The Cuban Biotech Revolution

The end of the cold war was cruel to Cuba. The country's trading partners, denied Soviet largesse, dried up. Hard cash ran low. What food the country could grow languished in the fields; trucks didn't have enough gasoline to bring the crops to market. And of course there was the US embargo.

What Cubans call "the Special Period" produced one notable success: pharmaceuticals. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Cuba got so good at making knockoff drugs that a thriving industry took hold. Today the country is the largest medicine exporter in Latin America and has more than 50 nations on its client list. Cuban meds cost far less than their first-world counterparts, and Fidel Castro's government has helped China, Malaysia, India, and Iran set up their own factories: "south-to-south technology transfer."

Yet at the same time as they were selling generics, the science-heroes of the Cuban Revolution were inventing. Castro made biotechnology one of the building blocks of the economy, and that has opened the door - just a crack - to intellectual property. To date his researchers have been granted more than 100 patents, 26 of them in the US. Now they're setting their sights on the markets of the West.

After the 1959 revolution, Cuba made it a priority to find new ways to care for a poor population; part of the solution was training doctors and researchers. Cuba currently exports thousands of doctors to impoverished countries and caters to an influx of "health tourists," mostly rich Africans and Latin Americans seeking cheap, high-quality care.

In 1981, half a dozen Cuban scientists went to Finland to learn to synthesize the virus-fighting protein interferon. Castro sent them with money for a shopping spree. They brought back a lab's worth of equipment and took over a white stucco guesthouse in the Havana suburbs; a decade later, Cuba was the pharmacy of the Soviet bloc and third world. Most trade took the form of barter, and development experts estimate that by the early '90s the business was worth more than $700 million a year.

"And then, almost from a Monday to a Tuesday," says Carlos Borroto, vice director of the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (known as CIGB in Spanish), "the Soviet Union collapsed." Cuba lost all its credit, 80 percent of its foreign trade, and a third of its food imports.

Faced with economic calamity, Castro did something remarkable: He poured hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals. No one knows how - Cuba's economy, with its secrecy and centralized structure, defies market analysis. One beneficiary was Concepcion Campa Huergo, president and director general of the Finlay Institute, a vaccine lab in Havana. She developed the world's first meningitis B vaccine, testing it by injecting herself and her children before giving it to volunteers. "I remember one day telling Fidel that we needed a new ultracentrifuge, which costs about $70,000," Campa says. "After five minutes of listening he said, 'No. You'll need 10.'"

Campa and her colleagues still have to scrimp and scrounge. Labs are filled with gear from Europe, Japan, and Brazil. The occasional device from the US has traveled the "long way around" - through so many middlemen (and markups) that it may well have circled the globe. Scientists develop their own reagents, enzymes, tissue cultures, and virus lines. Each institute has its own production facility and conducts clinical trials through the state-run hospital system.

Still, if pharma is to become an economic engine, Cuban researchers acknowledge that they'll have to join the international business community. South-to-south transfers simply don't raise enough cash. That's where things get complicated.

Slowly but surely the pieces just keep coming closer and closer together.

Just my speculation....thinking out loud.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/10/tues/

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Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation denies a claim by House Republicans trying to link it to Fidel Castro.

What's this?

(snip)

Castro claims

Meanwhile in Miami, three Republican members -- Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, his brother Mario and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- will charge that Teresa Kerry's foundation has "connections" to and has helped finance "Fidel Castro's Internet network."

A Diaz-Balart spokeswoman would not elaborate, but she did say it involved the Heinz Endowments' financial ties to a group called the Tides Center and the Tides Foundation.

There is a financial connection between the Heinz Endowments and the Tides organization, and between the Tides organization and an Internet project based in Cuba. But the connection between the Heinz Endowments and the Cuban project is very tenuous.

The Heinz Endowments have issued approximately $8.1 million in grants in the last 10 years to the Tides organization, a San Francisco-based group that funds a variety of socially progressive environmental, economic and social justice projects.

About $230,000 was issued to the Tides Foundation between 1994 and 1998 and the remainder issued to the Tides Center. All grants were issued for environmental and economic development projects in western Pennsylvania, where THK has spent much of her adult life. The Heinz Endowments money was specifically earmarked for these projects.

One organization that also hired the Tides Center to manage its financial and administrative affairs is the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), which promotes "peace and social and economic justice" around the world by helping countries develop Internet and computer networks. IGC says it has had projects in the former Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina, among others.

It also once had a project in Cuba which involved helping the island nation establish an Internet connection. IGC has another connection to the Tides organization: It received $13,000 in grants from the Tides Foundation between 1993 and 2002 for general support, but not specifically for the Cuba project.

"I seriously doubt that any money from Teresa Heinz Kerry or the Heinz Endowment would have gone to this [Cuba] project," said IGC Director Mark Graham told CNN. "I wish that were the case. We could have used the money."

"In recent weeks, the Heinz Endowments has been accused of using its funding of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania to advance a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups. This accusation is simply wrong," Maxwell King, president of the Heinz Endowments, said in a written statement.

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