Cuba, a shining example of innovative research

When Jesus was born in Nazareth many years ago and rumours had it that he was the long awaited Messiah who would bring salvation to humankind, many did not believe the rumours. The more skeptical ones even wondered how a tiny and nondescript village like Nazareth could produce a world historical individual. The die-hard skeptics posed the question: Can anything good come from Nazareth?

In 1958 the Cubans, led by Fidel Castro’s Communist Party, rebelled against American imperialism, got rid of the American stooge Batista as their president, and sent his repressive state bureaucrats and business tycoons into exile in the US. They landed in Florida, hardly 100 miles from the Cuban coast. For 55 years these Cuban exiles and their offspring have been trying to overthrow Castro and his communist regime; for 55 years the Cuban revolution has stayed intact, watching the Americans across the Florida channel with the stubbornness of a he- elephant.

Starved of American technology and denied the American market, the Cubans have had to do with 1949 Chevrolet cars as their taxis and to import American technology via Canada when necessary. In other words, the Cubans have survived by their wits, becoming world champions in boxing and hosting one of the world’s best resourced athletics university.

But that is not all. The Cubans have curiously excelled in technological development and innovation where much more advanced countries have achieved meagre results. I first visited Cuba in 1983 when I was teaching in Mexico. I was part of a Mexican youth delegation on a friendly visit to Cuba. We visited many projects, but the most fascinating to me were the medical institutions which gave excellent free service to the people from the village to the centre in Havana the capital. The Cuban government had turned the former multi-storey Bank of America building into a national referral hospital where Cubans received most advanced health care ranging from brain surgery, organ transplants to cancer treatments. That was in 1983.

Several years later, when I was Minister for Planning and National Development, the Cuban ambassador to Kenya, Pedro Pedroso, invited me to visit Cuba now as a government official. I again took keen interest in the Cuban health system and requested to take a complete physical health examination at the hospital I had so much admired in my youth.

The experience was phenomenal. But I also visited two very fascinating institutions: the Cuban Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering where I learned that medical science and pharmacology cannot really advance without the two related branches of research: biotechnology and genetic engineering. It was in this institute that Cuban scientists discovered various vaccines that made the preventive health care in that island so effective. A Cuban baby received seven vaccinations while in the womb. Such a baby comes out with the iron fist to fight the world’s many infant maladies much better than other cohorts in the rest of the earth.

We were then taken to visit Labiopharm, the government’s national pharmaceutical agency which uses the scientific output from the Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering to make actual drugs, vaccines and other related products for use in the health care system. Labiopharm also impressed me with its own research aimed at using sugar, the main cash crop in Cuba, to produce various byproducts such as detergents, perfumes, alcoholic drinks, vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

I came back to Kenya and went back once more to Cuba, this time taking with me the two managers of Chemelil Sugar Factory and South Nyanza Sugar Mills. I wanted them to see how sugar can be used as a base for industrialisation beyond the well known byproduct of power alcohol that Brazil has excelled in. When the two managers came back to Kenya, they presented papers at a workshop at the Windsor Golf and Country Club for the sugar fraternity in Kenya. From then on I was expecting something revolutionary to come from that sector. Nothing happened beyond the workshop. I was terribly disappointed.

As fate would have it, in 2008 I became the Minister for Medical Services in the Coalition Government. I thought I now had a wonderful opportunity to put in practice what I had seen in Cuba as a youth and as a planning minister.

I once more visited Cuba and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with my colleague there, setting out cooperation between our governments in the areas of pharmaceuticals, research and human resources development. When I got back I presented a Cabinet Memo to my colleagues proposing the setting up of a Centre of Excellence in health care which would set off with two key components: oncology and genetic engineering. I knew that research on biotechnology was already going on in other centres like KEMRI in Kenya. My colleagues shot down the idea, arguing, among other things, that “what Kenyans needed were more health centres and dispensaries: not esoteric things like the Minister is proposing.” These were the words of a medical doctor-turned-politician and then cabinet minister.

I learnt later in 2011 that the Cuban Centre for Molecular Immunology had discovered a vaccine called CIMAVAX against lung cancer and through their National Immunisation Programme would soon make lung cancer history in that little island. I did not believe it. Having myself been smitten by the envenom tongue of cancer, I was deeply frustrated that I never made headway in establishing a research centre for oncology and genetic engineering here in Kenya. We are a much bigger population with an education system capable of attracting all kinds of brains from all over the world: why are we such midgets in the fields of scientific discovery and innovation?

When President Barack Obama recently opened relations with Cuba, the Americans were quick to look for CIMAVAX to be tested in their research laboratories for possible approval by the FDA for use in the US. As Kenyans, we have had relations with Cuba from time immemorial, but our “national idiocy” has not given us the opportunity to benefit from the achievements in that little island. Like the bigots in ancient Palestine, we keep on asking: “Can anything good come from Cuba?” When Obama comes here in July, let someone in the higher echelons of government ask him that. He will definitely explain why he wanted to accomplish the task of normalising relations with Cuba before his term is over. He has left a legacy for the US for which he will long be remembered while some of us remain mere footnotes in the history of our nation.

* Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a professor of political science, the senator for Kisumu County in Western Kenya. He writes a weekly column in the Sunday Standard.

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