While on the ground in Cuba, Breakthrough’s Rania Khalek sat down with Dr. Juan Jesús Luis Alemán. He is Deputy Director of the Moncada Clinic in Havana and a member of the Henry Reeve Brigade, a special medical mission the Cuban government dispatches to provide medical care free of charge in disaster zones.

The brigade began as a single unit after Bush turned down Fidel Castro’s offer to send Cuban doctors to New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Aleman has served in Guatemala, West Africa during the ebola epidemic and in Italy after one of the world’s first major covid outbreaks overwhelmed the country in 2020.