Science and the knowledge economy bolster Cuba’s socialist revolution

Cuba and Cuban science gained acclaim worldwide for producing very effective COVID-19 vaccines. The achievement stood out among nations of the Global South. The feat reflects Cuba’s development over decades of a formidable scientific establishment engaged in the development and marketing of biologic products oriented mainly to healthcare and also to food production.

The planning processes and strategizing involved were unique, and so too the resulting organizational forms. These special characteristics relate directly to Cuba’s version of socialism.

In a speech on January 15, 1960, a year after the Revolution came to power, Fidel Castro remarked, “The future of Cuba will necessarily be a future of men (sic) of science.” The landscape would change dramatically.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences was reactivated in 1962. In succession came the National Center for Scientific Research (1965), the Center for Biological Research (1982), the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986) with its 38 scientific institutions, the Immunoassay Center (1987), the vaccine-manufacturing Finlay Institute (1991), the National Center for Biopreparations (1992), and the Center for Molecular Immunology (1994).

The “Scientific Pole,” formed in the 1980s in Western Havana, now includes over 40 research centers that employ 30,000 workers. Established in 2012 to facilitate commercialization, BioCubaFarma exports 164 products from sixty-five centers. It operates nineteen units abroad as joint ventures or Cuba-owned entities.

Dr. Agustín Lage-Dávila, longtime head of the Center for Molecular Immunology, writes of “whole cycle institutions” that carry out research, product development, commercialization, and export, all under single management. Export income funds each institution’s activities and contributes to the national budget.

Exported products have included vaccines against meningitis B, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenza type B, COVID-19, lung cancer (CIMAvax-EGF), and many other infectious agents. Other products are interferons, erythropoietin, streptokinase, Heberprot-P (used to treat diabetic foot ulcers), diagnostic test kits, and six non-vaccine treatment modalities for COVID-19.

Lage’s book on the origins, development, and upkeep of Cuba’s immense bio-scientific network was published in Cuba in 2013 and again in 2016. Monthly Review Press recently issued a translated version of the book’s second edition titled The Knowledge Economy and Socialism – Science and Society in Cuba. The various chapters represent articles Lage, an immunologist, biochemist, and cancer expert, wrote for Cuban journals. An additional chapter consists of Lage’s responses to questions provoked by the book’s first edition. The clarity and readability of the book’s English translation is a plus.

The book overflows with information, opinions, analyses, historical references, and optimism balanced by ample recognition of big problems. Lage explains that, after the Revolution, Cuba at once embarked upon developing human capabilities and initiating social advances. There was no waiting for available funding, as is the practice of most nations.

As a result, circumstances were in place to build what Lage calls a knowledge economy. It would feature the export of scientific products, in place of the natural resources and the industrial base that Cuba lacks. Lage notes that biological products have to be new and novel to sell.

Cuba’s bio-technical industries function “without sterile fragmentation …[and] within inter-institution borders … [K]nowledge is captured and incorporated into negotiable assets.” Cooperation, according to Lage, works better than competition. Elimination of institutional boundaries promotes the integration of knowledge. The system favors autonomy over centralized decision-making; it features “layered” decision-making, “cross-pollination,” and a shared sense of responsibility.

The contrast with capitalist modes of bio-technical production is striking, he suggests. There, funding rests on venture capitalism. Products and their value end up in private hands through patents, intellectual property protection, and regulatory barriers. Planning is for the short term. Scientific creation is divorced from ownership of the results.

Lage repeatedly returns to the necessity of overcoming a contradiction pointed out by Karl Marx, that of the social character of production and the private character of appropriation of both the product’s value and the means of production. He refers to the “private appropriation of accumulated science and knowledge” and the appropriation of people in the form of brain drain.

As a socialist country, Cuba defends social ownership of the means of production and the accumulated value of products. Socialism is a prerequisite, he suggests, for science to be propelling a nation’s economy.

Lage emphasizes the contribution of Cuban culture and notions of sovereignty in bolstering the project. Culture shows in ethical values, motivation, solidarity, and inclination toward unity. There is an “indissoluble link between sovereignty and socialism” through which “our daily tasks are part of a larger historical task.”

He adds that “We are getting closer … to the knowledge economy …[and] approaching Marti’s ideal of ‘whole justice’ daily through every social program we successfully implement … Thus we construct not only the spiritual and material well-being of our people but also the defense of national sovereignty.”

Lage discusses the knowledge economy as it manifests locally, specifically in Yaguajay, near Sancti Spiritus, the municipality he represents in Cuba’s National Assembly. He cites a “municipal socioeconomic developmental strategy” that, enlisting nearby universities and research centers in “knowledge management,” has led to “qualitative changes” in healthcare, tourism development, computing, housing promotion, and agriculture.

The “levers of socialism” are helpful, in particular:  massive state investment in creating human capital, integration among institutions, linkages with social programs, exports connected to Cuba’s international agreements and solidarity programs, the capacity to innovate in managing institutions, and workers’ “political and social motivation.”

He recognizes risks. Time is one; “building a knowledge economy … is today’s task, not tomorrow’s.”  Rich countries use “their accumulated economic advantages … to enlarge those advantages and erect new development barriers in poor countries.” He cites residual damage from the Special Period, old habits of “centralized business management,” brain drain, and pressures exerted “by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.”

As regards U.S. aggression: “They know … the potential of socialism. A country that makes its material wealth grow based on the education and spiritual wealth of its people and on the equity that derives from the social ownership of the means of production and distributive justice would be too clear evidence that the solutions to the problems facing humanity today are not on the path of capitalism nor in the subordination to the interests of the developed capitalist countries. Thus, they must show that our system ‘does not work,’ hence the blockade.”

A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from biotechnology exports is down.