With or without you: Cuba’s pharma revolution couldn’t wait.

I am grateful to Sergio Jorge Pastrana, until recently Cuba’s Ambassador in Barbados, for filling in some gaps in the story of the UN Industrial Development Organization’s involvement in Cuba’s pioneering pharmaceutical industry.

In the late 1970s, in order to minimize the impact of the US embargo, the Cuban government began its first investments in pharmaceutical production plants. A UNIDO project, beginning in 1978, enlisted the expertise of an Indian company, Sarabhai Chemicals, to help Cuba establish its first chemical synthesis plant for the production of generic pharmaceutical products.

At that time, Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro was determined to develop the country’s pharmaceutical sector, and deliver healthcare to the population.

Castro paid special attention to research into vaccines and treatments for fighting various cancers, and, in 1981, he set up six Cuban researchers in a small laboratory in a house in Havana. “He used to visit the scientists almost every day. He would often come by very late at night,” Merardo Pujol Ferrer, business development director for Heber Biotec, the marketing company for Cuban biotech products, told The Miami Herald.

In May 1981, the scientists harvested the first batch of leukocyte interferon, marking the beginning of Cuba’s efforts to develop its own biotechnology industry. Interferon didn’t turn out to be a cure for cancer as doctors had hoped, but did prove beneficial against dengue fever which broke out in Cuba in the 1980s. The small Havana lab was upgraded and became the Centre for Biological Research.

Biotech’s potential

At the beginning of the 1980s, across the world there was increasing recognition of the potential of biotechnology. A group of scientists, concerned about the wide gap in know-how between the developed and developing countries, recommended that UNIDO establish an international centre in a developing country to help close that gap.

At a meeting in Belgrade, in December 1982, interested countries enthusiastically endorsed UNIDO’s initiative to offer grant funding via a competitive application process to facilitate the creation of a biotechnology development centre

A committee of experts, coordinated by UNIDO, was tasked with visiting and assessing the suitability of the countries proposing to host the international centre: Belgium, Cuba, India, Italy, Pakistan and Thailand, spending 7-10 days in each country between March and May 1983.

A UNIDO-led delegation travelled to Havana in April. Sergio Jorge Pastrana was, at that time, head of the department of international cooperation at the Cuban Academy of Sciences, an institution with the rank of a Ministry, dealing with all of the country's scientific and technological activities. He was tasked with accompanying the delegation on site visits and was asked to translate when the delegation met President Castro.

What Castro told UNIDO

Pastrana recalls that during the meeting Castro said, “We have just started to build and, as we speak, the site is being prepared by heavy machinery...” He was interrupted by a UNIDO member of the delegation who said, “Comandante, the analysis is yet to be made. We will report soon and, in a month or so, the Board will decide about the site... Please, do not hurry.”

As Pastrana tells it, Castro answered, “It is OK, do not worry. If you decide that Havana will be your site, we will share the Centre with UNIDO. If not, it will be ours. Why hesitate and wait, when it is so urgently needed? The more centres we can have, as soon as possible, the better.”

Cuba goes ahead

A UNIDO meeting in Madrid in September 1983 agreed on setting up an International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology but could not reach agreement on its location. At that meeting, Cuba withdrew its application to host the centre and instead backed India’s bid. At the same time, it announced it was opening its own centre, which would doubtless cooperate with the UNIDO centre when it materialized.

Cuba’s Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), which absorbed the earlier-established Centre for Biological Research, opened on 1 July 1986, with around 300 employees. “This centre is big, but I hope the scientific results that are obtained will also be great,” said Castro at the opening ceremony.