Above photo:Â Cuban medical professionals arrive last month at Malpensa airport in Milan, Italy, to help treat covid-19 patients. More photos at arkansasonline.com/44cuba/. AP/Antonio Calanni.
The European Union now excludes travelers from the COVID-ridden U.S. but welcomes those from the virtually COVID-free Cuba. Cuba, the country that sends doctors and infectious disease specialists around the world to fight the pandemic, the country the U.S. has held in contempt for 60 years, villified with every epithet and sanctioned and embargoed and blockaded to within an inch of its life.
In a catharsis of propaganda, the U.S. tries to convince the world that Cuban doctors are victims of human trafficking, or else they are all spies, or perhaps both. Rosa Miriam Elizalde likened it to a vision of Cuba as the Red Planet, sending spies to take over the Earth, like the invasion in H. G. Welles’ War of the Worlds as told by Orson Welles in his (in)famous radio play.
Spies. Yes, they just might be spies. What perfect disguises: doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, medical technicians. And what if they could come to the U.S.?
Perhaps they will secretly take over our health care system, make sure we are all carefully looked after, and teach us to treat epidemics like they are epidemics as if everyone must be protected because everyone is at risk. You know, like in Cuba.
And while they are at it, perhaps they might send us more spies disguised as economists to surreptitiously teach us how to give everyone a home, a job, education, money to live on and time for recreation. You know, like in Cuba.
Maybe they will send us still more spies, disguised as actors, artists, photographers, musicians, who will teach us…well, they won’t necessarily have to teach us too much about art (though that would be nice), but they will show us how to do it all collectively, cooperatively, without the corporate veto that corrupts, defunds, starves, and destroys so much art and the ones who make it.
And then maybe Cuba will send yet more spies, disguised as school teachers and literacy experts, to teach us exactly how to go about educating everyone without exception, to the best of their abilities and inclinations, to make every school as good as every other school, and to show us how to treat our teachers like the precious mentors they are. Like in Cuba.
Oh, Cuba, please send us all the spies you can spare for we are suffering from a severe lack of spies. And we are dying because of it.
Roger Stoll is a Latin America/Caribbean solidarity activist with the Task Force on the Americas, a three-decades-old anti-imperialist human rights organization. He has published articles, book reviews and political poetry in Dissident Voice, Resumen Latinoamericano, Mintpress News, Counterpunch, Popular Resistance, San Francisco Examiner, ZNet, Jewschool, and New Verse News.