I have the greatest privilege of being associated with Native cultures of many continents.. thus satisfying my curiosity and desire to travel and the chance to help them with my medical expertise. these notes are from those travels. I am a professor at the University of Havana
My sister from Cuba wrote, dont forget to wear manga larga/large sleeve shirts and make sure that once you get to your destination, immediately wash them.
That was to be my least of the worries.
The sensation of calling for an Uber driver to take me to the airport, the last time was at the end of November and it was for a short flight. This is my first long haul international journey in 18 months.
The approach to the MIA Miami International Airport looked so welcoming. David, the Uber Driver had been in Miami for five years, we had a pleasant chat about our lives in Cuba.
The airport was not at all crowded. I had come few hours early expecting delays in checking in, security etc. A confident AA agent checked me in within a few minutes, even though there was a long line waiting at the Special Check in section. He asked do you have the Spanish Health clearance, he barely glanced at it, issued me my boarding passes. and TSA Pre Check was so quick that i was surprised.
That set the tone for the journey. Relaxed and without anxiety and also enjoying the excitement to the full.
I walked quickly to the Centurion Club and recognized the person at the desk and also a lady who just joined: they both said, how nice to see you. I blurted out: It feels so good to be traveling again.
A nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc, tasted californian not New Zealander.. one of my favourite servers at the Cluba, Linda from Pinar del Rio, greeted me with the warmth of a sister.. we chatted for a little while while she went to get me something to eat and drink.
whether people realize it or not, living in the United States adds unnecessary kind of mental emotions and when covid came, these worries (a pity for people who believe in microsoft putting data collection or magnets by aliens or just plain people who refuse to see the science) were multiplied and all the pleasures that USA can afford to give you disappeared as well. If you were not involved in some human projects helping others, the past year would have been a hell for those living in the United States in addition to the pronouncements of the Imbecile in Chief with whose departure country quietened down a little with improved survival of patients with Covid.
At the Centurion lounge, seeing people, who may not mean much in your every day life, but with their appearance and the feelings that they give you, make you realize that they do mean, and they are capable of eliciting and donating certain emotions to you .. was the beginning of the reclamation of a normal life of a traveller I had led ever since graduating as a Medical Anthropologist.
In the USA, appearance count as I took my seat IL, on this 777-200, one is impressed but the onboard service was nowhere a match: it is much like a Mexican restaurant looking like a lovely adobe house from Mexico but inside serving mediocre Tex-Mex cuisine.
This is what was served for a reapas on this flight. Ah well.. glad I had a nice small meal at the Centurion Club
On arrival at JFK, I would have preferred the Flagship Lounge but it is incredible that almost all the lounges at JFK a premier airport was closed. JFK terminal 8 American Lounge at least offered a little Hummous and French Onion Soup to make up for their meagre throwaway from Miami to JFK
Terminal 7 was a reminder of the poorer countries in Africa and their airports. There was nothing about the airport that welcome a recommendation. Please avoid terminal 7 if possible, unfortunately used by Qatar British Airways Iberia and other One World Airlines. The security agents were ignorant and rude and the agent who checked me into my Iberia flight would have not been able to get a job as a janitor in his native south american country, perfectly ignorant .. and I was flying IBERIA and I would have expected slightly better attention. It is possible that all of a sudden rush for travel and inexperienced personnel working are not up to steam. Both flights from Miami as well as the one to Madrid was full to the hilt
The aircraft was an older model and like the aeromozas working this flight, looked tired and haggard. They were very busy and the flight was a very quick six hours plus a few minutes to Madrid, and in the excitement of travel, one was willing to forgive
The flight left promptly and flew over what looked like the Hamptons and off to the Atlantic Ocean.
Lots of precautions about Covid, and we were offered fresh towlettes to wash our hands an encouraged not to use the bathroom often and in fact, most of the bathrooms were closed, causing quite a bit of confusion and inconvenience
I enjoyed my fish dish, a drop of VIlla Conchi Cava which was described by the French vinotheque as
Accords mets
Riz / Salades et crudités / Poisson / Comme apéritif / Plats légers
As the plane was descending into the Madrileno skies, we were treated to coffee and fruits.. ah Well. Qatar Airways, I miss you very much..
I was connecting to a flight to a regional airport in France and all EU flights left from the Satellite which has no services whatsoever. Fortunately a security agent let me into the main terminal and a pleasant agent at the Iberia Dali Lounge allowed me to use the Lounge.
In the future, the airlines wont give you any food but you can get catered meals at the Lounge?
I enjoyed the breakfast .. savouring the croissant and the mushrooms .
As I was in the lounge for quite a few hours, i enjoyed the lunch offering of Curry with cashews and chicken as well as rice . I am not in the habit of drinking wine at Lunch time , so a good cup of coffee was sufficient. The regional flight to a regional airport was on a regional airline, at least i had the seats next to me vacant and I dozed off the entire short flight before entering France
For the first time in this journey the French Police asked me for my vaccine certificate and I knew this small airport well and within minutes was at the quay to catch the navette to town. One had to pay with credit cards as they do not wish to handle cash, and the lady was patient and got my credit card working, the system in France slightly different, with usage of Pin numbers
This is the street where my hotel for the night was situated, just a short walk from the Railway Station and all the coffee shops and bistros offering the public drinks and food and snacks .
I talked to quite a few people. Bangladeshis afraid of their status refused to speak English with me, but they couldnt speak French either and they softened when they realized I was not from the Immigration...A moroccan receptionist with whom i regaled about the food of Morocco..a half drunk french man who commented on my french skills..
25 companies around the world made semi conductor chips before Covid 19.
USA used to make 37% of the all the world's supply but now only 12 %.
Intel now does not have the most advanced technology in the USA now. Silicon valley started with Intel.
Steve Jobs moved the manufacture to Taiwan, TSMC, which manufactures the most advanced chips. This is the largest supplier of chips for American cars.
During the covid pandemic year, the production now has become limited to just four countries (or companies): Taiwan, USA, Singapore and Israel.
Mark Lu, the CEO of TSMC had this to say to the Americans: You have the capacity to produce so many more PhDs and scientists so make sure that a sizable portion go into fields of innovation such as Chip making!
It is of interest to note that nearly 80 per cent of the Graduate students in the STEM, at American Universities are from Asia, China has the largest number of graduate students. Remember a large number of Chinese students are also studying in other developed countries.
There is a glut of computer programmers and computer repair people, that just wouldn't cut it. Proportionately more R &D are done at the American affiliates in Israel.
Technology for the future is a global issue, we cannot just hold back the knowledge or the know how from each other. Share the knowledge, help with manufacture and distribution and also to share the huge profits these companies accumulate.
Today, Sunday 2 May 2021 Sixty Minutes, an investigative journalistic TV programme, had the above topic and also the one below.
Michael Lewis has written 14 books, most of them about people who saw things coming – crashes on Wall Street, the next great idea in Major League Baseball, the value of a left tackle in football. His new book, called "The Premonition," follows a group of doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming, and raced to sound the alarm. But this is not just a book about the past. The book itself is a premonition.
Lewis writes that at the beginning of the pandemic one of those people was Dr. Charity Dean, a disease control expert, and the assistant director of California's Department of Public Health. In January of 2020, Dean was alarmed when she saw images circulating on social media that appeared to show Chinese authorities welding apartment doors shut to keep residents indoors.
Dr. Charity Dean: And watching those videos on Twitter, 'cause I had no other source of information, I thought, 'They know something we don't and this is real.'
Michael Lewis: Charity, who thinks she's all alone, all alone in the world, aware in January that this pandemic is gonna sweep through the United States and nobody's doing anything about it, including her state government. And nobody will listen to her. And all of a sudden, she's introduced to the Wolverines. When she finds these people, it's, like, yeah, these are my people.
John Dickerson:(the interviewer) Who were the Wolverines?
Michael Lewis: The Wolverines were a group of seven doctors, all of whom at one point or another had worked in the White House together, and who stayed in contact and kind of helped the country navigate various, various previous disease outbreaks. But they weren't in the decision making apparatus in the U.S. government.
John Dickerson: Why are they called the Wolverines?
Michael Lewis: They're called the Wolverines because a fellow White House employee dubbed them so. It had some obscure reference to the film "Red Dawn."
Michael Lewis: …where these group of high school kids named the Wolverines go up and try to defeat the invading Russians.
John Dickerson: In other words, the Wolverines had to take things into their own hands 'cause there was nobody to stop the invading force.
Michael Lewis: That's right. They were a guerilla disease fighting operation.
John Dickerson: Because the people actually who were supposed to be fighting the disease weren't doing it.
Michael Lewis: Weren't doing it.
President Trump on January 22, 2020: We have it under control. It's going to be just fine.
In late January, as President Trump and the federal government publicly showed no urgency over the virus, Lewis writes that the Wolverines tried a work-around: getting the states to move. It's why the Wolverines recruited Charity Dean, hoping if she could push California to act, the federal response might quicken.
Michael Lewis: She asks one of them, 'Who's running the pandemic response?' And one of them says, 'Nobody's running the pandemic response. But to the degree that anybody's sort of running the pandemic response, we sort of are'
John Dickerson: This is fantastical, I think, to most Americans. Which is, they think there is something called the Centers for Disease Control. And there are big buildings in Washington that have Health and Human Services. Why did the Wolverines have to do what there are huge institutions designed to do?
Michael Lewis: That's a great question (laughter). That's a very good question, right?. In the first place, the Trump administration abdicated responsibility for running the for the federal government. He just walked away from that. He said, 'Governors, you're on your own.'
(the above from CBC)
It did not end there. As the death rate was mounting and the virus was vacationing in these Great USA with gusto, the CDC and some doctors in charge kowtowed to an ignorant administration bent propagating medications with no shown efficacy and a lackadaisical attitude (much like what is happening with Bolsanaro in Brasil and Modi in India )
CDC center for disease control was not helping as they did not know what to do. There was absolutely no testing. while the doctors in California and the Wolverines were worried about the onslaught, they had to find a way to test the people.
Joe De Risi
They built the lab in eight days. It could produce COVID test results in 24 hours and they offered its services for free to county public health offices across California, which is when DeRisi discovered how starved for resources public health offices were.
Joe DeRisi: We had a whole bunch of clinical results they were sending to a county. And we sent them by fax because that's how they officially receive results.
John Dickerson: Did you even have a fax machine?
Joe DeRisi: No. But we, we got curbside delivery at Best Buy and were able to buy a $300 fax machine. It was the first fax machine I'd seen in years. But the problem was, after we faxed these results, we got a call the next day sayin', 'Why did you only return half the results? 'We realized that their circa early '90s fax machine only had a page buffer that could hold about half the results we sent. So we literally went back to Best Buy, got another curbside delivery, and drove up a new fax machine up to that county public health office because they didn't have the budget to buy their own new one.
Michael Lewis: I chose my story, my characters, to dramatize those pockets of deficiency in our society so we could see them. Cause they saw them. I just followed the characters.
There were pockets of success. Charity Dean helped convince Governor Gavin Newsom to shut down California on March 19, the first state to do so.
California has registered 3.7 million COVID cases to date, not the 20 million once feared. Dean credits Carter Mecher's vision with giving her the courage to push. So does fellow-Wolverine Dr. Matt Hepburn, who ultimately led vaccine development for the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But still, nearly 600,000 Americans have died.
Michael Lewis: It's like a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose in the end. They're there to fight this pandemic and to save American lives. They don't appear to do it. But the little wrinkle on the end of it is you know they learned things that are gonna help us the next time around.
(sorry i couldnt get rid of the commercial on the following video, but Mr Lewis's words are worthwhile, forget the ridiculous advertisement.
The stories of each character's struggle to be heard highlight what Lewis says is a key point: public institutions are ill-equipped to move fast enough to handle a large-scale pandemic. His characters worry the country is still vulnerable.
John Dickerson: What connects them, the characters?
Michael Lewis: They love life. They realize how important it is. And they want to save it. And so they all have some, this emotional component of when they hear 600,000 Americans died. It's not just a number.
John Dickerson: Michael writes that all of you are motivated by your, your love of life. Do you agree with that characterization?
Dr. Carter Mecher: My training was in critical care medicine, so I operated ICUs. And in an ICU, what I got to see and what I got to witness was the final struggle for a lotta human beings. I got to see the last, last days, last weeks, last moments of a lot of people. And, you know, in sports they talk about, you know (emotional) – sorry. They talk about, like, you know, players leaving it all on the field. And you know when I would see these patients in the ICU, I would watch them in that struggle. And they left everything on the field, everything. And you know, my question for us is, almost 600,000 people in this country have left everything on the field. And the question is, have we?
(from CBC)
After watching the episodes I was visibly upset. Shouldnt Trump along with Bolsanaro and Modi be tried for Genocide, being responsible for the majority of Covid 19 deaths ?
When would the selfish capitalist style of USA become mellowed and think of the millions of its citizens who various reasons need protection? from their own elected officials?
When would the 100 million unvaccinated adults in USA will be enlightened that they cannot go on being a danger to their fellow citizens? I would warn the unvaccinated: as more and more people are protected, the virus will come looking for you! Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccine which are being rolled out in enough quantities have shown to have excellent protection.
Yesterday walking past two vaccination centres, sitting there empty, i felt such a pang in my heart from my brothers and sisters in Brazil and India.. People are concerned about USA because there seems to be a sizable portion of brain washed people, to whom you cannot leave the destiny of this country. Many of these clueless people admire and follow their brand of right wing politicians who were among the first to get the vaccinations when it became available, way back in December 2020. The majority of the Republican lawmakers FAIL to disclose their vaccination status but there is a strong feeling that a good proportion of them are vaccinated.
To those who are not vaccinated (without a sound medical exception), I want them to know that they do not love their neighbour as thyself as their religious teachers tell them and they also do not have the right to kill your neighbour.
As of 6 a.m. EDT May 1, a total of 103,422,555 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 31.2 percent of the country's population, according to the CDC's data.
Israel leads the world in vaccination rates with more than 60 percent of their adults vaccinated. Followed by UK, Bahrain, Kuwait UAE . Chile in our Americas, which gave us Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Salvador Allende has the highest rate of vaccination in Latin America, closely followed by Uruguay who gave us Jose Mujica, Benedetti and Galeano, is close behind. As expected, Bolsanaro's Brasil and Modi's India trail behind most other countries for their vaccination rates.
Today I remarked to my good friend Jose, as we were driving towards Palacio de Jugos for our Cortaditos : we are so lucky, Life is almost is at a normal level for us, even though both of us (vaccinated) had our masks on and maintained social distance from others at the cafe..
May all the people, all over the world, have the same FREEDOM!
PS. If you can watch today's 60 minutes on YOUTUBE, when it is uploaded on the platform, please do so. Tonight's show also included a lengthy interview with Secretary of State Blinken.
