By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on April 23, 2020
A country with a formidable medical industry like the U.S. dominated to the extreme by capitalist profit, has proved incapable of dealing with the coronavirus. As much as Trump has criminally subordinated the management of the crisis to business success and his zealous antics to get himself re-elected, a system based on profit and in the midst of a deep multidimensional crisis could not have hoped to achieve much more.
The fact is that the United States has been overtaken in its performance against the attack of the pathogen by poor and underdeveloped countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. We don’t even have to say Cuba, whose scientific and biomedical complex, with the support of Raúl and Díaz-Canel, is making valuable therapeutic findings in the fight against Covid-19, and, at the end of the day, that will surely be confirmed by their positive results. The iron blockade by the United States has not been able to prevent it, nor have been able to stop the rapid deployment of 20 medical brigades to beat the virus from the Caribbean, through Africa, to the very heart of Western Europe.
Unlike their neoliberal counterparts, Presidents Alberto Fernandez of Argentina and Lopez Obrador of Mexico have listened with respect to their scientific communities and life first in their strategy against disease and put a social stamp on the protection of those most in need. Similarly, Venezuela, where the most ruthless economic siege, accompanied by the threat of U.S. military action and low oil prices have failed to topple the government of President Maduro, who early on adopted a comprehensive strategy to protect the population from the pathogen. The pandemic, a great planetary tragedy, has instead had the virtue of showing in the naked eye the incompatibility of neoliberalism with the preservation of life and the intrinsically genocidal nature that this model has turned out to be.
When the United States, in spite of its colossal scientific and medical advances, leads the world in the number of infected people with almost 900,000 as well as in the number of deaths, with 45,150, it is clear that science, far from favoring human beings, can become their enemy if it is not accompanied by the highest humanist sense that must be intrinsic to it and does not go beyond being just an instrument at the exclusive service of the elites that exploit labor with its predatory nature. How is it possible that doctors and nurses have not even been provided with the personal protection equipment (ppe) indispensable to preserve their lives and those of patients in the northern powerhouse, which spends 618.7 billion dollars annually on advertising and 8 billion dollars on weapons and wars? That this essential equipment has become, stimulated by a White House of merchants, a lucrative speculative black market, far beyond the reach of health institutions? I have read the moving story of a hospital director who, in order to dispose of these materials, had to travel far for them, passing the trucks carrying the ppe as food carriers to escape harassment by federal agencies.
Had it not been for large Chinese supplies, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba would not have had these indispensable tools in time to save the lives of doctors and patients. Havana, by the way, lost a number of ventilators due to the purchase of two suppliers by a US company, which invoked the blockade in order not to deliver the agreed contract.
Faced with the advance of the virus, China and Russia have maintained a healthy spirit of international cooperation within the framework of the principles of the UN and the World Health Organization (WHO), far removed from the selfish attitudes of the United States towards the world and of Germany and the Netherlands towards the Mediterranean members of the European Union (EU). It would be a miracle if the bloc survived the double whammy of the pandemic and the looming economic depression with tens of millions of unemployed. Just as Washington has lost its international leadership, a trend observed since the beginning of the century, but extraordinarily accelerated by Trump and his multimillionaire gang of white, Jared Kushner-type Zionists and Christian Zionists like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
No epidemic is a motor for social change, although, given the enormous magnitude of this and the gigantic economic crisis that accompanies it, it can serve as an opportunity for the popular and progressive forces to resolutely advance what they had not even imagined in their most optimistic dreams. But in Washington, it is the ultra-rightwing Trumpet that is already pushing through plans that, if anything, give crumbs to the needy and serve up a fat spoon to the wealthy. Trump has already said that he will save the evil oil shale industry.
Source: La Jornada, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau