The following are excerpts from an essay written by Cuban President Fidel Castro on July 17 directed to graduates of Cuba’s University of Information Sciences (UCI). The essay first appeared in Granma.
UCI opens its doors to young people from Cuba’s 169 municipalities. It is not grounded in the model of exclusion and competition among human beings which developed capitalist countries advocate.
Our world order appears to have been designed to foster the egoism, individualism and dehumanization of humanity.
 |
A Reuters press dispatch published on May 3, 2006, titled “African brain drain deprives Africa of vital talent,” reports that, in Africa, “it is estimated that some 20,000 skilled professionals are leaving the continent every year, depriving Africa of the doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers it needs to break a cycle of poverty and under-development.” …
“Brain drain deals a double blow to weak economies, which not only lose their best human resources and the money spent training them, but then have to pay an estimated $5.6 billion a year to employ expatriates.”
The phrase “brain drain” was coined in the 1960s, when the United States began to hoard UK doctors. In that case, one developed country dispossessed another; one emerged from the Second World War in 1944 with 80 percent of the world’s gold reserve in bullions, the other had been severely hit and deprived of its empire in the course of the war.
A World Bank report titled “International migration, remittances and the brain drain,” made public in October 2005, yielded the following results:
In the last 40 years, more than 1.2 million professionals from Latin America and the Caribbean have emigrated to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. An average of 70 scientists a day has emigrated from Latin America in the course of 40 years.
Of the 150 million people around the world involved in science and technology activities, 90 percent is concentrated in the seven most industrialized nations.
A number of countries, particularly small nations in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, have lost over 30 percent of their population with higher education as a result of migration. …
More than 70 percent of software programmers employed by the U.S. company Microsoft Corporation are from India and Latin America.
The intense migratory movements, from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union towards Western Europe and North America, which began following the collapse of the socialist block, are worthy of special mention.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) points out that the number of scientists and engineers who abandon their native countries and emigrate to industrialized nations is about one third of the number of those who stay in their native countries, something which significantly depletes indispensable human resource reserves. …
Between 1960 and 1990, the United States and Canada received more than one million professional immigrants and experts from Third World countries.
These figures are but a pale reflection of the tragedy.
In recent years, encouraging this type of emigration has become an official state policy in a number of North countries, which use incentives and procedures especially tailored to suit this end.
The American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act—approved by the US Congress in 2000—increased the temporary work visa (H-1B) allotment, from 65 thousand to 115 thousand in the 2000 fiscal year and then to 195 thousand for fiscal years 2001 through 2003. The aim of this increase in the visa cap was to encourage the entry into the United States of highly qualified immigrants who could occupy positions in the high-technology sector. …
This relentless plundering of brains in South countries dismantles and weakens programs aimed at training human capital, a resource which is needed to rise from the depths of underdevelopment. It is not limited to the transfer of capital; it also entails the import of grey matter, which nips a country’s nascent intelligence and future at the bud.
Between 1959 and 2004, Cuba has graduated 805,902 professionals, including medical doctors. The United States’ unjust policy towards our country has deprived us of 5.16 percent of the professionals who graduated under the Revolution.
However, not even the elite of immigrant workers enjoy work conditions and salaries like those of U.S. nationals. In order to avoid the complicated paperwork which U.S. labor legislation requires and reduce the costs of immigration procedures, the United States has gone as far as creating a software ship-factory which keeps highly-qualified slaves anchored in international waters, in a kind of assembly plant which produces all manner of digital devices. Project SeaCode consists of a ship, anchored more than three miles off the coast of California (international waters), with 600 Indian computer scientists on board, who work an uninterrupted 12 hour daily shift for four months out at sea.
The trend towards the privatization of knowledge and the internalization of scientific research companies subordinated to big capital has been creating a kind of “scientific apartheid,” which affects the vast majority of the world’s population. …
More and more people have access to the Internet each day—in July 9, 2007, the figure was almost 1.4 billion users. However, in many countries, including numerous developed ones, the people with no access to this service continue to be the majority. The digital gap spells dramatic differences, whereby part of humanity, fortunate and connected, has more information at its disposal than any generation before it ever had.
To have an idea of what this means, suffice it two compare two realities: while more than 70 percent of the population of the United States has access to the Internet, only 3 percent of Africa’s entire population has such access. Internet service providers are based in high-income countries, where a mere 16 percent of the world’s population lives. …
A society in which millions of human beings are considered superfluous, the brain drain of South countries constitutes a common practice and economic power and new technologies are wielded by only a handful of nations cannot be called human, not by a long shot. Overcoming this dilemma is as important for the destiny of humanity as mitigating the climate change crisis which scourges the planet, two problems which are completely interrelated.
