  Cuba is continuing attracting the attention of the international scientific
community for some important and unexpected achievements in applied science
such as health biotechnology. They represent outcomes of the 1959 decision of
Cuba to develop an advanced scientific system in order to address the most
urgent problems for the development of the country and to overcome the
condition of subalternity. This ambitious objective was tackled in a very
original way, making a broad and wide-ranging recourse to every effective
support and collaboration, with Soviet but also Western scientists and
institutions, in addition to a peculiar Cuban inventiveness. Indeed,
immediately after the revolution, Cuba developed an advanced and articulated
scientific system, and achieved a level of excellence in leading scientific
fields, like biotechnology, quite independently from the Soviet Union, which
was behind in this field. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early
1990s, that could have put the achievements of the Revolution at risk, posing
again the threat of subalternity, under an intentionally worsened American
embargo, did not change this trend: once more Cuba addressed this challenge
reconfirming the strategic choice of supporting its most advanced and
profitable scientific sectors, especially the capital-intensive and typically
American field of health biotechnologies. This strategy proved to be once again
a well-chosen course of action.

History and Philosophy of Physics