The U.S. is “trying to destroy” Cuba’s scientific community  | 10 Years after Obama’s Opening

Dr. Mitchell Valdes-Sosa was born in the U.S., but he’s one of Cuba’s top scientists. As the director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience, he was involved in talks to further scientific collaboration between Cuba and the U.S. during Obama’s historic opening with Cuba. But this collaboration died with Trump and Biden’s change of policy toward Cuba. 

“The U.S. is a bully. They're trying to isolate and destroy the Cuban scientific community,”  Dr. Valdes-Sosa says. 

This story is part of the series “Obama’s opening with Cuba: Ten years later.”

TRANSCRIPT

“The US is a bully in this sense. They're trying to isolate, and I think, essentially, to destroy the Cuban scientific community,” says Dr. Mitchell Valdes-Sosa, director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience. 

“Immediately after the announcement that relations between the U.S. and Cuba would be normalized, steps were taken in different fields to try to establish closer ties. There were visits, for example, from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, to Cuba, to discuss with scientific centers. And people from Cuba went to visit the U.S. “We were talking about people to work in U.S. universities, U.S. research centers, and having people come and work with us. There were many plans that were being thought up and written out of things we could do together,” the Dr. explains.

“As soon as the Trump administration began to work, the first thing they did was to shut this down,” Dr. Valdes-Sosa says. “And the U.S. scientists that had been so enthusiastic to work with us, immediately said there's no future for this. These plans have to be shelved.”

“Unfortunately, during Biden’s administration, very little has changed. People are simply afraid to work with Cuba. And in fact, we know that some legislators have proposed that anybody that works with Cuban labs would be prohibited from receiving federal funds. And since for biomedical research, for health, the principal funder is the U.S. government, these labs would be ruined. It's not only the problem of being able to work with Cuban and U.S. scientists together, some European scientists are scared of working with Cuba because they feel this would harm their relations with the U.S.,” he says. 

“So, the U.S. is a bully in this sense. They're trying to isolate, and I think, essentially, to destroy the Cuban scientific community. And this is what we feel, because these kinds of measures have no justification. They solve no problem of national security for the United States, and they're harmful for the health of Cubans and American citizens. This, I think, has no precedent in world history. Cutting down avenues of saving people's lives, of making people's lives better just through scientific collaboration, which is by definition, an international enterprise. And it’s a shame, because together we could do much more than each side on its own,” Dr. Valdes-Sosa says.