Cuba is winning accolades for its international “doctor diplomacy,” in which it sends temporary medical professionals abroad—ostensibly to help poor countries battle disease and improve health care. But the doctors are not a gift from Cuba. 

On September 12th, President Raúl Castro’s health minister announced that Cuba would send nearly five hundred health-care professionals to West Africa.(...)No other country, to date, has contributed as many trained health-care professionals to the Ebola crisis as Cuba has. 

After being expelled from numerous Latin American countries for dubious activity, the United States organization USAID has developed a reputation of an organization that while providing aid is also developing ways to undermine governments in a number of the continent’s countries.

Foreign policy experts are saying that the back-and-forth is demonstrative of how public health issues are building bridges between countries that have a history of being at odds with one another. 

Cuba is offering to throw the entire weight of its international medical mission at stopping the spread of Ebola and avoiding— in the words of Raul Castro— “a humanitarian crisis of unpredictable consequences.”

Today, as the world is going through one of the sharpest crises of international relations in recent years, the Cuban missile crisis — or, as Russians call it, "the Caribbean crisis" — may help us understand some very important things. The most pertinent of these is the escape from "historical inevitability."

After 20 years working to promote academic and cultural exchanges with Cuba, I would not have imagined that in 2014 the U.S. embargo would still be so solidly in place.  It’s high time for President Obama to exercise his executive authority to make changes toward normalization of relations with Cuba.