The New Dark Age

Gerald A. Perreira

The government of Guyana capitulating to US pressure to expel the Cuban medical brigade is shameful beyond words

Donald Trump and the Prince of Darkness, Marco Rubio, are now inflicting the unthinkable on Cuba – an embargo that deprives the Cuban people of vital petroleum and gas products that fuel a modern society’s ability to function. This is an immoral, illegal and ruthless attempt to deal a final death blow to Cuba, following 67 years of relentless US economic sanctions, blockades, sabotage and attempted regime change operations. The intention is to force this island nation to its knees. The question is, will the world allow Cuba, which has become a symbol of human dignity and resistance, refusing against all odds to surrender their inalienable right to self-determination and true independence, to fall. This current embargo threatens the very ability of Cuban society to function and provide vital services to their citizens and in so doing is life threatening. As such, it constitutes a form of genocide.

There is only one way to break this embargo and that is for every nation in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and indeed worldwide, or at least the majority of nations, to simply refuse to comply with this barbarism. Unfortunately, Caribbean governments, with a few exceptions, have chosen instead to cower in the face of US bullyism and to relinquish what little is left of our sovereignty and self-respect. Their cowardice is sickening.

Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali and his People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government have completely capitulated to US pressure, remaining silent about the fuel embargo and the Cuban Medical Brigade’s departure from Guyana. The Brigade left recently of their own accord, since the other option was for them to be asked to leave, literally expelled.

Imagine, a political party founded by the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, a self-professed Marxist-Leninist and devout anti-imperialist, could find itself complicit in this attempt to bring the Cuban revolution to its knees. It is shameful and tragic beyond all measure, especially since Cuba has provided vital assistance to Guyana for decades.

Cuba started sending medical brigades to Guyana in 1978, and these brigades are credited for rescuing Guyana’s healthcare system from collapse and literally saving thousands of Guyanese lives. Additionally, over the years, Cuba has provided hundreds of scholarships to Guyanese citizens to study medicine, veterinary medicine, marine engineering and architecture, economics and agriculture. Imagine betraying Cuba, which despite a 67-year unjust and unlawful US blockade, and the unbearable pressure that blockade brought to bear, put its own country and citizens at risk to fight the forces of the South African Apartheid Regime at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, a battle that Nelson Mandela credited with dealing the final blow to the Apartheid Regime in South Africa.

At a joint sitting of his country’s National Assembly in honour of President Irfaan Ali’s recent State visit to Belize, Prime Minister Briceño called for immediate talks to prevent the impending humanitarian crisis:

“We call for urgent good faith talks to avert a humanitarian crisis which is likely to emerge in the Republic of Cuba if there is ever decreasing deliveries of petroleum products. A manufactured humanitarian disaster is neither moral nor is it legal…the government of Belize stands in full solidarity with the Cuban people.”

Despite Prime Minister Briceño pointed comments prior to President Ali’s address to the Belize National Assembly, which begged a response, President Ali, much to everyone’s surprise, did not make mention of Cuba’s impending humanitarian crisis. I recently published an article titled “Guyana: A Pawn of US Imperialism“. However, the Government of Guyana turning its back on Cuba at this crucial moment in Cuba’s history is so shocking that to my mind it goes beyond the category of pawn and enters a whole new realm.

President Irfaan Ali and his administration are now showing us that they have in fact taken on the very characteristics of their foreign masters. Indeed, it seems that Guyana, just like the USA, “has no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests”. To turn your back on Cuba at this moment and allow the Cuban Medical Brigade to leave Guyana without uttering a word, means that you lack any quality that can admit you to what we might refer to as civilized human behaviour, that you have become no different to the foreign masters you serve. Those same foreign masters who have enabled a genocide in the open-air concentration camp of Gaza and are systematically starving women and children to death before our eyes.

Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, recently attempted to deny that the Government’s decision to end the work of the Cuban Medical Brigade in Guyana was due to US pressure. If that were so, why would we be ending this program, which is so clearly beneficial to all Guyanese, all of a sudden, out of the blue, after 48 years of service, and at exactly the same time as the US is targeting Cuba? Perhaps Dr. Frank Anthony was so ashamed of his government’s actions that he simply could not bear to admit to this shocking betrayal.

Indeed, Guyana’s Government has migrated from pawns of imperialism to becoming indistinguishable from their foreign masters. The slave master of yester-year used to create what was referred to as “drivers” or supervisors on the plantations from the enslaved populations. To inculcate in them the repressive characteristics necessary, they used fear and intimidation and took practical steps to ensure that bit by bit they lost their souls, their very humanity, just like their masters. An important part of this process was to get these African supervisors to brutally whip and torture their own, sometimes to death. The US is doing the same with the PPP/C government in Guyana and other governments in the region.

And for what? What is their excuse? Like the enslaved of yester-year who took the whip when they knew it was wrong, and whipped and tortured their own brothers and sisters, the answer is simple: to survive. To survive as factotums of the Empire. Those enslaved Africans that complied, did so because they had a gun to their head and they lacked the courage to resist. Exactly what is happening in Guyana today.

Guyana is a neo-plantation and those who hold office here are nothing more than supervisors for foreign masters. Selected for their compliance.

Their excuses whispered behind closed doors are pathetic. They know this is wrong, but what can they do, the situation is very complex, and their hands are tied, we have no choice, Guyana has a lot to lose blah blah. My response is simple: There is always a choice. Guyana has already lost everything; it is a captured state. We have lost our sovereignty, our God-given right to self-determination, our precious natural resources and wealth, our human dignity, and now we are being asked to turn our back on a sister nation that has given us so much over the past 48 years, despite being under an economic blockade themselves and severe pressure. So indeed, we are losing all that makes us human. It is called selling your soul. Bob Marley said it plain, inspired by the Biblical verse Mark 8:36,  “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold“.

Delusional Ramblings

Trump Administration claims that Cuba presents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US and supports “transnational terrorist groups” has no basis in reality, similar to the accusations that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro headed a Cartel de los Soles, a drug cartel that did not exist. A fact check can substantiate that the most “unusual and extraordinary threat” to not only the US, but to the entire world, is currently the Trump Administration. Not least of all because of their shameless spreading of disinformation, outright lies, in an attempt to justify their tyranny and terrorism. However, even more worrying is their seeming loss of contact with reality, where they appear to believe their own hype. This phenomenon is usually associated with psychosis, where the brain struggles to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined, resulting in distorted perceptions, thoughts, and behaviours.

As it becomes increasingly obvious to the world that we are witnessing the now inevitable decline of the US Empire and its West European factotums, the delusional behaviour is alarming. Nowhere was this more evident than when Marco Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference on February 14th. This son of Cuban immigrants, thus himself and family victims of the West’s colonial project, stood at the podium speaking as We and Us, as though he was himself of Western European heritage. As if this was not delusional enough, he went on to glorify Western colonialism, “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers”. He told the audience that in 1945, “great European Empire’s had fallen into terminal decline” accelerated by what he called “Godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings”. He opined that “then as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past”.

However, he exclaimed with passion, “together our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice and it was a choice they refused to make”. He declared, “this is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the US want to do again now, together with you”. He told the audience that the US does not want allies who are “shackled by guilt and shame” but rather “allies who are proud of their culture and heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same noble civilization and who together with us are willing and able to defend it”. He declared “we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Perhaps the only thing more delusional than Rubio’s speech was the fact that the audience, made up primarily of European dignitaries and NATO officials drank the Kool Aid, giving Rubio a standing ovation. Reality check: the Hegemon’s reign of tyranny is over, the US/UK/EU decline is in motion and their collapse is inevitable.

Doctors not Bombs

Fact check: Far from being a threat of any kind, Cuba is in fact responsible for saving millions of lives worldwide.

“Our country doesn’t drop bombs on other people. We don’t have biological or nuclear bombs. We train our doctors to help other nations.”

This quote is from Fidel Castro’s speech at the University of Buenos Aires in 2003, shortly after the first US so-called “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in March of that year. Castro spoke of “doctors, not bombs”, stating that Cuba did not need to produce weapons of mass destruction or drop bombs on other nations, and that in contrast to the United States, Cuba would instead send “tens of thousands of scientists and doctors” to the “most lost corners of the world”. This positioned Cuba’s “revolutionary medicine” as a cornerstone of Cuban foreign policy. In 2005, Fidel Castro established the Henry Reeve Brigade. The Brigade, a highly specialized Cuban medical contingent provides rapid, voluntary humanitarian aid worldwide, specializing in natural disasters (floods, earthquakes) and severe epidemics such as Ebola and COVID-19. The Brigade was named after Henry Reeve, an American-born Brigadier in the Cuban Liberation Army who fought for Cuban independence in the 19th century. Since 2005, the brigade has deployed thousands of health professionals to over 45 countries, saving tens of thousands of lives. Most notable interventions include the 2014 Ebola response in West Africa, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and global support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuba’s healthcare system has achieved health outcomes that have far surpassed so-called developed nation health outcomes in areas such as life expectancy and infant mortality, despite the pressure of constant economic sanctions. Healthcare in Cuba is free, available to all and premised on a community based, preventative medicine approach, a “family doctor” model, and the world’s highest doctor-to-patient ratios. Despite shortages of medicines and infrastructure due to economic conditions, the system prioritizes top-tier healthcare for all Cubans and never fails to deliver despite the challenges.

What makes the Cuban healthcare model and medical education so outstanding is that it is holistic, and therefore able to connect the dots between every aspect of a human being’s existence and that person’s state of health and well being. Should we no longer send our students to Cuba to avail themselves of this extraordinary training and healthcare model, we will not just be losing scholarship programmes but access to a transformative and progressive model that can assist Guyana to develop our own healthcare system in a direction that is clearly superior to our current curative/reactive model.

Cuba’s contributions to global public health and medical knowledge cannot be overstated and is acknowledged worldwide. Cuba is a health power. Its medical internationalism is one of the largest and most significant healthcare efforts in history. Since 1963, over 420,000 medical professionals have served abroad, delivering healthcare to 150 countries across the world. According to data from Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health shared in 2021, these healthcare professionals have performed more than 14,500,000 surgical operations, 4,470,000 deliveries and saved 8,700,000 lives. These figures are simply extraordinary for a small island nation that has been under crippling sanctions for decades.

Cuba sent an international mission to fill the public health gap in Algeria, after they had gained independence in 1963, kick starting their policy of medical internationalism. In 2005, they built field hospitals and provided healthcare after the disastrous Kashmir earthquake. After the earthquake in Haiti, which also led to a Cholera epidemic, Cuban teams provided ongoing healthcare, even when many foreign teams had left, performing hundreds of thousands of surgeries. When the Ebola Epidemic broke out in Africa in 2014, Cuban Healthcare workers, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO, were amongst the first to arrive in the affected nations, namely Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. During the COVID-19 pandemic that sent the world into lockdown and led to the near collapse of many healthcare systems including in some first world nations, Cuba deployed 58 medical brigades to 42 countries, including Qatar and Italy. When the devastating earthquakes hit Syria and Turkey in 2023, Cuba mobilized medical teams and deployed them in under 48 hours. In all these disasters and more, Cuba has responded not only with medical equipment but by placing their doctors and nurses in the field, often at great personal risk.

Cuba has more often than not been the first and only consistent medical presence in times of crises, when many countries, specifically Western nations, looked the other way. Recognizing their immense contribution, in 2017, The WHO bestowed the Dr. Lee Jong-Wook Memorial Prize for Public Health on Cuba in recognition of its emergency response work.

One of their most remarkable flagship programs has been operation Milagro (Operación Milagro), the aim of which was to restore vision on a global scale. Carried out in cooperation with Venezuela, Cuban medical brigades have provided over 3.3 million free eye surgeries to people from poor backgrounds, often in countries with little or no access to surgical options.

The Cuban Medical Brigades have achieved huge success because they are rooted in solidarity and the primacy of the well-being of the human person over financial gain, which stands in stark contrast to profit-driven and inequitable healthcare systems, especially evident in the US.

In the immortal words of Fidel Castro:

“Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.”

Cuba did not just send its own doctors but ensured that they were educating future doctors globally. Training doctors on the ground where they were present and providing tens of thousands of foreign students with the opportunity to study to medicine in Cuba, mostly for free or very little, on the condition that when they graduate, they return to their countries and serve under-served communities.

In addition to all this, Cuba has achieved significant scientific advances, spearheading work in the area of HIV prevention, being the first in the world, noted by WHO in 2015, to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis through integrated prenatal screening.

Making major advances in vaccine development and biotechnology, Cuba became one of the first countries in the Global South to develop its own Hepatitis B vaccine, achieving near-universal immunization and dramatically reducing related morbidity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba again successfully developed multiple vaccines using protein-subunit technology and they were shared with other countries in the Global South who were being excluded from access to vaccines, while Western pharmaceutical companies were raking in huge profits.

Another feat achieved by Cuba was the use of innovative technology and community-based health care models to significantly reduce diabetes-related amputations, one of the leading causes of disability and premature mortality in the Global South.

I have focused on Cuba’s extraordinary achievements in the area of healthcare because the Medical Brigades are under attack, however, their achievement in the area of education and other social indicators are equally outstanding

In a world full of sell-outs, cowards and traitors, clamouring to surrender to the US bully, Cuba stands as a beacon of light. An example to all that there are still those who refuse to surrender to the Hegemon’s tyranny. 67 years of resistance in the face of sanctions that have arrested Cuba’s development at every turn, has created a nation that has attained a mythical, legendary status – the ultimate David and Goliath story. There are few nations in this world that can actually claim to be sovereign and truly independent. This small, defiant island nation, 90 miles off the coast of Miami, is one of them. Trump, Rubio and Hegseth cannot and must not have their way. The fight for Cuba is literally a fight for all humanity.

Fidel Castro summed it up when he addressed the South Summit in Cuba in 2000:

“We are fighting for the most sacred rights of the poor countries; but we are also fighting for the salvation of a First World incapable of preserving the existence of the human species, of governing itself in the midst of contradictions and self-serving interests. And much less of governing the world whose leadership must be democratically shared. It could almost be mathematically demonstrated that we are fighting to preserve life on earth.”

Gerald A. Perreira is a liberation theologian, educator and political activist. He is chairperson of Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) based in Guyana www.ovpguyana.org , a member of the Governing Council of the Global Pan African Movement and an executive member of the Caribbean Pan-African Network (CPAN). He lived in the Libyan Jamahiriya for many years and was a founding member of the World Mathaba. He can be reached at mojadi94@gmail.com