As Italy’s death toll soars past 6,000, Cuba has sent medical brigades to combat COVID-19. Cuba has also deployed doctors to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Suriname and Grenada. “The arrival of a medical brigade from Cuba to Italy is pretty historic. You have a leading European nation accepting support in the form of a medical team from a small Caribbean island,” says our guest, Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. “It just goes to the history of Cuba’s deep and long-lasting commitment to humanitarian solidarity with other countries.” Kornbluh covers Cuba for The Nation magazine.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the sixth medical brigade Cuba has sent to other countries to combat the spread of COVID-19. Cuba has also deployed doctors to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Suriname and Grenada. The international effort comes as many Cuban hospitals are scrambling for resources, and Cuban residents say they’re having difficulty finding medicine — a struggle the Cuban government attributes to decades-old U.S. economic sanctions. Cuba announced a temporary travel ban for non-Cuban residents Friday. This came just two days after allowing a British cruise ship with at least a thousand passengers and staff to dock on the island after five people on board tested positive with COVID-19. As the ship reached the Cuban harbor of Mariel last Wednesday, British cruise ship crew members held a banner that read “I love you, Cuba.”

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Amy, you know, the arrival of a medical brigade from Cuba to Italy is pretty historic. You have a leading European nation accepting support in the form of a medical team from a small Caribbean island. And it just goes to the history of Cuba’s deep and long-lasting commitment to humanitarian solidarity with other countries. And Cuba has done this before. They were on the frontlines of the fight against Ebola in Africa. They received the utmost compliments from our U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, at the time. As she pointed out, that’s an awesome thing for a country of 11 million people to be sending doctors to Africa to fight Ebola. And it’s a similarly awesome thing for Cuba to be sending doctors to Italy as part of a worldwide effort, really, to fight this pandemic.

Cuba faces the spread of the virus on the island now. They’ve only had one reported death so far, but more than a thousand people are under observation, and more than 40 cases have been confirmed. Hopefully, the closing of the borders, or, as the Cuban officials say, the regulation of their borders, keeping nonresidents and tourists out for at least a month, if not longer, will kind of stem the spread of the virus, which of course has come from abroad. And Cuba’s resources are going to be extremely strained in this situation, and in part because the Trump administration has, over these last months, levied these sanctions against Cuba, ostensibly to push it away from Venezuela, but it’s part of a regime change program in Venezuela and in Cuba that the Trump administration is running.

And I think one of the key points here for all of us to consider is, we really have met the common enemy of humanity, and it’s not communism, and it’s not socialism, and it’s not what it’s been. It’s an invisible disease. And Cuba actually has a significant contribution to make in terms of trained medical staff, in terms of the medicines you refer to, the Interferon Alpha 2B, that they’ve developed over the years, that is useful in fighting viruses like this one. And this is an expertise that the world needs and that the United States could benefit from. So the whole issue of continuing to sanction Cuba and making it more difficult for them to fight the virus at home and contribute to fighting the virus abroad doesn’t make any sense at all and is not in our interests. It’s not in the interest of humanity right now.

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