4-06-05, 8:51 am
Editors' note: With admissions that US intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was 'dead wrong,' will the Bush administration admit that its accusations against Cuba were also dead wrong? We think it ought to. We think friendship with Cuba is a better way to improve all of our lives, especially given the medical advances documented in the following article. Imagine what we could do together.
Travel to the center of production of biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction in Cuba
From Granma
John Bolton, under secretary of state for International Armaments and Security, has accused Cuba of producing biological weapons and being a terrorist threat to the United States. He has repeatedly made this accusation, once on March 30, 2004, before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, Bolton asserted that Cuba could supply double-use biotechnology to other criminal states.
The assistant secretary referred to the island as a criminal state, and expressed his concern over Cuba sharing such technologies with other despicable nations. These accusations were part of President Bush’s argument to approve his measures against Cuba regarding travel and the sending of remittances. One of those centers of production of biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction, where products are constructed to be shared with other terrorist countries, which could attack the US people at any moment, is the Havana Molecular Immunology Center. Its researchers cannot obtain a visa to travel to scientific meetings held in the United States because, according to the US authorities’ document, their presence is a danger to the most powerful nation in the world.
The Center for Defense Information visited those installations on May 2003 with Pentagon officials, searched every inch of the building, interviewed personnel and prepared reports on six military and scientific specialists. Since I have never been to a biological weapons center with such potential to destroy, I decided to visit this institution. In contrast to what I imagined, I did not see a massive military presence at the entrance of the building, guarding such dangerous activities, just a photograph of Martí, and a bulletin board with his poetry in the corridor. The dangerous scientists were barely 30 years old, with innocent smiles that did not seem like those of individuals planning a surprise attack on the United States.
When I began asking what they do at the center, I found out that they produce erythropoyetine for anemia and immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer. And it would seem that I am not the only person to have come to this conclusion because their products are being tested in Italy, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Spain, among other countries. Moreover, 50 US companies have expressed an interest in the center’s oncological treatment. Last year, the US pharmaceutical company CancerVax signed a cooperation agreement with the center to produce three cancer vaccines from this institution for the manufacture of biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction, one of them to treat lung cancer. This collaboration has taken almost two years of negotiations by the US company’s CEOs with the US authorities in order to convince the government, including the director of the John Wayne Cancer Institute of Cancer in California, who had to explain the project to the US Senate itself.
So, the crime of the Molecular Immunology Center is that it is a pioneer in research into immunology in order to manufacture vaccines for poor countries, and which it has been exporting for five years. It is giving an example of scientific rigor in combating cancer through the production of humanized antibodies and vaccines, which develop natural defenses against tumors and have demonstrated a high efficacy in European clinical trials. And all this is happening in a Third World country, where reagents take seven months to reach its labs because of the US blockade, and with scientists who do not envy the money and luxury of developed countries. Without any doubt, weapons of mass destruction are to be found in the Molecular Immunology Center and the 40 centers comprising the so-called Scientific Complex in west Havana, but these are weapons against egoism, lack of solidarity and the model of scientific development in the first world, based on the enrichment of the large transnationals.
