By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on September 26, 2025 from Havana
The vertigo and harshness of the events that overwhelm us leave, as a result, the dissolution of evil: it is erased by habit, it becomes trivial, a nonsense. What other explanation is there for Donald Trump’s announcement that the “cause” of autism is the consumption of acetaminophen during pregnancy, and the “evidence” lies in the fact that Cubans supposedly do not suffer from the disorder because there is no way to pay for the medicine on the island?
Since the announcement of such nonsense this week, dozens of experts have cried foul and, at the very least, described the president as reckless and out of touch with scientific evidence. The WHO and the European Medicines Agency issued separate statements that can be summarized in a single sentence: “There is no evidence that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism in children.”
Why is Trump embarking on this new crusade with his Health Secretary, anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Combining pregnancy with Tylenol—the brand name under which paracetamol is marketed—introduces a topic with enormous daily visibility (over-the-counter painkillers), low information entry costs, and high media impact. The episode has already moved the market (hitting Kenvue, owner of Tylenol) and given the White House an entire news cycle on its terms, even though the scientific community refuted it within minutes.
Cuba enters this plot as a rhetorical device. By insinuating that “there is almost no autism there” because Cubans cannot afford paracetamol, Trump fabricates intuitive “evidence” for non-specialized audiences, introduces an international contrast that is easy to repeat in the media, and, in passing, rubs his agenda in the face of a country he already uses as an antagonist in other actions. It is performative: it does not seek to describe the epidemiology of autism, but rather to sell an intuition that sidesteps the anomalous—and deeply political—conditions in which the Cuban health system operates today.
Using Cuba as “proof” is not only a fallacy, but also a crime. If paracetamol and other essential medicines are in short supply, it is not because the island serves to justify nonsense, but because of the US economic blockade designed to create shortages and cause as much suffering as possible to an entire people. The blockade has a real and permanent impact on health; it limits free, universal, and quality care and turns what should be routine into a feat. Just a few days ago, a five-year-old boy died in the community of La Maya, Santiago de Cuba, because, in the absence of medicines, his parents gave him expired paracetamol to lower his fever.
Contract cancellations, shipping companies refusing to transport goods, persecution of sources of income, increased costs for any purchase, and, in addition, a technical-legal barrier that prevents the use of products and technologies with more than 10 percent U.S. components. To put it plainly: a defibrillator, an infusion pump, a cardiac prosthesis, or a simple compressor—devices that are essential in hospitals—are beyond the reach of Cubans, not because of their price or clinical usefulness, but because of the country where some of their parts were manufactured.
Between March 2024 and February 2025, the Cuban health sector recorded losses exceeding $288 million, according to the report on the effects of the US blockade to be presented to the UN in October. These are not abstract figures: they represent wards running out of medicines, operating rooms that are delayed, schedules that are extended, and professionals who are worn out because logistics has become a permanent obstacle course.
Official figures warn that Cuba’s so-called Basic Medicines List, with 651 items—250 imported and 401 domestically produced—has been affected by 69 percent. Of these, 364 medicines are in short supply: 56 percent of the total. It is not that the population “does not consume paracetamol”: it is that the country cannot normally access supplies that any other system buys from a catalog or at the click of a button, and when it does, it must do so through third-party markets and at much higher prices.
Other examples in the report are even more dramatic. In cardiology, the inability to purchase percutaneous aortic valves—Edwards-Sapien or CoreValve—forces the abandonment of minimally invasive procedures that have changed the lives of millions of older people around the world. With this equipment, Cuba could treat thousands of patients without resorting to complex surgeries, but 375 Cubans who needed a permanent pacemaker were unable to receive one in the last year.
The medical profession does what it can: it intensifies monitoring, adjusts treatments, and reverts to more invasive techniques with their associated risks. In pediatric oncohematology, the lack of first-line drugs—lomustine and methotrexate for osteosarcoma, for example—forces the use of less effective second- or third-line regimens. The result is painful to write: the chances of survival for children with these diseases, which until recently were over 75 percent, have now fallen to around 60 percent.
There are dozens of examples as comprehensive as these in the document that Cuba will take to the UN, which can be consulted online (https://short-url.org/1fOE7). Therefore, few things are as outrageous as being the Emperor’s alibi when there is a shortage not only of painkillers, but also of cancer serums, pacemakers, heart valves, and so many other things due to a sanctions architecture that enshrines violence against non-belligerents and aims to destroy entire populations. Starting with their children, who cannot even afford to buy paracetamol.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English