{"id":227901,"date":"2020-09-22T15:12:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T19:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=227901"},"modified":"2020-09-22T15:12:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T19:12:23","slug":"our-other-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/counterbalance\/our-other-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Our other war"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good friend sent me a few weeks ago a <\/span>speech<\/span><\/a> that has circulated mainly on social networks and is attributed to the President of Uganda, on the meaning of COVID-19. It is perhaps, as she told me, the most instructive of all the ones I\u2019ve read. In one of its parts he states: \u201cThe world is at war.\u2026 A war without guns and bullets, a war without human soldiers. A war without borders.\u201d Without a doubt, he is right.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I learned by reading and watching many war films, especially World War II and specifically the Great Patriotic War, the one that the Soviets won against German fascism and that today many interpretations intend to forget or relegate to the background is that the vanguard, being decisive, can only be truly successful if it has a powerful rearguard. Those great tank battles, where the Red Army literally crushed German armored divisions, were only possible because the rearguard produced the steel, the bronze, the engines, and finally the tanks. Without a powerful rearguard, it would have been very difficult for the Red Army to take Berlin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cuba is also waging this new war. It does so every day and every morning we receive the report.<\/span><\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t the only war our country is waging. There are others, as old as us Cubans; others, a little less old, but also old and others more recent. Some are fought against external factors, others, on the contrary, have to do with internal factors; some are evident and tangible, others are not so obvious and it is often difficult to make them visible.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this war against the pandemic, from my perspective, the vanguard is our healthcare system. All of it: from medical schools and health personnel to the simplest and most remote of the family doctor\u2019s offices. Our pharmaceutical industry, especially the system associated with biotechnology and its research, development and innovation system, with all its research centers, constitutes one of the most powerful weapons of the vanguard, that of its doctors and scientists. I think its capacity for response, it agility and its results leave no room for doubt.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is, however, a great asymmetry between the behavior of the vanguard and that of the rear. By rearguard I understand that other system that should provide the necessary means for Cuba to face the pandemic in better conditions. For this, the production and supply of food is decisive.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rearguard is made up of those sectors responsible for producing\/supplying a group of goods and services, some of them essential and others perhaps relatively dispensable, but which should help to wage this war. I am talking about the sector that produces food \u2014agriculture and food processing industry\u2014, and of those others that guarantee services that have become very necessary: \u200b\u200bcommerce, in its different forms (physical and electronic) and banking, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the furrow to the table: removing obstacles and obstacle-makers in food production in Cuba<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n