Remembering when Cuba was on the vanguard of medical research, and today's dismal reality in the time of COVID-19

Setting the record straight

America Arias Maternity Hospital Building (Havana, Cuba 1930s)

Original version: CubaBrief

Cuba today traffics its doctors abroad for the profit of the dictatorship while Cubans in the island do without. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic there are shortages in Cuba, and a regime that was slow to respond in a constructive manner leading to protests, and public calls for action. Meanwhile PBS is broadcasting Castro propaganda on Cuba's "vaunted" healthcare system in a program to air Wednesday titled "Cuba's Cancer Hope". 

The hard reality is that Cuba's glory days of "cutting-edge" medicine pre-date the Castro regime.

Carlos J. Finlay, pioneering Cuban doctor

Carlos Juan Finlay, a Cuban epidemiologist, discovered that yellow fever was transmitted from infected to healthy humans by a mosquito vector. Dr. Finlay identified that the carrier of yellow fever was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, today known as Aedes aegypti. Finlay's career began under the Spanish colony and continued into the early years of the Cuban Republic. Dr. Finlay was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906.

However, he was not the only great Cuban doctor to become internationally renowned.

I know this first hand because as a child my pediatrician in Little Havana, in a modest office near Flagler Street, was Dr. Agustin Walfredo Castellanos, his patients used to call him "El Chino Castellanos". He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959 and 1960 by Colombia and Ecuador respectively.

Dr. Agustin Walfredo Castellanos

Dr. Castellanos described "the first practical method of angiocardiography, with which he studied several congenital malformations of the heart. Also, he designed the first automatic angiocardiographic injection device. He also pioneered the method of retrograde injection of contrast material into the aorta which was mainly used to diagnose patent ductus arteriosus."

Reference to Castellanos (1938) and his co-workers in Cuba breakthrough in Angiocardiography

Angiocardiography, according to Merriam Webster is "the radiographic visualization of the heart and its blood vessels after injection of a radiopaque substance.

Dr. Castellanos and his colleagues published the first important paper on the clinical applications of intravenous angiocardiography in the Archivos de la Sociedad de Estudios Clinicos in 1937. Cuban medicine prior to 1959 was not just groundbreaking in basic research, but also in public health.

Cuban doctors in the 1930s provided the breakthrough that made above images possible.

 Professor James W. McGuire and Laura B. Frankel in their paper published in the Latin American Research Review, “Mortality Decline in Cuba, 1900-1959: Patterns, Comparisons, and Causes” found that “Cuba's progress relative to other Latin American countries at reducing infant mortality was even greater from 1900 to 1960 than from 1960 to 1995. During the earlier period, Cuba led all Latin American countries for which data are available at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. From 1960 to 1995, by contrast, it came in fourth and fifth respectively.”

Rodolfo J. Stusser, M.D. in his November 2013 paper, "Cuba’s Long Tradition of Health Care Policies: Implications for Cuba and Other Nations," documented that "in 1958 Cuba had 6,000 physicians, 3,624 pharmacists, 2,260 pharmacies, about 500 laboratories, and 60 drug manufacturers, handling 40,000 different products for 6 million inhabitants."

Numbers don't lie, although the Castro regime would like to disappear them.

Thankfully, Glenn Garvin writing at Reason Magazine has burst one of the propaganda bubbles of the Castro dictatorship and its fictitious "lung cancer cure" reporting that "CIMAvax is far from a "cutting-edge" medicine. The truth is that it barely works at all. As Cuba's Cancer Hope admits in a single throw-away line, "Cuban clinical trials show that it extends life three to five months on average." The five-year survival rate for its users is about 15 percent, roughly the same as that for patients treated with approved U.S. cancer therapies. American oncologists hoot in frustration at patients who want help getting to Cuba to obtain CIMAvax. Says one, quoted in a recent report by Public Radio International: "Without seeing new stats, it's not that impressive… . I am not too worried about people not being able to go to Cuba."

Earlier this month, Castro's Venezuelan henchman was promoting Cuba's "interferon" as a cure that saved "around 3,500 lives in China" declaring Cuba in the vanguard, Caribbean National Weekly called it the antidote for COVID-19, and Newsweek was calling it a "wonder drug." The reality is far more humble. Interferon Alpha-2B Recombinant (IFNrec) was jointly developed with China, but they did not pioneer the discovery of interferon. Interferon research, not surprisingly, was pioneered in Switzerland in the 1950s. Finally, interferon is not a cure but a possible treatment, with risky side effects that in the late stages of the illness can cause more harm than good. The communist regimes in Cuba and in China are profiting off of the desperation of people around the world caught up in a pandemic that spread out of control because Beijing covered it up for weeks. Sadly, many have fallen for this propaganda.

One last point on Cuban medicine, post-1959 who are the great doctors that have made strides in medicine that have led them to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine? We know that Cuban medical missions have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on three occasions, but President Donald Trump has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. One need not be a doctor to get that nomination.

The more important question is how many Cuban doctors, educated and trained under the Castro regime, have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine?