Business Day, March
29, 2001.
THE usual procedure is that you get checked for weapons before boarding a
flight.
In Cuba, the metal detectors and x-ray machines await you and your hand
luggage when you disembark. Even if you don't set those off, chances are you
will be frisked a couple of times by security men with electrical wands before
you are finally allowed out.
Of course, there are many people just 150km to the north who wish President
Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution ill. But the regime fears not only human
assassins. It lives in terror of unapproved ideas and information getting into
the wrong hands.
In Cuba, the digital divide is not simply a matter of unevenly distributed
resources, but of state policy. The masses may not surf anything but the placid
waters of the Caribbean.
Foreigners can access the internet at a price. The Palacio de Convenciones,
a conference centre, will supply a special line for R1200 a day, three times the
price of a room. So this is being written on a typewriter.
Not that Cuba is backward place. As President Thabo Mbeki found out when he
had scarcely alighted from his plane on Monday, Castro thinks he has some of the
best medical technology going.
Mbeki and his entourage were whisked off to the Centre for Genetic
Engineering and Biotechnology first thing. Official welcoming ceremonies could
wait. So could everything else. Whoever invented the word briefing was not
thinking of what Mbeki endured for three hours in the centre's auditorium.
Cubans may be restricted in what they can say and read. Their choices as
consumers may be limited by rationing and lack of anything much to buy, unless
they can lay their hands on dollars, the de facto official currency, available
to those who work in the tourist sector. But they sure have access to doctors,
of which there is one for every 178 inhabitants.
US sanctions have had several effects. They have helped keep the regime in
power by giving it a pretext for economic failure and an enemy to rally this
nation of Don Quixotes. They have also spurred the development of a domestic
pharmaceutical industry that produces about $50m worth of medicines a year,
according to a recent study by the US International Trade Commission.
The industry employs about 5000 scientists in 50 laboratories, the
government says. Products on the market include vaccine for hepatitis B and
meningitis, as well as treatments for heart attacks, certain cancers and
AIDS-related infections. A state-owed company, Heber, markets the drugs
internationally, including in SA, where registration has been sought for the
hepatitis vaccine.
The idea on Monday afternoon was that Luis Herrera, the biotechnology
centre's director, would describe the operation to Mbeki and his delegation and
give them the tour. However, Castro accompanied Mbeki personally and this had a
profound impact on the dynamics.
As far as Herrera and the hundred or so lab-coated scientists in the room
were concerned, the SA group might just as well have not been there. The guy in
the beard and the smartly pressed olive-green battle dress was the only member
of the audience who mattered, especially when he started butting in with
questions and comments.
The meeting turned into a seminar between Fidel and the scientists, various
of whom were summoned to the front to help answer questions. All this was
transacted in Spanish, with neither Fidel nor any of the others waiting for the
interpreter.
Castro was extraordinary. He was intent on figuring out the cheapest and
most effective way of minimising mother-to-child HIV transmission.
Simply dispensing cheap copies of Boehringer Ingelheim's nevirapine from the
Indian generics made by Cipla was not enough. Mothers needed to use formula
rather than breast-feed. How cheaply could such formula given the required
inputs be obtained? This topic alone took up a good 45 minutes.
From time to time he remembered that Mbeki was sitting next to him and
turned to address him. This had to be translated, and by the time Mbeki had had
his reply translated back, the conversational train had moved on.
In one particularly muddled exchange, the director of Cuba's AIDS action
plan, Jorge Gonzalez, who is also on Mbeki's AIDS panel, appeared to complain to
Castro about members of the committee who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.
Mbeki began to talk about the status of the panel's report before being drowned
out by his hosts, his voice surfacing again when Castro suggested a second
committee was needed. From what one could make out, Mbeki did not think that was
a very useful idea.
Aside from Education Minister Kader Asmal, who slept after his one effort to
join the conversation failed, the rest of the SA delegation looked embarrassed
and fidgety. It would be fair to conclude that, one way or another, SA and Cuba
are not, or ever likely to be, on the same wavelength.
© BDFM Publishers 2000 | 