China, Cuba, and COVID-19: How communists prioritzed power, silencing whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang, and plunged the world into a pandemic

Remembering a hero one year later.

Today remembering Dr. Li Wenliang, the hero who warned about the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. He was grabbed by secret police in the middle of the night and threatened with prosecution for making "untrue statements." He died a year ago today on February 7, 2020. The police state had silenced him and COVID-19 took his life, but the whistleblower is not forgotten despite the efforts of Beijing to erase him.

Dr. Li Wenliang warned about intitial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan

On March 15, 2020 this blog warned about the ability of Communist regimes, such as the ones operating in China and Cuba, to engage in the "denial of objective reality, truth and an ability to systematically lie to achieve is sometimes effective in taking over a country and imposing a totalitarian dictatorship, but is a total disaster when dealing with infectious diseases, and an outbreak such as the coronavirus."

Others in China, who questioned the Chinese Communist dictatorship's response to COVID-19 went missing this past March 2020. A high profile case was the Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang "wrote in a scathing essay that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was a power-hungry 'clown.' He said the ruling Communist Party’s strict limits on free speech had exacerbated the coronavirus epidemic," reported  Javier C. Hernández in The New York Times on March 14, 2020. Mr. Zhiqiang went missing at the time, and reappeared in September 2020 when he was found "guilty of corruption, bribery and embezzlement of public funds" in a Beijing court fined $620,000 and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The message to the Chinese populace is clear: criticize the Chinese Communist leadership at your own peril. Transparency and the free exchange of ideas and data are non-existent in such an environment. This is not good in the midst of a pandemic.

Regimes in China and Cuba both seek political advantage in viral outbreaks

This is also not unique to China, but is also taking place in Cuba. This blog initially looked at the Chinese response to COVID-19 in Wuhan, and compared it with what Havana had done in 2016 and 2017 with Zika. In both cases the severity of the outbreak was covered up, and the result was the spread of the disease around the world which was traced back to China and Cuba respectively.

Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore commenting on the 2017 Zika outbreak said Cuba had "a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious," and that this was due to their desire to maintain high levels of tourism into the country.

What happened with Zika appears to have also taken place with COVID-19 in Cuba.

Above is an advertisement posted on March 9, 2020 by Havanatur, a tourism company owned by the Cuban military that claims that because "Cuba is bathed in the rays of the sun all year, and taking pertinent measures they have greater strengths before COVID-19 and that Cuba is a safe destination"  showing a picture of folks on the beach in Cuba, without masks contrasted with two women with masks in an urban setting somewhere else.  Many tourists who believed Havana's propaganda as a safe haven, ended up having a bad time in Cuba in 2020.

Castro regime officials falsely claimed throughout February and March 2020 that Cuba was a safe harbor with effective treatments for (SARS-CoV-2) virus for visiting tourists, and found it echoed elsewhere.

Officials refused to close schools, or take other precautions, Cubans desperately began to take steps on their own against the pandemic, having learned about it on the internet. Teachers, ignoring the regime's orders, closed schools and sent children home. The Catholic church, aware of the danger presented by public gatherings, suspended religious services. 

Cuba’s independent journalists raised the alarm while the official media insisted that the country was prepared for the epidemic, that tourists were welcomed while the pandemic ran its course elsewhere. Officials falsely said that Cuba’s sun was “a good antidote” that "Coronavirus doesn't replicate at high temperatures" and continued to advertise their false claims on social media targeting European and North American audiences.

Cuban-American economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago observed in a Harvard webinar on May 1, 2020 that in Cuba, “there is no independent entity that can report its own [coronavirus] figures or criticize the government’s data.”

According to data reviewed by the Miami Herald and reported by Nora Gamez, "in the week ending on March 21 there were 144,095 newly reported 'acute respiratory illnesses.' By March 28, the number of new weekly cases of people with acute respiratory diseases rose to 188,816, more than double the weekly average this year. 'Not only could the increase be explained by a COVID-19 outbreak, it most likely does reflect the COVID-19 outbreak based on when it started and what has been going on in the world,' said Dr. Aileen Marty, an expert on infectious tropical diseases and director of the Florida International University Health Travel Medicine Program."

In less than a month (March 15 - April 4th) the Cuba based, Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine, "reported 491,494 cases of acute respiratory diseases."  This was a dramatic increase from measurements taken in Cuba over the past five years, and the months prior to March 2020.

It also points to a far more serious outbreak that probably killed many more than the number officially reported by Cuban officials. In January and February 2021 reports emerged from Santiago of hospitals and morgues overwhelmed with COVID-19 dead in the second largest city in Cuba, while regime authorities continue to present low numbers of dead that do not correspond with anecdotal reports around the island.

Castro regime continues to pitch Cuba as a medical superpower to attract tourists.

This lack of transparency by communist officials in China led to a global pandemic that has so far killed 2,323,593 people around the world and infected over 100 million, and caused an economic downturn that has impacted millions more.

The repetition of these practices to silence health workers in Cuba does no favors for combating the pandemic in the island, and protecting visitors from the present threat.  The regime has attempted to return to the propaganda line they ran with a year ago, of Cuba as a safe haven, but now promise "beaches, mojitos and vaccines all in the same place" in their pitch to tourists.

A year into this global pandemic and the question arises what would have happened if instead of silencing Dr. Li Wenliang, they had listened to him, and raised an international call to alert the world to the danger and contained the outbreak? Will we ever learn what really happened (and is happening in China) or the true impact of the pandemic in Cuba?