It was just before New Year’s Eve, 2019 when an emerging virus in China caught the attention of Dr Ileana Morales, director of Science and Technological Innovation in Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health. She had already participated in implementing Cuban protocols to prevent Ebola and address diseases such as Zika and dengue. But this was […]

Three fourths of the 175 staff at Cuba’s National Medical Genetics Center (CNGM) are women. And women constitute 90% of the research team working on the Center’s largest current project—unlocking the biological secrets of COVID-19 in the Cuban population. They are identifying particularly vulnerable groups and geographies, reviewing therapies applied and long-term sequelae of the […]

If all physicians are detectives, using their skills to track down what ails body and mind, then epidemiologists are medicine’s social detectives, using their training to understand the great calamities of population health. For over 30 years, Dr José Moya has worked in the field since his initial position as head of epidemiology in Ayacucho, […]

The 2020 fall semester at Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) began on an especially somber note: honoring 17 of its alumni felled as they battled COVID-19 in their home countries and beyond. A few were recent graduates among the 30,047 from 118 countries who received scholarships from Cuba to study medicine at ELAM. […]

Cristian Morales, an economist by training, has dedicated his career to improving health and health equity in the Americas through his work with PAHO/WHO. This has taken him from hurricanes, earthquakes and epidemics in Haiti to PAHO’s Washington DC offices, where he was instrumental in achieving consensus on a resolution aiming for universal health—coverage plus […]

Speaking remotely with US graduates of Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), I found them at work on hospital floors, in ICUs and health centers across the United States, putting their professional and personal commitment to the test against COVID-19. Nowhere was that more evident than in New York City, the disease’s epicenter, where […]

A strong foundation of primary care is critical to the health system and is particularly important during pandemics like COVID-19. Primary care practices should be a natural fit for triaging, testing, treating, and educating patients. —Corinne Lewis, Shanoor Seervai, Tanya Shah,Melinda K. Abrams, and Laurie Zephyrin MDThe Commonwealth Fund, April 22, 2020[1] This thoughtful observation […]

  Dr Durán is a native of eastern Santiago de Cuba and his early medical career began in this mountainous region, where he also headed provincial prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. He went on to become rector of the Medical University of Santiago de Cuba and provincial health director. Later in Havana, Dr Durán was […]

Serving in her present role since the economic crisis of 2008, Alicia Bárcena is no newcomer to regional and global emergencies, economic or otherwise. She also has extensive experience in the UN system, including as chief of staff to the UN Secretary-General and later, during Ban Ki-moon’s tenure in that position, as Under-Secretary General for […]

  Dr Barry is incoming Board Chair of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) and past President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and serves on the National Academy of Medicine’s Board of Global Health. She has […]

  Dr Jeanette Vega is well known in global health circles for her work in the areas of health equity, social determinants of health and health systems. She has served as Chile’s Vice Minister of Health, and as director of the country’s National Health Fund (FONASA). For five years, she was also WHO Director of […]

Coordinator, National Pediatric Cardiology Network William Soler Children’s Heart Center, Havana “Our family wasn’t rich, but we didn’t want for anything,” says Dr Palenzuela by way of introduction. In 1950s Cuba, her father drove a taxi and her mother was a homemaker, raising two daughters—one now an economist and the other a top pediatric cardiologist. […]

She was a country girl from the northeastern Cuban province of Holguín, her father a farmer, her mother a teacher. Fast forward a few decades: Dr Lilliam Álvarez mastered mathematics, physics and nuclear science, finally specializing in numeric solutions to differential equations. She spent 20 years at the Cybernetics and Physics Institute in Havana, half that time as deputy director. For another eight years, she served as director of science in the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment. Full professor and senior researcher at the University of Havana, she is a member of the national academic authority that awards doctoral degrees in math and is Cuba´s ambassador to the International Mathematical Union. In 2000, she was inducted into the Caribbean Academy of Sciences, and in 2008, was elected a full member of the Third World Academy of Science (now The World Academy of Sciences).

But over time, her rich bibliography, with titles the likes of A numerical technique to solve linear and non-linear singularly perturbed problems began to be peppered with other provocative gender-informed work: Women doing hard sciences in the Caribbean, Are Women Good for Math? and her 2011 book Ser mujer científica o morir en el intento (Be a Woman Scientist or Die Trying). Her focus on women in science—and their rights to belong in its leadership as well as its ranks—is also reflected in her activist approach internationally and in Cuba.

She is a member of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World and heads its Cuban chapter. After her designation as a Distinguished Member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, she was elected Secretary in 2010 and also chairs its Commission on Women in Science.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences was the right place to hear her story and to explore the way she sees women scientists in today’s Cuba—and the country she would like to see in the future.

A 2014 PAHO resolution that Cristian Morales helped formulate serves as a framework for the Americas’ governments to actively work towards health for all their people, incorporating this aim into national programs for sustainable development. This September, the UN General Assembly will sponsor a High-Level Meeting on Universal Health . . . a first in its history. In part two of MEDICC Review’s interview with Dr Morales, he outlines strategies he believes vital for transforming health systems to reach universal health—defined as coverage and access for all—and for turning words into action.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, but his family is Cuban. After 1959, they returned to the island, where Dr Mitchell Valdés received his medical degree at the University of Havana in 1972. He went on to study clinical neurophysiology, earning his PhD with a dissertation on the auditory system’s sensory physiology. When the Neuroscience Center opened (as part of western Havana’s Scientific Pole). he became its director, a post he holds today. Dr Valdés, a Distinguished Member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, is widely published and has collaborated with colleagues in dozens of countries, including the USA, UK, Italy and Holland. He is a full professor of clinical neurophysiology, sits on Cuba’s National Coordinating Group for Persons with Disabilities, and serves as an honorary professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. What brought me to his office is the set of symptoms reported by some two dozen US diplomats in Cuba and more recently in China as well. And the controversy surrounding what might be the root cause—a topic that has crossed the line from medicine into politics. MEDICC Review’s intent was to hear from Dr Valdés on the science pertinent to the controversy.