026. These ideas below are beyond startling, they seem impossible:

Cuba has not had a covid death in three years, United States had 40,000 covid deaths last year [2025]. I know of two people who died last year from covid. Covid is no longer a disease of clinic, of medical import in Cuban public health [any] longer. Covid is just not something to worry about, and they’re still working on the same vaccine they had initially, and it gives immunity that lasts in terms of years.

The vaccine in [the United States] gives minimal immunity that lasts in terms of months. Cubans vaccine gives over 90% protection that lasts in terms of years. So the country of Cuba has herd immunity right now.

I should note that boosters have been provided to the elderly and similarly vulnerable populations as a measure of extra precaution.

I took my initial knowledge in about Covid19 in the exact same manner I am attempting to in terms of NeuralCIM for dementia: I’m no doctor, but does it improve the quality and duration of life for elders who are borderline and far too often deemed expendable? On that basis, this data about Covid vaccines is utterly amazing. So that was my set-up for being told about how to possibly reverse dementia.

Before I do, I just want to say as a caregiver in particular– and as someone living in a desperate age as well– those who peddle cures, answers to questions that really have no answers, fake ways to end terminal diseases, etc are the very worst. The idea of being even close to or sort of adjacent to such snake oil sales hurts me on the same level as Holocaust denial: It’s a dark, evil place to pretend these things, and worse: The goals that they attempt to enact are beyond the values of any legitimate sector of humanity. “Faith healers” and similar scum belong on the same historical lists of people as those who protect pedophilia. Exploitation of the desperate and the vulnerable is the very worst practice of humanity.

So what of NeuralCIM and the newer treatments of Alzheimer’s?

I was invited to go to a vaccine Congress in Cuba a couple of years ago, and I went and at that Congress, I was talking to people that I heard were working on a drug for Parkinson’s and dementia. I have a brother with Parkinson’s, and I was very interested in this. My mother had dementia, my father had dementia, two of my grandparents had dementia, and so I was very interested in what this drug would be, and so I kind of kept up with it. When I found out that the study was published, I was actually working with Cuba on another cancer study [….] I see that this ATHENEA trial is published, so I contact them and say, Can, can I meet with the people involved with the ATHENEA trial? Turns out to be the same people. CIM does a cancer therapy. CIM also did the neuralCIM. And so I go in there, and I go to the conference room with CIM, and 14 people walk in, half of them talking about the cancer. The other half give me a presentation on neuralCIM.

And basically as I’m learning this my jaw is dropping, because nothing could be this good. This is incredible. But I know these people. I’ve been working with these people for years. I know that they are credible. I know that what they’re telling me is real, and these numbers, this is going to be a world changing drug. This is amazing, [these are] world changing statistics. And so that got me interested.

This is the personal tale of what also got me interested. I had seen a short video from The Belly of the Beast, who are also releasing a full length documentary about the same (called “Teresita’s Dream”), and when I realized the scale of the discovery it almost blew my mind.

See, I believe that dementia is clearly a medical condition, but during my nearly 9 years as my mother’s primary care person, I realized that slowing down decline and maintaining mental capacity often has a lot more to do with providing the correct environment: One with love, familiarity, tasks and hobbies that are very much within the realm of the possible, locations that hold memories, and a lot more.

For me, the thing that slowed down my mother’s decline the most was using her piano almost nightly, and playing well. Similar to our beloved animals, establishing routine was key. Later on, what caused her decline to spiral was the lockdown of the pandemic, not being able to go outside, see others, or live anything like a normal life.

Having seen the most important person in my life go through those two markers of her years with dementia was more powerful to me than any study ever would or could be. When I imagine Donna being able to play the piano and again be the one who knew the name of the song? Who would then revert to a teacher and explain the history of the song, for example?

Sometimes the beauty of what was not is too strong to think on for very long, and it becomes depressing– but that’s a result of the work of most of a decade trying to provide space for exactly those types of moments. Just like in a research lab, a caregiver swears by trial and error.

In this current day and era, there is every reason to believe that the only thing denying hundreds of thousands of people in just the US alone– never mind the many millions globally—from this help towards long term recovery of their passions and their lives, are the cruel policies driven by The United States government, currently led by Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

So I also had a chance to speak directly with the producers of this nasal spray, at the Centro de Immunología Molecular [CIM]. First, the location is in Playa– a distance west of Vedado that required figuring out how to get to the location for the appointment. When I contacted solidarity organizations in Cuba, hopeful with my intentions to learn more about neuralCIM, I was immediately told that they would make all the arrangements, that I could have full access and more but that given the current American blockade of all oil to Cuba, I would need to find my own transportation to the site.

I managed to find a local electric 3 wheeled ride and driver, and the trip was more than affordable without gasoline (or shocks on wooden benches). Taking a little longer to wind through the streets of western Havana was not an issue, either.

When we arrived, I was shown around and introduced to about a dozen of their top researchers and was blown away by the presentation they made for me. I was first shown their history of ground breaking developments in fighting cancers, and then I was given a serious amount of information about NeuralCIM and how it has already begun transforming lives.

First, let me note that the presenters were nearly all women, from close to a dozen. This is of note for me specifically: It gave me deja vu from receiving important dental work from a large, almost exclusively female operated Cuban dental office when I was uninsured for a few hundred whereas Canada’s dental offices wanted many thousands.

Mentioning this to Cubanas, I have had it pointed out to myself that 80% of Cuba’s top scientists– in all fields of study, across the board– are women.

Essentially to my layman’s eyes, I learned about both the solid nature of CIM’s trial experiments and how they are better than standard, and that the results are enough to leave any medical researcher beyond hopeful. The numbers, given the rigors of their tests, are demands for further exploration.

[Macdonald Stainsby is a writer on social justice, a caregiver and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to a better world. Courtesy: His substack at https://substack.com/@macdonaldstainsby.]