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Comment by sonograph | Hacker News Reader

> This is pretty exciting news. Cuba has a long history of sending medical aid to other developing countries, and right now the vaccine timeline for a lot of poor African countries is really, really bad. If this pans out, it could save a lot of lives.

Does Cuba have the capacity to produce enough vaccines for those nations? That would be really surpising to me

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They'll probably be more likely to share enough technical know how that production elsewhere is possible.

I don't know the answer to that question, but since this is a protein vaccine it should at least be much easier to manufacture at scale.

Cuba is also known to train African doctors and return them back to Africa. They also helped South Africa during the apartheid regime

That has no relation to vaccine production at all.

It relates in terms of Cuba's attitude to international aid and the possibility of doing something similar with the vaccines.

It does. Cuba has strong international public health ties and is believed to be setting up production for the vaccine abroad.

I have never heard of this. The African National Congress (ANC), which fought against Apartheid for decades, had close ties with communist regimes in Angola and Mozambique. Those countries in turn had Cuban help in the fight against (South Africa-backed) right-wing rebels.

The South African government at the time was rabidly anti-communist -- think Eugene McCarthy and the red scare in the U.S. -- so I doubt they would have much to do with Cuba.

They helped South Africa, not the South African government, which was somewhat famously hostile to the majority of South Africans.

They also attacked French, and South Africans in Angola, btw, fyi

And then the apartheid croaked everywhere south of 17th parallel

I'll add another trivia: they also throw you in jail if you speak badly of the current regime, which btw doesn't allow free elections.

I think everyone already knows you go to jail in Cuba and most other authoritarian countries for speaking against the government.

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