CANADA
The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to address homelessness

Timothy Martin, 

Doctoral Student, 

Faculty of Education, 

York University, Canada 

 

3/18/2021

As emergency shelters and encampments emerge in cities across North America, the public has been confronted with a more visible homeless population as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this has led to several crusades aimed to — 

once again — hide this population from view.

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes A small homeless camp is shown outside a department store in Montréal, Que., on Jan. 23, 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

I research public responses to homelessness, and I believe that we can do better. Through education and dialogue, we can begin to recognize that we all want the same thing: the end of homelessness, safer neighbourhoods and adequate housing for all.

With several years of experience involved in coalition work alongside Ontario’s street-involved population, my doctoral research examines processes of mourning as ways to mobilize public understanding and togetherness.

Homelessness need not be viewed as an inevitable part of the fabric of North American society. It was not always omnipresent, and need not continue to be. It has only really become pervasive, and increasing since the 1980s in Canada. Research has argued that it is preventable.

Policies produce homelessness

Today’s housing crisis is a result of particular policies that are neither inevitable nor intractable. Yet, perhaps most unfortunately, the collective response has too often included blaming, criminalizing and stigmatizing people experiencing homelessness.

No longer can we covertly warehouse working-class people experiencing any mixture of bad luck, addictions, mental health challenges and trauma produced by historical oppressions that are difficult to define.

The spread of COVID-19 through the shelter system is well-documented, though it took a lawsuit for the City of Toronto to take action. And still, several Canadian cities threaten the evictions of the most vulnerable from encampments.

Read more: Cities must end homeless camp evictions during the coronavirus pandemic

Various communities made up of outreach workers, nurses and artists — such as the Encampment Support Network in Toronto — meet the material needs that city governments refuse to address. Meanwhile, “dehoused” citizens are shipped off to holding cells in hotels, shelters, community centres and empty apartment buildings, where many already struggling with mental illness or drug addictions are isolated and separated from essential harm reduction services. The results have been disastrous.

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward This homeless camp at Strathcona Park in Vancouver, B.C., developed after city officials shut down the homeless encampment at Oppenheimer Park in late 2020 in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

 BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE SHOULD NOT RESIDE FOR FREE IT UPSETS THE NEIGHBOURS WHO HAVE TO PAY RENT

Hope in coalitions

What is now emerging is the way in which certain affluent communities have veered toward age-old practices of NIMBYism, fear-mongering and unequal policing. Of course, this is a complex issue.

In a talk she gave at the West Coast Women’s Festival in 1981, social justice activist Bernice Johnson Reagon declared: “We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is ‘yours only’ — just for the people you want to be there.” Reagon, a lifelong civil rights activist and feminist, wrote and spoke about the desperate need to engage in coalition work, reminding her audience that coalition work “is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets.”

Medical sociologist Arthur Frank suggests a conceptual persona he calls the dialogical stoic that combines the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius with the dialogical responsibilities adhered to by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Stoicism is that ability each of us has to choose the best option amid what is sometimes a panoply of difficult circumstances. Frank explains the steadfast commitment to dialogue as a discovery of the suffering of the other, while existing “on the boundary with others.” Frank emphasizes, importantly, Bakhtin’s claim that people are unfinalizable — thus, there is no “last word.” There is no “these types of people.”

Collisions open up opportunities for coalitions. Will we seek to discover the other — their stories, their pain, their gifts — as, like always, we have the choice to do so? Or will we band together with those only like us? Will we stay home or take to the streets?
‘Feel the strain’

There has been some thoughtful writing about the teachable moments offered by the pandemic. Students returning to schools certainly have much to digest and teachers have a great deal of material to draw from as they resume in-person classes.

But what if we began to consider the teachable moments offered to all of us, even as these opportunities present themselves in public spaces? Cultural critic Henry Giroux describes this as public pedagogy, arguing that classroom learning needs to spill out into “social movements in the streets.”

These are certainly uncomfortable moments. But, as Reagon reminds us: “If you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Read the original article.

Timothy Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

CANADA

‘Everyone is at risk’: Migrants and undocumented workers need the COVID-19 vaccine too

Krista Hessey  

GLOBAL TV SPECIAL REPORT

 5 hrs ago  LONG READ 

Lily has risked her life working on the frontlines in one of the most dangerous settings for COVID-19 deaths in the country: long-term care homes.

© Provided by Global News "It's a trap." Lily came here legally, and has been trying to meet the requirements to gain permanent status for seven years. Now she's undocumented and has to start all over.

She says that she doesn’t think of it as dangerous and that she loves the work that she does. She actually transitioned from one-on-one care to long-term care during the coronavirus pandemic so she could help more people.

“Some of them think that once you reach a certain age, you don’t have (a reason to live),” Lily told Global News. “But for me, I always try to give them that — make sure they know that it’s not the end, being in a home.”

During the pandemic, essential workers like Lily are being called heroes. But despite caring for people on the frontlines of this health crisis, Lily herself doesn’t have access to healthcare.

She’s undocumented. We have changed her name to protect her identity as she fears deportation.

“You walk around in fear thinking, ‘Oh, today's the day.’ You really have to try to put that behind you and get up, go to work, function,” she says. “It's something that plays on your mind every single day — that you could be found out and lose everything you're trying to get here.”

Because she works in long-term care in Toronto, one of the cities hardest hit by COVID-19, she should have been among some of the first people to receive the vaccine. To arrange shots, her employer sent out an email in January, asking staff for their provincial health card numbers — something she doesn’t have.

So she put it off, forced to make excuses for why she won’t be getting the shot alongside all of her colleagues. She says she knows she would be fired if her employer found out she has no status.

“Then what will be your position? You have no money. You have to live here, yet you can pay bills,” she says, exasperated by the thought of once again being put in that situation.

“I don't want to take that chance.”

Despite assurances from federal and provincial governments that the vaccine will be available to everyone, regardless of immigration status, the reality on the ground is quite different.

There is fear and confusion. Advocates say the way provinces are approaching vaccination excludes and marginalizes migrant workers and undocumented people, despite those communities being some of the most at-risk.

The Migrant Rights Network, the country's largest network of migrant-led groups, along with 270 other organizations, is calling on federal and provincial governments to ensure people have safe and dignified access to the vaccine, regardless of status.

The Migrant Rights Network says that across the country, it is already seeing people being denied the vaccine, according to Karen Cocq, an organizer for the network. Among the list of the organization’s demands are that the vaccine must be free, not require a health card or the collection of any identification or addresses, or information about immigration status.

READ MORE: Dalhousie University to document impact of COVID-19 on temporary foreign workers

The network is also asking for a guarantee that information collected will not be shared with immigration enforcement or police.

“Unless those concrete measures are taken to ensure that everyone has access in practice, the policy won't matter,” Cocq says.

Video: Advocates say migrants and undocumented people are being denied access to vaccine

Global News reached out to the ministries of health in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec — provinces that have large numbers of migrants and undocumented people — to see what information someone must give in order to receive the vaccine.

All three provinces say that the vaccine will be free and that a health card will not be required to get it, though a card is asked for at almost every stage from making the appointment to showing up at the clinic for the shot.

When asked what information will be collected, all provinces required a full legal name, address or postal code, date of birth, and contact information.

In Ontario, if you do not have a health card you must bring “another form of a government issued-photo ID, such as a driver’s licence, passport, Status Card or other provincial health cards,” something undocumented people likely don’t have.

“That level of information would keep an undocumented person away,” says Dr. Paul Caulford, director of the Canadian Centre for Refugee and Immigrant Healthcare. He has been providing health care to migrants and undocumented people for more than two decades.

Although provinces have laws in place to protect health information, for undocumented workers, it's not enough; the fear that information is being turned over to border services and of their possible deportation is too great.
Failed policies

When the coronavirus spread to Canada, Caulford says he knew it would be devastating to the population he treats.

In March 2020, he says six people with symptoms of COVID-19 showed up at the centre in Scarborough. He sent them to the hospital for treatment, but he says they were all turned away after they asked to pay for care but couldn't.

Outraged by this, he says he started organizing with other advocacy groups to call on the federal and provincial governments to expand coverage to uninsured people.


“We posed the question to them: if you don't treat everyone in your community and it's a pandemic, you treat no one. Everyone is at risk.”

It worked. In March 2020, Ontario and a few other provinces temporarily expanded health insurance coverage to uninsured people for COVID-related treatment. Ontario even went a step further and provided access to the full health system. It was a win, but celebrations did not last long.

Caulford and other physicians say it took hospitals a long time to implement the new policy. For months, people without coverage were being turned away or asked to pay for care.

“We had to advocate and phone (the hospitals),” Caulford says. “(The provincial government) didn't really blast on the loudspeakers that it was happening.”

“There was a policy announcement without a plan for implementation,” adds Dr. Dan Raza, chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare and a family doctor at St. Michael's Hospital. “We absolutely cannot make that same mistake again.”
They are on the frontlines

Let’s take a moment to look at the scale of the problem.

More than 1.6 million people in Canada are migrants, refugees, or undocumented, according to the Migrant Rights Network. That’s one in every 23 people.

They come here through Canada’s various temporary foreign worker programs, via study permits or without documentation at all. They work in various frontline industries, such as health care, delivery, cleaning, construction, farming, and warehousing.

“This isn't something that's in the cracks, in the margins, in the shadows. This is a core part of our economy,” says Fay Faraday, a labour and human rights lawyer and an assistant professor at Osgoode Law School.

“There are significant sectors in our economy that would grind to a halt and businesses that would shut down without undocumented labour.”

The pandemic has brought to light the importance of essential workers, whose often low-paid, precarious work has kept the country functioning. While these people have received thanks and praise, for those with temporary status or no status at all, the last year has been devastating.

Like many Canadians, migrants and undocumented people have lost their jobs during this crisis but unlike Canadians, they cannot access emergency financial aid.

Most temporary workers are here on what’s called an employer-specific work permit, meaning they can only work for one employer and only do the job assigned on the permit. If they lose their jobs, they lose their income, health care coverage, and can't legally work anywhere else until they find a new employer willing to submit an application for a new work permit.

READ MORE: Advocates call for COVID-19 vaccination access for migrant and undocumented workers

That process of finding a new job and getting a work permit can take anywhere from nine months to more than a year in normal times, explains Faraday, and now the pandemic has made that take even longer.

With many industries shuttered by the pandemic, finding an employer who is willing to do the necessary paperwork can be tough and government processing times have been delayed, meaning people are waiting longer for the benefits that come along with the permit, like health coverage.

In order to pay bills and make ends meet, people are often forced to take work in the meantime which results in them losing their status if the government finds out.

“So there is a growing number of people who are in very precarious circumstances and have lost status for reasons that are completely beyond their control,” Faraday says.

Video: How to provide migrants and undocumented people safe access to the vaccine

The federal government says it knows that people are struggling due to job losses and service delays, but claims it has put policies in place to get migrants back to work, like extending windows of time for people to reapply for status and letting people work while permits are being processed.

For people in Canada without documentation at all, not having access to health care during a global health crisis has been beyond challenging.

Laura normally works as a residential cleaner but she lost her job because of the pandemic. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and their two children. We are not identifying her because she fears she could be deported.

Laura says the last year has been tough on her family. On top of struggling to pay rent, she has been terrified to get sick.

“It's really scary for us to get the virus because we say, are we allowed to go to the hospital?” she says.

Now with the vaccine available, Laura says she wants to get it but is nervous to go to a clinic.

“I won't feel comfortable giving my personal information,” she says. “I don't know what they will do with it.”

There are past examples of hospitals providing information to border services. Six years ago, a Vancouver health agency reportedly referred information about patients to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), though since then the practice has largely stopped.

Video: Undocumented worker speaks out about barriers to access COVID-19 vaccines

This fear is deeply ingrained in these communities and the government isn’t doing any messaging to combat it, Caulford says.

“All the government needs to do is put out an announcement through the radio that if you happen to be undocumented, come to the vaccine centre, you're safe. No data will be collected that will harm you,” he says.

He says he recently had a patient who almost went blind in one eye because he didn’t want to go to a hospital.

“That's how frightened they are of accessing health care.”

Caulford started the Canadian Centre for Refugee and Immigrant Healthcare, a volunteer clinic in Scarborough, with some colleagues after witnessing an undocumented teenager almost die after being denied care in 1999.

"We'd hoped we'd be out of business in one year after we told everybody what we found in 1999 and we're here 23 years later and it's worse," he says.

He's now on a mission to get vaccines to the centre's patients. For weeks, he has been wading through layers of bureaucracy in order to set up the centre's own pop-up vaccine clinic. He's hopeful to have it up and running soon.

"There will be phone calls to thousands of people to say, come in, and give them a heads up and address the vaccine hesitancy. But we're not going to collect your information. And they've come to trust this place," he says.

It’s important work, but the clinic is small and he says resources are limited. He’s frustrated by the lack of action from the federal government and says, "we're here because of bad policy."

"After all these years, they've still continued to let these people fend for themselves and be lost," Caulford says. "It's a form of apartheid health care because it's a highly racialized population. Ninety-five per cent of our patients are persons of colour and visible minorities."

After more than 20 years of pleading with the government, he says if this crisis does not bring awareness to the limitations of Canada's health care system, he doesn't know what will.

"Every morning, I wake up being grateful I'm in Canada, but often every night, I go to bed thinking about where we've let human beings in far less fortunate circumstances than ours down."

For Laura, getting the vaccine would mean she would be able to return to work and better support their two children during this crisis.

“It's necessary for everybody,” she says. “I don't want to be out of that just because of my status.”
Government response

Last summer, after three migrant farm workers from Mexico died from COVID-19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the conditions that have left migrants and undocumented workers vulnerable to the virus.

“We know there are many issues, from living conditions to the fact that temporary foreign workers are tied individually to companies or employers, to various challenges around labour standards,” he said last June. “We can even look at things like pathways towards citizenship, which would give people more rights.”

Cocq from the Migrant Rights Network says it’s telling that the government recognizes the solution to the problem and yet refuses to act.

"The government has clearly recognized that permanent residency is what will give people access to the equality that they are demanding they deserve. But it's only for some and not for others," Cocq says.

As part of Canada’s economic recovery from the pandemic, the Trudeau government plans to accept 1.2 million newcomers to Canada over the next three years. The government says the 401,000 immigrants it would accept this year is the highest since 1913.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino declined our request for an interview, but in a statement, his spokesperson Alexander Cohen says the government is “seizing the opportunity to engage those immigrants who are already here, but without permanent status.”

The government has created one new initiative called the “Guardian Angels” program, which would allow people without permanent status and who worked in healthcare during the first wave of the pandemic to apply for permanent residency. But the requirements for eligibility are very narrow.

Yet Mendicino says he would like for it to be more broad in scope.

“We’ll deliver on our plan by making the most of the talent already within our borders. Their status may be temporary, but their contributions are lasting,” Cohen says in a statement.

"There are workers who are doing front-line dangerous work during the pandemic, throughout the economy. All of them are essential. All of them should have status," Faraday says.

Advocates say the government's decision to create "pathways to permanent residency" leaves people exploitable.

“We've created a system that very predictably puts them at a disadvantage and imposes human suffering unnecessarily, but in a way that is functional for other people who profit from it,” Faraday says. “That is not a basis on which to build an economy. That is a basis on building exploitation.”

Lily came to Canada on a temporary work permit seven years ago and has been working diligently ever since, navigating the onerous government system and various programs in order to get permanent status and reunite with three kids and grandkids.

“That was the goal back in 2014, but now it's 2021 and I am undocumented. I have no rights, no status,” she says.

She lost status last January after her last employer failed to properly complete the paperwork that she needed to get a new work permit and renew her status.

Even she doesn’t qualify for the government’s new program — despite doing a front-line job that many would consider makes her a hero.

“Hero? I don't know. I just go to work. I'm just hoping that the federal government will see that we all need the vaccines. We all need status. We all need permanent residency.

"The ones who are here, we are here already. We work. We pay taxes. So why don't you just try and meet us halfway?”

See this and other original stories about our world on The New Reality airing Saturday nights on Global TV, and online.

BACKGROUNDER

In Cuba, the post-Fidel era began ten years ago

Can events like Chanel Fashion Week can still happen in Cuba?

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

This article, originally published on January 23 2017, 

has been updated  to reflect ongoing developments 

in US-Cuba relations.

Last Friday, speaking in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood, president Donald Trump announced a change of American policy toward Cuba, which under the administration of Barack Obama had seen significant rapprochement with the US.

“Effective immediately, I am cancelling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” he said.

Rhetoric aside, the policy Trump outlined doesn’t fundamentally alter many of his predecessor’s steps toward normalisation, including renewed diplomatic relations, unlimited visits for Cuban Americans visiting family back home and the end of the US immigration policy that had favoured Cubans.

And though the speech has the government and small businesses in Cuba on edge, no single Trump decree is likely stop the changes that have already swept the island over the past decade.

Trump’s changes do little to alter the fundamentals of

 the normalisation process started by his predecessor 

Barack Obama. Joe Skipper/Reuters

The post-Fidel area began ten years ago

Ever since Fidel Castro died in November 2016, foreign observers – journalists, political tourists, and the like – have been flocking to the streets of Havana. Let’s go and see communist Cuba before it is too late! they reason.

What this reaction misses is that Cuba has already changed: the post-Fidel era is already over a decade old.

My research, published in January 2017 in the Mexican Law Review, shows major shifts in the governing style and ideology of the country. The charismatic leadership that epitomised Fidel’s time in power is gone, replaced by a collective arrangement. And Cuba’s centrally planned economy has integrated market socialist features.

These changes will likely be accelerated by Barack Obama’s repeal of the US policy that gave Cuban migrants favoured immigration status – both by eliminating an escape route for dissatisfied citizens and by reducing potential future remittances. Trump does not plan to undo this change.
The end of charismatic leadership

When Fidel fell gravely ill in July 2006, he provisionally delegated his dual posts – president of the Council of State and first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba – to his younger brother Raúl, long-time head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and second secretary of the Communist Party. As Fidel’s health further deteriorated, the National Assembly made Raúl president in February 2008.

This move kept succession within the family, but Raúl has rejected any Kim dynasty-style future for the country. If ten years ago Cuba looked more like North Korea than China, today the opposite is true.

Leadership and ideology in surviving communist systems in 2016.

 Created by author. Author provided

THEY ARE NOT COMMUNIST THEY ARE STATE CAPITALIST 

THE PARTY IDEOLOGY ONLY IMPACTS THE SUPERSTRUCTURE

 OF THE STATE

(GRAMSCI)

Breaking with Fidel’s decades-old practice, Raúl recommended to the delegates of the sixth Party Congress in April 2011 that they limit public officials to a maximum of two five-year terms; this soon became the official Party line.

In the short term, term limits meant that Raúl Castro’s presidency would end in February 2018, which he has confirmed. In the long term, that raised questions on the post-Castro era. To be sure, in 2013 Miguel Díaz-Canel, a Communist Party insider, was promoted to first vice president of the Council of State – the first time ever that a revolutionary veteran did not hold that position. Technically, according to the Cuban constitution, if the president dies, the first vice-president takes over.

The seventh Party Congress, held in April 2016, nonetheless appointed Raúl Castro to be first secretary. While this does keep a revolutionary veteran in control of a key post after 2018, for the first time the head of the Cuba’s Communist Party will not be the same person as Cuba’s president.

The Castro brothers in 1996. Reuters

The rise of market socialism

Market socialism can be defined as “an attempt to reconcile the advantages of the market as a system of exchange with social ownership of the means of production.”

As if following this definition from the Oxford Dictionary of Social Sciences, the sixth Party Congress approved that from now on “planning will take the market into account, influencing upon it and considering its characteristics.”

This is a clumsy engagement with the market, treating it as an alien from outer space. And it epitomises the current ideological hardships of the Cuban regime.

Still, Raúl Castro has overseen the largest expansion of non-state socioeconomic activity in socialist Cuba’s 50-year history.

Cuba’s National Office of Statistics reports that in 2015 71% of Cuban workers were state employees, down from 80% in 2007, and the number of (mostly urban) self-employed workers has grown from 141,600 in 2008 to half a million in 2015. In a country with a total workforce of five million, this is not a trivial change.

From 2008 to 2014, more than 1.58 million hectares of idle land has been transferred into private hands. That’s nearly a quarter of Cuba’s 6.2 million hectares of agricultural land, roughly on par with state-owned land (30%)

.

Cuba’s agricultural land is being handed over to non-state developers.

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

In sum, the market is no longer the enemy, it’s a junior partner in Cuban central planning. The last Party Congress, Cuba’s seventh, approved the continuity of controlled liberalisation efforts by turning market socialism into Communist Party doctrine, stating that “the State recognises and integrates the market into the functioning of the system of planned direction of the economy.”

The new Cuban polity

The rise of market-socialist ideology emerged, to a substantial extent, from the decline of charismatic authority.

Cuba’s next generation of leaders –- expected to take over in 2018 -– will not enjoy the same unquestionable legitimacy as its founding fathers, much less that of Fidel Castro. So the inevitable passing of the revolutionaries still in power today, most of whom are in their 80s, makes the already difficult process of revamping the regime even tougher.

Raúl Castro’s challenge over the past decade has thus been not only to make his presidency stand on solid ground, but also to make sure that such a ground endures after he leaves. The question of economic performance was clearly central to that task.

Raúl saw market socialism as a way to strengthen Cuba’s economy without abandoning its Castro-era ideals. The revolutionary veterans’ interest in seeing the system they built survive is unsurprising, and it explains their rejection of any capitalist encroachments.

But it remains to be seen how long – and if – this ideological limit will survive them.

Small businesses like barbershops or food stands, now ‘normal’ in Cuba’s market socialism system, may be affected by Trump’s new policies. Alexandre Meneghini/Retuers

Let’s return to the earlier chart presenting a comparison of surviving Communist countries at present. It shows Cuba today, after ten years of Raúl, located somewhere in between North Korea (where an orthodox Soviet-style economy is still firmly entrenched) and countries such as China and Vietnam that have seen capitalism restored, and somewhat closer to the latter.

But the difference between “medium” market acceptance and “high” market acceptance is a substantial one. The latter presupposes a comeback of the bourgeoisie – the social class of owners of the means of production, expropriated by Castro’s revolution – and thus far this key ideological limit remains strong in Cuba.

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, many have assumed that the fall of communist Cuba is a matter of when not if. Only by abandoning the focus on “the fall” and understanding how communist rule has survived in Cuba we can grasp how mightily Cuba has already changed.

January 23, 2017  •Updated June 19, 2017

Author

Ramón I. Centeno
Postdoctoral fellow, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Disclosure statement
Ramón I. Centeno received funding for his doctoral studies –that produced this research– from Mexico's National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt, for its acronym in Spanish). He also received financial support for two field trips to Cuba from the Department of Politics of the University of Sheffield, and the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS). He has an editorial role in the Mexican political magazine 30-30.com.mx.

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.

BACKGROUNDER

Cuba is poor, but who is to blame – 

Castro or 50 years of US blockade?

RECENTLY THE TRUMP EMBARGO HAS CAUSED DESPERATE CUBANS TO TRY TO GET TO AMERICA UNLIKE THE BARCADI FAMILY 

THEY GET NO SPECIAL TREATMENT AND GET SENT BACK HOME

Alongside his depiction as a “brutal dictator”, negative reflections on Fidel Castro since his death on November 25 (2016) have focused on his “mismanagement” of the Cuban economy and the consequent “extremes of poverty” suffered by ordinary Cubans.

This caricature is problematic – not only because it ignores the devastating economic impact of the United States embargo over 55 years, but also because it is premised on neoclassical economic assumptions. This means that by stressing economic policy over economic restraints, critics can shift responsibility for Cuba’s alleged poverty on to Castro without implicating successive US administrations that have imposed the suffocating embargo.

This approach also ignores key questions about Cuba after the revolution. Where can medium and low-income countries get the capital to invest in infrastructure and welfare provision? How can foreign capital be obtained under conditions which do not obstruct such development, and how can a late-developing country such as Cuba use international trade to produce a surplus in a global economy which – many claim – tends to “unequal terms of trade”?

It was the search for solutions to the challenge of development that led Cuba’s revolutionary government to adopt a socialist system. They adopted a centrally planned economy in which state ownership predominated because they perceived this system as offering the best answer to those historical challenges.

But the commitment to operate within a socialist framework implied additional restraints and complications, particularly in the context of a bipolar world. My book, Che Guevara: the economics of revolution, examines the contradictions and challenges faced by the nascent revolutionary government from the perspective of Guevara’s role as president of the National Bank and minister of industries.

Literature on Cuba is dominated by “Cubanology”, an academic school central to the political and ideological opposition to Cuban socialism. Its emergence and links to the US government are well documented. Its arguments are that the revolution changed everything in Cuba – and Fidel (and then Raul) Castro have personally dominated domestic and foreign policy since, denying Cuban democracy and repressing civil society. Thanks to their mismanagement of the economy, growth since 1959 has been negligible. They simply replaced dependency on the US with dependency on the USSR until its collapse in 1990.

These ideas have also shaped political and media discourse on Cuba. But the problem with this analysis is that it obstructs our ability to see clearly what goes on in Cuba or explain the revolution’s endurance and Cuban society’s vitality.

What did Castro inherit?

Arguments about the success or failure of the post-1959 economy often hang on the state of the Cuban economy in the 1950s. The post-1959 government inherited a sugar-dominated economy with the deep socio-economic and racial scars of slavery. Cubanologist Jaime Suchlicki argues that Batista’s Cuba was “well into what Walter Rostow has characterised as the take-off stage”, while Fred Judson points to structural weaknesses in the Cuban economy: “Long-term crises characterised the economy, which had a surface and transient prosperity.” So while one side insists that the revolution interrupted healthy capitalist growth, the other believes it was a precondition to resolving the contradictions obstructing development by ending Cuba’s subjugation to the needs of US capitalism.

Following the revolution, Castro set out to bring social welfare and land reform to the Cuban people and to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of the Cuban elite. But when the defeated Fulgencio Batista and his associates fled Cuba, they stole millions of pesos from the National Bank and the Treasury. The country was decapitalised, severely limiting the capacity for public spending and private investments. Wealthy Cubans were leaving the island, taking their deposits and taxes with them. How was the new government going to carry out the ambitious socio-economic reforms without financial resources?

We have to consider these real circumstances at every juncture. For example, when the US embargo was first implemented, 95% of Cuba’s capital goods and 100% of its spare parts were imported from the US – and the US was overwhelmingly the main recipient of Cuban exports. When the Soviet bloc disintegrated, Cuba lost 85% of its trade and investment, leading GDP to plummet 35%. These events produced serious economic constraints on Cuba’s room for manoeuvre.

Putting a price on poverty

Moving on, we should also ask: how are we to measure Cuba’s poverty? Is it GDP per capita? Is it money-income per day? Should we apply the yardsticks of capitalist economics, focusing on growth and productivity statistics to measure “success” or “failure”, while paying little attention to social and political priorities?

Ration cards symbolise poverty and shortages in Cuba. EPA/Alejandro Ernesto

Even factoring in its low GDP per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI) lists Cuba in the “high human development” category; it excels not just in health and education, but also in women’s participation and political inclusion. Cuba has eliminated child malnutrition. No children sleep on the streets. In fact, there is no homelessness. Even during the hungry years of economic crisis of the 1990s, Cubans did not starve. Cuba stuck with the planned economy and it enabled them to ration their scarce resources.

Yes, salaries are extremely low (as both Fidel and Raul have lamented) – but Cubans’ salaries do not determine their standard of living. About 85% of Cubans own their own homes and rent cannot exceed 4% of a tenant’s income. The state provides a (very) basic food basket while utility bills, transport and medicine costs are kept low. The opera, cinema, ballet and so on are cheap for all. High-quality education and healthcare are free. They are part of the material wealth of Cuba and should not be dismissed – as if individual consumption of consumer goods were the only measure of economic success.

Operation miracle

The specific and real challenges Cuban development has faced has generated unique contradictions. In a planned economy, with an extremely tight budget, they have had to prioritise: the infrastructure is crumbling and yet they have first-world human development indicators. Infant mortality rates reveal a lot about the standard of living, being influenced by multiple socioeconomic and medical factors. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is 4.5 per 1,000 live births, which sits it among first-world countries – and above the US on the CIA’s own ranking.

It is not just Cubans who have benefited from these investments. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, educators and other development aid workers have served around the world. At present some 37,000 Cuban doctors and nurses work in 77 countries. They generate foreign exchange of some US$8 billion a year – Cuba’s biggest export.

In addition, Cuba provides both free medical treatment and free medical training to thousands of foreigners every year. As a direct initiative of Fidel, in 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine was inaugurated in Havana to provide foreign students from poor countries with six years of training and accommodation completely free. In 2004, Cuba teamed up with Venezuela to provide free eye surgery to people in three dozen countries under Operation Miracle. In the first ten years more than 3m people had their sight restored.

Prohibiting even trade in medicines, the US embargo led Castro to prioritise investments in medical sciences. Cuba now owns around 900 patents and markets pharmaceutical products and vaccines in 40 countries, generating yearly revenues of US$300m, with the potential for massive expansion. The sector produces more than 70% of the medicines consumed by its 11m people. The entire industry is state owned, research programmes respond to the needs of the population, and all surpluses are reinvested into the sector. Without state planning and investment it is unlikely that this could have been achieved in a poor country

.

Cuban researchers developed the first synthetic vaccine against a bacteria that causes pneumonia and meningitis. EPA/Alejandro Ernesto

In the mid-1980s Cuba developed the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine. Today, it leads in oncology drugs. In 2012 Cuba patented the first therapeutic cancer vaccine. The US embargo forces Cuba to source medicines, medical devices and radiology products outside the United States, incurring additional transportation costs.

Sharing economy

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, told me in 2009:

A great example provided by Cuba is that in its poverty it has known how to share, with all its international programmes. Cuba is the country with the greatest cooperation in relation to its gross domestic product and it is an example for all of us. This doesn’t mean that Cuba doesn’t have big problems, but it is also certain that it is impossible to judge the success or failure of the Cuban model without considering the US blockade, a blockade that has lasted for 50 years. Ecuador wouldn’t survive for five months with that blockade.

Let’s consider the embargo: the Cuban government estimates that it has cost the island US$753.69 billion. Their annual report to the United Nations provides a detailed account of that calculation. That’s a lot for a country whose average GDP between 1970 and 2014 has been calculated at US$31.7 billion.

Yes, Castro presided over mistakes and errors in Cuba’s planned economy. Yes, there is bureaucracy, low productivity, liquidity crisis, debt and numerous other problems – but where aren’t there? Castro pointed to these weaknesses in his own speeches to the Cuban people. But President Correa is right – to objectively judge Castro’s legacy, Cuban development and contemporary reforms today, we cannot pretend that the US blockade – which remains today despite rapprochement – has not shaped the Cuban economy.

Castro almost saw out 11 US presidents since 1959, but he never lived to see the end of the US embargo. New challenges face Cuba, with economic reforms underway and the restoration of relations with the United States. Next week, I will begin new research in Cuba to assess the revolution’s resilience in this post-Castro, Donald Trump era.

December 2, 2016

Author

Helen Yaffe
LSE Fellow, Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science
Disclosure statement
Helen Yaffe has received research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Partners
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.

The scene from Cuba: 

How it's getting so much right on COVID-19

Jennifer Ruth Hosek, 

Professor, Transnational Studies,

 Queen's University, Ontario 
3/17/2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately harms underprivileged people globally, Cuba’s “people over profit” approach has been saving many lives — both on the island and abroad. From the onset, Cuba’s approach has been holistic and integrated.

© (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) A doctor shows an empty vial of the experimental Soberana 02 vaccine for COVID-19 being developed at the Molecular Immunity Center during a media tour of the facility's vaccine production in Havana on Feb. 25, 2021.

Its response is among the most respected in the world. Widespread confidence in the Cuban government’s science-based policies, public service media messaging and volunteerism are key reasons as to why Cuba has been able to control the viral reproduction rate until mass vaccination begins.

The cash-strapped Caribbean island risked opening to holiday visitors at the end of 2020 and is currently managing higher COVID-19 caseloads than ever before. Its health experts are combining international clinical trials of its vaccine candidates with mass production. Cuba is the only Latin American country with the capacity to manufacture a vaccine domestically other than Brazil, which is not doing so. Cuba aims to protect its populace, then give away or sell its vaccines abroad

.

© (Yamil Lage) A technician works with the Soberana 02 COVID-19 vaccine at the packaging processing plant of the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana, Cuba, in January 2021.

Before the virus’s arrival in Cuba, the country prepared for mitigation based on best practices from Asia and its own expertise with contagious disease.

Beyond Cuba’s borders, its medical diplomacy took over. Cuba’s Henry Reeve Medical Brigade has been fighting the pandemic in at least 37 countries and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. When COVID-19 stranded the cruise ship MS Braemar, only Cuba allowed it to dock.

In contrast, many countries’ pandemic responses have been haphazard, with well-funded lobby groups representing restaurants and pharmaceutical companies, to name just two sectors, wielding excessive influence. Oscillating virus reproduction rates have required disruptive and costly mitigation measures and resulted in illness and death. The media, academics who include Helen Yaffe, Emily Morris and John Kirk and non-governmental organizations like Havana and Oakland-based Medicc have long documented Cuba’s emulation-worthy health system.

Read more: Coronavirus response: why Cuba is such an interesting case

Hard work, hard science

Care in Cuba is universal, research and training is robust and disease and disaster mitigation is well-organized. The public health-care system is co-ordinated across research institutes and centres of disease control, through to dispersed local neighbourhood clinics. Cuba also has a near 100 per cent literacy rate, with much attention paid to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

Cuba’s achievements are the result of hard work and hard science in a not-for-profit system. The populace’s confidence has been earned through science-based campaigns against the likes of HIV, Ebola, dengue fever and the Zika virus.

Nations that have responded well to the pandemic have communicated clearly and factually with their people. Cuba has a tradition of multi-pronged public-service messaging.

The country’s epidemiology director has become a trusted household expert through his daily news reports. Every day at 9 a.m., a seated and masked Dr. Francisco Durán speaks directly to the public, noting and lamenting every fatality, detailing disease spread and treatments, answering viewer questions and sternly advising continued adherence to preventative measures.

The well-known psychologist Manuel Calviño discusses topics such as self-discipline and positive thinking. Cheerier spots feature famous actors urging fortitude and depict groups of people following health protocols.

In cartoons, angry “red meanie” viruses are drowned by hand-washing and blocked by face masks, animation heroes celebrate International Workers’ Day from their balconies, youngsters stay home to protect their grandparents and families play inside together. The socially distanced 42nd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema featured animated doctor’s orders in its promotional video. Ubiquitously stated, sung and danced slogans include “Cuba for life, with a new (masked) smile.”

Mask-wearing is popular

I surveyed residents of Havana online and later in-person while in Cuba in December and January. Most reported wearing masks to “protect others and myself.”

While masking has been broadly politicized elsewhere, Cuba mandated masks in March 2020, immediately sharing instructions on how to make them at home.

While in many countries volunteers struggled to find ways to help, in Cuba, existing organizations such as neighbourhood watches and universities quickly moved into action.

Medical students have gone door-to-door checking for symptoms. Computer science students have developed helpful apps and supported medical staff in their dorms-turned-quarantine centres. Necessary work got done while public buy-in solidified the mitigation efforts. The initial growth curve was inverted early on.

Banking on individual responsibility among its well-educated citizens, Cuba shifted to a “new normal” at the year-end holiday season. Tourists headed to isolated beach resorts and expats to their relatives’ homes. The hotels follow health protocols meticulously — speedy PCR testing, masking, sanitation and social distancing

.

© (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) A tourist, wearing a protective face mask, walks along the beach in Havana, Cuba, on March 2, 2021.

But family visits led to outbreaks, as they have globally. Some visitors, many of them arriving from areas with high rates of infection and science denial such as Miami, breached the requisite protocols: one PCR test with a negative result upon arrival, a five-day home quarantine and another negative PCR test before mingling.

Pandemic has been costly

All indicators show Cuba has put its limited resources to efficient use for the public good. But especially coupled with former U.S. president Donald Trump’s tightening of the American blockade against Cuba, the pandemic and the resulting plunge in tourism are costly. Scarcity of affordable food and consumer goods, along with an increased cost of living accelerated by a long-overdue monetary unification, have increased stress levels.

Read more: U.S.-Cuba relations: Will Joe Biden pick up where Barack Obama left off?

Sensing an opportunity, foreign interest groups are supporting small, lively social media and in-person protests, most characterized by vociferous yet vague demands for artistic freedom.

Daily cases are also now hovering around 850 compared to 42 on Nov. 15, 2020 — just before Havana’s airport reopened. Although the curve is again flat — exponential growth has been halted for the second time — medical personnel and supplies are strained. Against this backdrop, however, there are Cuba’s advances on the vaccination front.

In this breakneck race, Cuba is simultaneously running Phase 3 international clinical trials of Soberana (Sovereignty) 2 and, planned for late March, Abdala, with robust production of these vaccine candidates. Work is also continuing on Soberana 1 and Mambisa.

Looking ahead to COVID-19 variants and reinfections, a booster Soberana Plus is now being developed.

If Cuba’s vaccination program is successful, the country will have once again provided for its people against enormous odds as it produces and distributes a vaccine domestically, then shares it with the world.

Many market-driven, rich nations of the Global North, including Canada, are not so well-positioned. Cuba’s access to internationally produced vaccines was highly improbable due to the U.S. blockade. Its ensuing decision to make its own vaccines stands to pay off handsomely.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jennifer Hosek receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

New analysis shows potential for 'solar canals' in California

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA CRUZ

Research News

 

UC Santa Cruz researchers published a new study--in collaboration with UC Water and the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced--that suggests covering California's 6,350 km network of public water delivery canals with solar panels could be an economically feasible means of advancing both renewable energy and water conservation.

The concept of "solar canals" has been gaining momentum around the world as climate change increases the risk of drought in many regions. Solar panels can shade canals to help prevent water loss through evaporation, and some types of solar panels also work better over canals, because the cooler environment keeps them from overheating.

Pilot projects in India have demonstrated the technical feasibility of several designs, but none have yet been deployed at scale. California's canal network is the world's largest water conveyance system, and the state faces both a drought-prone future and a rapid timeline for transitioning to renewable energy. Solar canals could target both challenges, but making the case for their implementation in California requires first quantifying the potential benefits. So that's exactly what researchers set out to do in their paper published by Nature Sustainability.

"While it makes sense to cover canals with solar panels because renewable energy and water conservation is a win-win, the devil is in the details," said Brandi McKuin, lead author of the new study and a UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies. "A critical question was whether the infrastructure to span the canals would be cost-prohibitive."

Canal-spanning solar panels are often supported either by steel trusses or suspension cables, both of which are more expensive to build than traditional support structures for ground-mounted solar panels. But McKuin led a techno-economic analysis that showed how the benefits of solar canals combine to outweigh the added costs for cable-supported installations. In fact, cable-supported solar canals showed a 20-50 percent higher net present value, indicating greater financial return on investment.

In addition to benefits like increased solar panel performance and evaporation savings, shade from solar panels could help control the growth of aquatic weeds, which are a costly canal maintenance issue. Placing solar panels over existing canal sites could also avoid costs associated with land use. Now that the new paper has provided a more concrete assessment of these benefits, members of the research team hope this could lead to future field experiments with solar canals in California.

"This study is a very important step toward encouraging investments to produce renewable energy while also saving water," said Roger Bales, a coauthor on the paper who is a distinguished professor of engineering at UC Merced, the former director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, and a director at UC Water.

Bales was part of the original group that got the project started in 2016, when San Francisco-based social impact agency Citizen Group approached UC Solar and UC Water with the concept. From there, the research grew into a collaboration between UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz, and Citizen Group, with funding support from NRG Energy and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Lead author Brandi McKuin started working on the project while completing her Ph.D. at Merced, then continued with help from senior author and UCSC professor Elliott Campbell, the Stephen R. Gliessman Presidential Chair in Water Resources and Food Systems and a fellow Merced transplant. UC Merced professor Joshua Viers and researcher Tapan Pathak advised on the project, and graduate students Andrew Zumkehr and Jenny Ta contributed to analysis.

Zumkehr led a complex hydrological analysis using data from satellites, climate models, and automated weather stations to model and compare evaporation rates at canal sites across the state, with and without shade from solar panels. McKuin then used this information in her assessment to calculate the financial benefits of reduced evaporation.

Ultimately, it was the cost savings of many combined benefits that made solar canals financially viable, rather than benefits from reduced evaporation alone. But the study also notes that benefits from deploying solar canals could extend beyond immediate financial impacts. For example, every megawatt of solar energy produced by solar canals in California's Central Valley has the potential to replace 15-20 diesel-powered irrigation pumps, helping to reduce pollution in a region with some of the nation's worst air quality.

And senior author Elliott Campbell says the wide range of benefits identified by the paper is, in itself, an important lesson to carry forward. He sees the findings as not only an assessment of solar canals, but also a clear illustration of the interconnections between urgent global issues like air quality, energy, and water conservation.

"What we're seeing here is actually some surprising benefits when you bring water and energy together," Campbell said. "Sometimes it leads to a smoother landing in how we transition to better ways of making energy and saving water."

###

 

Text me about cervical cancer

Digital communication is a way to bridge the racial disparity gap in cervical cancer information and follow up

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: FORD LEARNED THAT WOMEN WANT TO RECEIVE TEXT MESSAGES ABOUT THEIR HEALTH CARE, BUT PRESENTLY CAN'T BECAUSE OF FEDERAL MEDICAL PRIVACY AND TELECOMMUNICATION LAWS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE ON UNSPLASH

An estimated 14,480 new cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, according to the American Cancer Society. Cases that could be prevented or cured with better education from screening to treatment based on improved provider-patient communication, says a Michigan State University researcher.

The issue is particularly acute for Black women, said Sabrina Ford, an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology within MSU's College of Human Medicine. Ford's research was published online Feb. 1 in the journal Gynecologic Oncology.

"More Black women were being screened for cervical cancer (compared to white women) but they were still dying from cervical cancer at twice the rate," she said. "It didn't make sense."

When Black women were told they had an abnormal cervical cancer finding on their Pap test screening, they often failed to follow up with their medical provider. The reason for this is complicated and two-pronged. One prong is about education and information. Providing clear clinical information in an easily accessible form is key to patient engagement.

"Culture does come into play because Black women do get their information from family, friends and personal experience," she said. "Sometimes there is medical mistrust, shame or fear and so, some women delay or don't follow up."

The other prong is about communication, specifically how medical providers are communicating with their patients. A doctor trying not to unnecessarily alarm a patient might not be telling their patients enough information, for instance that the Pap test screens for cancer. Handing a patient a one-page flyer about cervical cancer may easily get lost, never read or understood depending on a patient's health literacy.

Ford learned that there needs to be improvements on both prongs in order to bridge the disparity gap. Women want to receive text messages about their health care, Ford said, but presently can't because of federal medical privacy and telecommunication laws. With regulatory changes, patients could consent to receive provider text messages, when they fill out initial office paperwork.

Also, Black women reported using their online patient portal, which also provides an opportunity to educate and advise patients so they can make informed decisions.

Another gap is communicating consistent messages. Medical providers should provide uniform information to patients on all fronts: in the office, on the patient portal, flyers and pamphlets or text messages.

"We can't blame the patient. We can't blame the doctor either when the communication isn't clear," she said. "I want to move the needle forward on cervical cancer and HPV. They are highly preventable, curable and could be eradicated."

###