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The world is facing a new challenge which is very complex. An invisible enemy is waging a war on all of us and impacts a large part of the human population. For the last several centuries, the capitalistic hegemonies such as America, UK were claiming to have been saviours of this world. That claim is shaken now that their society is in deep trouble with a coronavirus attack. Their citizens are highly vulnerable to the current pandemic and society is in unprecedented shambles.

The effort to control and eliminate pandemic attacks from these countries so far have not succeeded. Hospitals and other capitalistic social infrastructure are not able to cope with the demands. There is an emerging thought process whether adopting capitalistic principles is the root cause of the failure today. The reason for this thinking comes from the example of Cuba.

Cuba is a small island in the Caribbean region. They were under economic ban under the USA for more than 60 years and adopted a complete socialistic structure. Let us look at two recent incidents when Cuba has surprised the world by extending a helping hand to other nations. On 12th of march, a cruise ship by the name diamond princess sailing in the sea sought help from many countries to park and treat the corona inflicted passengers. There were confirmed cases of 50 out of 3700 travellers. To control the spread and treat the passengers, the ship was seeking a port and hospital facilities. The nearby port of Bahamas islands refused the permission for dock. What it essentially means is that a ship belonging to the UK was refused entry by a country under the administration of the UK. Such is the nature of fear of Covid-19 pandemic. In Spite of multiple requests from UK authorities, no permission could be obtained. Ship management was left clueless on what to do with passengers with no help coming from anywhere. In the midst of the trouble, Cuba came forward to accept the ship in their country to dock and treat the passengers in the hospitals. Passengers came out of the ship with the banners – ‘We love you-Cuba’. All the passengers were treated for the virus and were safely sent back to the UK. A new beginning by Cuba to the world.

One of the ship passengers expressed the hopelessness that they experienced during this process and how they would not have survived without the helping hand of Cuba. They were surprised by the warm hospitality extended by Cuban citizens to them. All of them today are highly thankful to the positive experience at a small socialistic island nation of Cuba during this troubling time.

Another incident is with Italy. Italy was swarmed with pandemic attack and the number of affected were next only to China in the early phase. No help was forthcoming from USA and rest of Europe in spite of repeated requests. The inside situation was grim with more and more medical personnel under virus attack. The hospitals were running under full capacity and there was a huge shortage of doctors. Under the difficult circumstances, Cuba came forward to help Italy by sending a medical team of 52 doctors to the city of Lombardy in Italy. Italy is the sixth nation in addition to Suriname, Venezuela, Grenada, Nicaragua and Jamaica. More than 28600 Cuban doctors are deputed to medical facilities across these countries.

It is a new world order being established. A capitalist country like Italy is getting immense help from a socialistic country like Cuba. It never happened in the past. Italy came out of this trouble with big help from Cuba. The pandemic is slowly coming under control in Italy.

The above two incidents are proving to the world that capitalistic social structure is no more fool proof. They are questionable under the background of the virus attack. Highly advanced countries with huge capital are not even able to help each other in the trying times. World believed in capitalism for many centuries and it clearly failed today against socialism.

The current socialistic achievements of Cuba were achieved over the last 60 years under the leadership of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and many other leaders. Words from Fidel Castro when he took over the leadership of the country after the revolution - "Let us not talk of the past of this country. Let us talk of how to build the future. No country in the world should suffer now like we have undergone. There will be mistakes but we will correct and move forward. We will implement forward looking policies for a socialistic Cuba. One day we will be proud to have adopted them when the whole world looks at them."

Cuba adopted a policy of free medical treatment and free education to each and every citizen. When the rest of the world spent a huge proportion of the budget money on the army, Cuba spent money on the citizen world. As a result, human development indices are showing remarkable progress today compared to other countries.

Today more than a lakh of Cuban doctors are working across 107 countries for treating the poor. A program named operation Miracle started during 2004 to treat eye diseases is working across 25 countries. More than 8 lakh patients have been treated until 2011 under this program. A noteworthy point is that Maria Theron who shot dead Che Guevara, the revolutionary Cuban leader was also treated by this program. He gained back his eyesight from this program.

Today Cuba is the only country in the world where 16 types of vaccines and medicines are given to its children. Out of 16, 15 are manufactured within the country. Due to the long-lasting ban of Cuba by the USA, none of its achievements were known to the outside world. The benefits were not made available to the world by the capitalistic imposed ban on the country. The Covid-19 attack and the inefficient handling by big countries have provided the perfect opportunity for Cuba to come out.

A similar progress would have been possible by our own Eelam. It was on the verge of developing a socialistic fabric in the Tamil controlled Srilankan districts. It was a possible opportunity to develop a perfect Tamil nation with free education, free medical and a model nation for citizens. But was destroyed by capitalistic forces helping Srilankan army in the final war. Tamil identity and ethics would have made the dream possible if given opportunity. In the words of Fidel Castro, the dreams of yesterday are made a reality today.

Written by May 17 Movement

Translated by Ganapathy Nallasivan

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