By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, October 2024
photo: Bill Hackwell
Introduction
In September 2024, the United Nations (UN) launched a call for a Pact for the Future to guide the achievement of global development goals for humanity. Around the same time, in mid-October 2024, the 25th anniversary of the Budapest World Science Conference was celebrated. This event, held under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Science Council (ISC), was the greatest effort by the global scientific community to alert society and governments around the world to the opportunity to choose a commitment and priority to promote ways of achieving sustainable development and to provide the world with a code of conduct and a framework for action that could lead to the creation and consolidation of a global knowledge society, which in turn could build a sustainable future (UNESCO, 2000).
Despite unprecedented global mobilization and more than seven years of preparation to produce a movement that could change the then very negative trends in the world’s economic and social development, the conference failed to overcome the obstacles of collective hypnosis in the face of the advance of neoliberal capitalism and the lack of attention on the part of the governments of developed countries to the urgent need for rational collective political leadership to offer an opportunity for the construction of a society that would seek global human, economic, and social development based on knowledge.
The evolution of the world economy under the laws of the so-called “Washington Consensus,” the declaration of a unipolar world according to the thesis of F. Fukuyama (1992), and the roadmap of Z. Brzesinsky (1997), all under the growing influence of digital technologies, defined the evolution of human societies towards the information society, rather than towards the knowledge society promoted by the global scientific community.
Digital enabling technologies and biotechnology, which held so much promise in terms of education, culture, new therapies, and formulas for better and more widespread human development, were very quickly geared toward market promotion, entertainment, and addiction. The rapid technological development in a society permeated by its influence and convinced of the “trickle-down” theory, whereby “market ethics” would grow the economy and benefit all societies by creating more jobs, which would also immeasurably increase the wealth of nations, took the current world system by storm.
Since their very origins, both Cuba and the United States have seen their respective developments as nations closely intertwined, as immediate neighbors, and in that process, the declarative discourses of the great power to the north have remained conditioned by internal political forces, which in the debate over supposed national interests (which are rarely clearly defined) privilege one or another extreme of one type or another, according to the immediate political situation.
Various authors have recently agreed to divide the discourse of the US political elites, defining, on the one hand, the dissemination of an uncritical idealized narrative and, on the other, the execution of real politics, which is always conditioned by the interests of large corporations. The objective of this article is to explore the role of science and its applications to the sustainability of human societies in general, and specifically within the framework of bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States. It also looks at how science plays an important role in defining political relations based on the real interests of both nations, regardless of the political discourse in the short term and the manipulation of the long-term strategy of imperial corporate power.
Development
To understand the true dimension of these challenges and warnings, we must refer to the background in order to define the evolution of the following components:
Although the development of national science capabilities in Cuba and the United States had a common, parallel, and coincidental origin in the historical horizon, their subsequent evolution was conditioned by the uneven development of the national economies with respect to their European metropolises.
At the end of the 18th century, the ideas of the European Enlightenment reached the evening salons of high society in important urban centers of the New World. In Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, in the heart of the nascent United States of America, and in Havana, Cuba, groups of intellectuals interested in philosophical, geographical, naturalistic, and medical studies began to organize. The respective pioneers were the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, United States, and the Patriotic Society in Cuba, known today as the Economic Society of Friends of the Country. The German academic traveler Alexander von Humboldt recorded in his diaries during his visits to both countries in 1800 and 1804 his exchanges with circles of researchers at social gatherings such as those organized at the time in Berlin, Paris, London, and other European cities. The first four national academies of science had emerged in Europe much earlier, in the 17th century, in Italy, England, France, and Germany.
It was not until the 1860s that these institutions appeared in the Americas. After long integration processes, the first American national academies of science emerged in Cuba (1861) and the United States (1863). In the same 19th century, academies of science were only established outside Europe in New Zealand (1867), Argentina (1874), and Canada (1883). Even in Europe, there were not many after three centuries. Only five were founded in the 17th century, four in the 18th century, and four in the 19th century. Until the beginning of the 20th century, science was practiced in very few capitals and almost always as an individual activity by a few professors with their students or apprentices in university cloisters, museums, or in the very few laboratories that existed at the time.
In both countries, the 1860s would witness bloody armed conflicts linked to the emergence and definition of the very survival of the respective nation states. In the case of the United States, the conflict manifested itself between two different modes of production and two different visions of future economic development. In the case of Cuba, in addition to a similar change in the mode of production, the struggle was essentially for its nascent identity as an independent nation. These two oppositions to the two largest European empires, Spain and Great Britain, which had been disputing global hegemony for centuries, marked the character of the creation of the main scientific organizations in each country.
The United States was born as a federated state of neighboring territories with different levels of development, economy, and state organization. That origin was, therefore, a long political process that continues today to compensate for differences and establish balances. Very early on, once Great Britain had been defeated in the war to define the feasibility of the United States as a nation, the ruling class of European origin dictated the Monroe Doctrine, the result of the elaboration of the geopolitics of the American world under the aegis of the nascent United States of America, which claimed the right to declare sovereignty over all the nations of the Americas.
Two elements would define the future after the military conflict that engulfed the country in the mid-19th century and threatened to divide it forever. First, industrial development and, second, the plundering of neighboring colonial territories at the expense of France, Mexico, and Spain.
For its part, within the framework of these processes of national consolidation, the Academy of Sciences of Havana emerged as a higher social organization that was an integral part of the first efforts to recognize a national identity in Cuba. while in the case of the US Academy of Sciences, the institution was created by decree of President Abraham Lincoln to support the nation as an advisory body in the Civil War. From its inception, it was conceived as a source of specialized advice to the country’s military effort, as recorded in its founding documents.1
It should be noted that at the time both Academies of Sciences were established, there had already been contacts between their scientists for a long time. This was the case of Felipe Poey and his long correspondence with the founding researchers of the Washington Academy, Joseph Henry and Spencer Baird, with whom he had been collaborating for two decades in the classification and promotion of the original collections of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as with other colleagues in institutions in Philadelphia, New York, and Harvard, or his son, also a founder of the Cuban Academy, meteorologist Andrés Poey, with his American colleagues.
These exchanges were between fellow researchers who respected each other as equals, and it is worth noting that it was precisely in the United States, during the Fifth International Sanitary Conference, held in
Washington, D.C., in 1880, that Carlos J. Finlay first presented his hypothesis that mosquitoes were the transmitters of yellow fever, which he would reiterate later that same year, a few months later, before the plenary session of the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Havana. Twenty years later, Finlay himself, in collaboration with American physician Jesse Lazear of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, was able to experimentally confirm the accuracy of his hypothesis, in contrast to others from the team of researchers working in Cuba at the turn of the century. He then collaborated with doctors Leonard M. Wood and Walter Reed in Cuba and William C. Gorgas in Panama, he launched sanitation campaigns to eradicate what was known as the “scourge of the tropics.” Thus, the greatest achievement in global virology in the 19th century was the result of an original scientific hypothesis by a Cuban researcher and its final demonstration and introduction into practice in both countries, throughout the region and the world, through bilateral collaboration with US scientists.
The history and details of the exchanges in various disciplines can be found in works listed in the references and in others published together with this one. Suffice it to say that since then, collaboration between researchers from both countries has continued almost uninterrupted for more than a century and a half and has been of great importance for its contributions in various fields of science for Cuba, the United States, the Caribbean region, and the world in general.
During the rest of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, scientific activities continued to be the work of societies and institutions of scientists themselves, under the auspices of large universities and other educational centers or nascent industries. It was not until the mid-20th century that government efforts to develop the sciences emerged in both countries.
In the United States, the main research and development centers were organized by large industrial monopolies. When the attack on the United States took place in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a war effort, ad hoc research activities were organized through the creation of commissions. It was not until the end of the war, in the postwar period between 1945 and 1950, that government structures responsible for science were established and linked to the permanent advisory bodies of the country’s defense agencies. Based on the report prepared by a commission chaired by engineer Vannevar Bush entitled Science, the Endless Frontier, and successive organizational processes in 1950, the National Science Foundation was established as the first government institution for the promotion of science.
In Cuba, meanwhile, after the US occupation at the end of the 19th century, the Academy of Sciences continued as an independent, non-governmental collective body of scientists, but the development of the Cuban economy based on the extractive interests of the main investors did not promote local research activities, so the Academy remained essentially a fundamentally medical entity,
to the point that when, in 1950, the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás requested a loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the origin of the World Bank), the commission appointed under the direction of Francis A. Truslow considered the need to immediately promote applied research and proposed the immediate establishment of a Cuban Foundation for Technological Research.
The truth is that this idea was not taken up, and at the time of the triumph of the Revolution, there were only a few medical laboratories and four experimental stations (three agricultural and one industrial) in Cuba.
On January 15, 1960, a few days after the first anniversary of the revolutionary triumph, Fidel was invited to close the meeting for the 20th anniversary of the Speleological Society of Cuba at the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences in Havana. It was there that he delivered the speech in which he said:
[…] The future of Cuba must necessarily be a future of men of science, of men of thought, because that is precisely what we are sowing most. What we are sowing most are opportunities for intelligence.
No sooner said than done, the Literacy Campaign was launched, and once it was completed, the Academy was re-founded and the University Reform took place, with the expansion of technical and basic science courses, together with a comprehensive scholarship system for young people from all over the country to enable them to access high school and university education.
The main research centers created to meet development needs, based on the limited existing laboratory facilities and the skilled workforce of the national universities, first undertook the task of studying, describing, and characterizing Cuba’s natural conditions and resources. Based on this, state economic and social development plans were designed, and over a period of three decades, the system of research and development centers created by the Revolution in the country was able not only to develop a scientific vision of the natural environment, the economy, and society, but also to apply this knowledge to national development, achieving human development goals characterized by indices that in many ways compete with those of developed countries. In addition to the above, research centers in various fields made progress in the creation of new productive technologies and finished products applied to human and animal health, agriculture, and various production processes, leading the RAND Corporation to state in a report prepared for the World Bank in March 2001 that “[…] Brazil and Cuba are the only two Latin American countries developed above the world average in terms of scientific and technological capacity.”
This demonstrates that Cuba’s internationally recognized scientific and technological development is a genuine result of the Revolution, in accordance with the development strategy outlined since the triumph of the Revolution, as recorded in two specialized reports prepared at the request of the World Bank in 1950 and 2000, respectively.
Science and the limits of development
The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 achieved two agreements of far-reaching significance: the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. These undoubtedly addressed the need for agreement on the two most pressing problems threatening the global environment, and there is no doubt today that the most notable warning on both issues was given at that time in a brief five-minute speech by our Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro, when he said: “An important species is in danger of disappearing: man.” But to understand the reasons behind the search for a legal framework that could reconcile the collective interests of humanity in order to promote sustainable development, it was necessary to travel a long road that began even earlier.
A good moment to sound a global alarm on this issue was the energy crisis of 1972. The previous decade had marked several extremes for human societies. The process of decolonization, the wars in Southeast Asia, especially the Vietnam War and related conflicts, the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the generational clash of the counterculture, and the initial steps in the conquest of outer space, to name just the main movements, had shaken the foundations of global governance. The social cataclysm knew no borders or horizons. Led by young people, 1968 was a year of turbulent social and political clashes in Washington, Mexico, and Paris, and of revolutionary effervescence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The 1960s, on the other hand, had already brought us the first widely publicized warning about environmental pollution caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides in extensive agricultural practices, with the publication of Silent Spring by writer Rachel Carson (Carson, 1962). At the same time, the emergence of a growing number of independent nations as a result of decolonization led the World Bank to create a high-level commission, chaired by the Canadian foreign minister, to argue for the requirements of international development. This commission produced a report entitled “Counterparts for Development”(Pearson et al., 1969). Similarly, towards the end of that decade, the Club of Rome commissioned a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to conduct a prospective statistical study on the global limits of the impact of commercial and economic industrial development based on current capitalist economic practices. The result of this request was the publication in 1972 of “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972), which already warned that the maximum thresholds of the regenerative capacity of various resources of the planet as a habitat for the human species were about to be exceeded.
Although statistics showed that these limits to growth were clearly defined by the prevailing patterns of production and consumption in the existing world economy, the main variables used were neither conclusive nor absolute, although they did warn of the need to achieve a sustainable and desirable balance, which immediately became the obvious corollary for the solution to the conflict defined by the report.
The following decade brought results from atmospheric chemists who discovered, by reading sequential observations of atmospheric ozone, a growing hole in the concentration of this gas over the polar ice cap, which eliminated an important filter of excess ultraviolet solar radiation, a cause of skin cancer. As a result of all these alarms, the United Nations (UN) World Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Brundtland Commission after its chair, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, produced the report “Our Common Future” (UN, 1987).
Since then, there has been a dichotomy between the stated goals of achieving a long-term sustainable balance in the use of the planet’s resources to adequately meet the needs of the global population (UN, Millennium Development Goals – MDG, Sustainable Development Goals – SDG) and, in contrast to these objectives, the economic, commercial, and social practices that maintain unsustainable patterns of production and consumption promoted by monopoly capitalism, which, on the other hand, based on permanent financial manipulation, only favor an increasingly smaller percentage of human societies (Piketty, 2014).
Amid these dilemmas, there is debate about the possibility of the human species’ sustainable permanence on the planet and what the transition to achieve this might look like. Unfortunately, this debate is manipulated by the media, which presents it as either an insoluble problem or a false mirage that is not as serious as it is made out to be. However, the global scientific community, thoroughly analyzing each of the circumstances that have pushed the possibility of equitable sustainable development to its limits, has consistently demonstrated that the conflict persists and is permanently exacerbated by practices arbitrarily imposed in order to continue privileging the minorities that hold power in developed capitalist countries.
First, we must consider the opposing elements in this dilemma.
On the one hand, as the entire planet has become a global community of production, consumption, and services, the market is regulated according to supply and demand, but the mechanisms of market regulation have been conditioned by the domination of international commercial, financial, and political organizations by the world’s leading power and their increasing use as instruments of force with objectives of geopolitical domination.
The debates surrounding the presidential elections in the United States have highlighted the contrast between these visions, which will ultimately be shaped by the vested interests of the US two-party political system in support of maintaining unipolar hegemony in the midst of a global geopolitical situation that, in addition to keeping it in a state of permanent instability, has demonstrated that it cannot continue unchanged.
It is absurd to privilege and prioritize the maintenance of unsustainable hegemony over the pursuit of global sustainability for human societies. The corollary developed by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (Harari, 2014), inspired by the works of Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now (2010), both from the University of California, is that the destabilization caused by neoliberalism promoted by the Washington Consensus, which, in order to guarantee short-term profits for the richest, destroyed the foundations that fostered the stability of all national economies, including those of the most developed countries themselves, leaves us facing the endless war declared in October 2001 by US President George W. Bush. This war is being waged by the US military apparatus and its allies, who have become the rulers of the tools of global domination nurtured by the military-industrial complex.
In short, the reality we have faced over the last fifty years is that there is a global international effort to foster a consensus aimed at promoting the collective development of human societies and establishing global agreements to this end, which have been enshrined in the pronouncements of the highest multilateral forums of supposedly binding commitments. but despite evidence, consensus, and intentions, the waste of fossil fuels, the growing marginalization and exploitation of the Global South, military chaos, and humanitarian catastrophes are systematically imposed.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of the main milestones in defining the objectives to be pursued in long-term sustainable human development according to the best knowledge of world science.
All these efforts have been systematically developed by building practical and achievable agreements and action programs (negotiated within multilateral international organizations and based on the best available scientific knowledge), based solely on the optimal use of the original contribution requested of developed countries by the World Bank and the UN since 1967 in the report of the UN Commission for International Development, consisting of 0.7% of the GDP of developed countries to be dedicated to international sustainable development in a stable and long-term manner. Unfortunately, all reports from then to the present day show that this is an unfulfilled promise, in the best years, by no less than half of the commitment, which, in turn, in more than 80% of cases, the contribution finally made has been invested within the donor countries. Added to this is the fact that, since the end of the 20th century, international development has barely been recognized as a partial objective, and the aforementioned UN programs no longer quantify it in absolute terms, but merely define it in terms of gradual percentage increases.
However, all the agreements and decisions of these conferences, duly substantiated by the best scientific knowledge available, have not been fulfilled in a timely and adequate manner over the last half-century due to the systematic failure of developed countries to fulfill their commitments to international development. There are two main reasons for the growing inability to meet official development assistance (ODA) commitments: firstly, the use of ODA for geopolitical objectives of domination and, secondly, the excessive military spending of developed countries.
In the half century since the identification of irreversible thresholds in the abuse of the planet’s habitability, the global economy has continued to invest and squander more resources on fratricidal wars than on organizing the long-term sustainable development of human societies on the planet, dominated by the mirage of imperial superiority.
Science, information, and knowledge
In one of his most recent essays (Beyond Hegemony, 2024) and in various lectures, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the School of Development at Columbia University in New York, argues that the current geopolitical situation is characterized by the confluence of the decline of Western hegemony, the global ecological crisis (comprising climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, and massive pollution, all phenomena induced by human societies), and the rapid advance of technologies (especially artificial intelligence, information technology, biotechnology, and geoengineering). Within this framework, a process of instability and adjustment is unfolding, in which the poles of development are being reconfigured, modifying the patterns of exploitation, production, and consumption that have been established over centuries. He characterizes this as a phase change in history, which is currently undergoing a process marked by uncertainty and the growing danger of a nuclear catastrophe.
For his part, in his speech at the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan in October 2024, the UN Secretary-General thanked this group of countries for their support for multilateralism and described the current situation as a
[…] proliferation of wars, the devastation of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, growing inequality and persistent poverty and hunger; a deep crisis that threatens plans for a better future for many vulnerable countries; the fact that less than a fifth of the Millennium Development Goals are on track to be achieved; the growing digital divide and the lack of safeguards against artificial intelligence and other digital technologies […] and, finally, […] the lack of representation of developing countries at the tables where global decisions are made. All this has to change […].
To this end, he said that the recently agreed Summit for the Future, in September 2024, defined the course of action to strengthen multilateralism, defend peace and human rights, and promote sustainable development. The Pact for the Future identifies four areas for action: 1. Finance. Reform of the global financial architecture, which is obsolete, ineffective, and unfair. 2. Climate. The goal of maintaining a 1.5-degree limit on global warming and objective financial commitments to that end. 3. Technologies. Every country must have the possibility of accessing the benefits of new technologies, and 4. Peace. Strengthening and updating the tools to guarantee peace, including reform of the United Nations Security Council.
Given these scenarios, bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States remain hostage to a limbo inherited from the Cold War of the last century, beset by powerful groups in various echelons of the US government with an endless web of laws, administrative provisions, unilateral coercive measures, and exclusionary designations that continue to constitute the most comprehensive and long-standing complex of economic, commercial, and financial aggression ever wielded in history by one great power against another nation. This monstrosity of aggression has gone through every possible alternative and, under a series of pretexts, has always sought to continue applying the policy defined by the aggressive and illegal memorandum of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lester Mallory, on April 6, 1960.
However, despite this climate of constant aggression under any pretext, scientists from both countries continue to communicate, exchange experiences, explore new possibilities, and promote ways to share the process of creating new knowledge. In more than half a century of this ongoing and ever-worsening dispute, Cuba has been able to build a national system of science, technology, and innovation that has achieved world-class scientific advances, technologies, and products. On the other hand, the research carried out by the scientific communities of both countries offers multiple opportunities for sharing work and objectives, but all of them can only advance in fits and starts due to the various ways in which different US political interests hinder any constructive initiative, until it becomes of interest again and contacts and collaboration are reestablished.
In this regard, several institutions in both countries, in the region, and around the world have served as bridges to maintain contacts regardless of the ups and downs of political confrontation, allowing researchers to showcase different results of joint work that benefit both countries and others in the region and around the world. Among the institutions that have facilitated these relations, the two Academies of Sciences deserve special mention. In the case of the Cuban scientific academy, it has been the main channel for relations in its capacity as an official institution of the Cuban State, which is not part of the government or the administration, although it has national institutional representation. On the US side, in addition to the National Academies of Sciences (NASEM), the efforts over the years of the Smithsonian Institution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are noteworthy. Both are non-governmental organizations that are among the world’s leading promoters of research and international collaboration. Similarly, the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and various non-governmental entities such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and countless university and local organizations, research centers, and many other research and development centers and bodies have respected and valued the work of the Cuban scientific community and share its goals and objectives.
The initiatives that have been carried out in bilateral scientific and technical collaboration show an ever-growing set of successful and very promising results. In the medical care sector, there is the joint response to the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Africa, in 2014, as well as a three-month exchange project on primary health care in low-income areas with the city of Chicago in 2017. In both preventive medicine and epidemic response, Cuba can point to results that are far superior to those achieved in the United States thanks to its vision of a comprehensive health system that can provide holistic solutions that are highly effective in both prevention and crisis situations and have attracted interest from various cities in the United States. This became evident in the inability to respond quickly and effectively to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lack of integration between public strategies and private healthcare systems failed to immediately contain the spread of the virus and excessive mortality among the most vulnerable patients.
In the training of medical personnel, US graduates from disadvantaged, low-income families, after studying at the Latin American School of Medicine, have also highlighted another area in which, despite the enormous difference in size and resources, the Cuban experience can make a positive contribution to health in the United States.
The potential application of new drugs developed in Cuba after clinical studies on both cancer vaccines and treatments for diabetic foot ulcers in collaboration with leading scientific centers in the United States could greatly contribute to improving morbidity and mortality from diseases that wreak havoc on large segments of American society.
In biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation activities, both shared natural resources and experiences in research, monitoring, adaptation, and resilience projects, scientific communities learn a great deal from each other and have been able to exchange information, techniques, and research resources for mutual benefit.
In the face of natural disasters, from prevention to response to extreme events, decades of experience in protecting populations and settlements through monitoring and education about hurricanes and other weather events can also help in the design and implementation of equivalent strategies for other types of crises such as oil spills and all types of emergencies. The cooperation in the face of hurricanes resulting from the joint work of meteorologists and the respective authorities of both countries is a prime example of how, despite political differences at any given time, through multilateral collaboration within the World Meteorological Organization’s Regional Association IV, scientists from both countries have maintained a high standard of work, not only for their mutual benefit, but also for the entire Caribbean region.
These and other equally satisfactory examples are included in other articles in this publication and in those cited and listed in the references of this article. They serve as examples for reflection on how both countries can best contribute to the achievement of global sustainable development goals and the future of human societies.
Conclusions
Political relations between Cuba and the United States have been in almost constant conflict since the 19th century, but they have escalated and intensified since 1960 to the present day, with only a brief episode of attempted détente at the end of Barack Obama’s presidential term. The fact that Cuba was the culmination of the wars of independence in Spanish America and that the thirty years of that last war ended up bleeding Spaniards and Cubans “to the last man and the last peseta,” allowed the United States to enter the fray and, in the short space of three months, to dominate the remnants of the Spanish empire and convert the few colonies that Spain still retained into protectorates under its aegis.
In the case of Cuba, which had been the motivating factor behind its communications campaign to justify the war against Spain, the intervening power had no choice but to grant independence, but not before, under pressure and blackmail, foisting on the constitution of the nascent republic a set of amendments that effectively turned it into a neocolony under the premises of the aforementioned Monroe Doctrine.
This neocolonial condition allowed the overwhelming entry of US investors who bought up land and the local economy at bargain prices and enthroned a corrupt and criminal local oligarchy that would end up turning Cuba into a recreational playground for the mafias and excesses of the northern power. The victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 radically changed the landscape, and an economic and social project for national development prevailed over the neocolonial subservience of the governments of the first half of the century. Since then, bilateral relations have been subject to the parameters of the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine, the precepts of the 120-year-old Platt Amendment, the dictates of the 60-year-old Lester Mallory Memorandum, and the delusions of an absurd extraterritorial law of the United States that has been in force for 30 years, which since then has been trying in vain to turn Cuba back into the protectorate it was, with the military boot of the United States on its territory in 1898.
In the face of all this abuse, the Republic of Cuba, under the process of the Cuban Revolution since 1959, laid the foundations for economic and social development based on national independence, which led to the creation of a more just, equitable, educated, and healthy society that has come to compete in human development indices with the most highly developed countries in the world and which, in the scientific field, has managed to establish centers and schools of thought at the highest global level in various disciplines.
These centers have established relationships and contacts with counterparts around the world, especially in the United States, which can contribute to the progress of global sustainable development goals.
If leaders in the United States could reason out the advantages of a constructive bilateral relationship with Cuba that would end the policy of confrontation aimed at imposing neocolonial conditions, renouncing their traditional goal of imposing regime change and, on the contrary, dedicated to fostering neighborly relations equivalent to those that exist with the other Caribbean countries, they would find that Cuba would not only be one of their main trading partners in the Caribbean, but would also be a counterpart in achieving greater welfare and development goals throughout the region.
At least in science, researchers have highlighted the advantages of a constructive bilateral relationship. It would be worthwhile to create the conditions to foster its further development and promotion aimed at achieving higher sustainable development goals. It should therefore be a priority for both countries to foster a climate of cooperation and exchange in the field of science, rather than confrontation and conflict. This would necessarily result in concrete advantages of national interest for all.
In the years since the beginning of this century, the policy of endless war declared by the then president of the United States in 2001 has only succeeded in killing millions of citizens of the countries of the Global South and tens of thousands of Americans. It has destroyed the economies of dozens of countries, increased the US public debt by several billion dollars, and enriched a handful of investors. The world has become more violent and insecure, and global development goals are vanishing, destroying the social fabric of nations for the benefit of much less than one percent of the world’s citizens who amass useless and absurd fortunes and increasingly distance the possibilities of harmonious development of human societies.
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1 The Act of Incorporation of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, established that the Academy would be required to provide scientific and technical advice free of charge to any department of the Government when requested. It is on record that during the remainder of the 19th century and until 1916, the Academy was consulted on only a dozen occasions. In 1916, by executive order of President Woodrow Wilson, the National Research Council was created, a new executive contingency body charged with coordinating scientific and technological research throughout the nation in support of the country’s war preparations in Europe. After the end of that conflict, the National Research Council continued to function as the permanent operating body of the National Academy of Sciences, fulfilling the organization and service of the specialized advisory function in science and technology matters for all entities of the United States Government. Governing Documents. http://www.nasonline.org
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
Originally published in Cuadernos de Nuestra América/Nueva Época/No. 013 / October-December 2024/
RNPS: 2529 /ISSN: 2959-9849/123 pp. Co-author: Sergio de Jesús Jorge Pastrana
Translation: Resumen Latinoamericano – English