Por Macdonald Stainsby
.jpeg) |
During the same historical period that the United States has targeted Cuba with blockades that last for decades– and now a full blown naval blockade of all energy to Cuba in hopes of collapsing the society at large– Cuba has instead targeted medical cures for stage four lung cancer, radical improvements in diabetic treatments, several Cuban developed vaccines for Covid19 to work around the medical blockade of the island, and most personally for me, improving dementia in general and Alzheimer’s (as well as Parkinson’s) in particular.
Cuba made a turn towards research and development of new medical treatments and other scientific breakthroughs in health during the hard days of the Special Period that followed the dissolution of the USSR and corresponding trade deals. It has borne the most heartening advances in treating the most painful of conditions.
Trying to involve myself in solidarity with Cuba at this moment of extreme US interference and imposed suffering already, accepting the chance to meet and learn from top researchers and scientists about such remarkable stories of hope was an easy decision.
I was my mother’s caregiver when she developed and lived with vascular dementia for almost a decade beyond her independence. Like other caregivers, it profoundly shaped my psyché, my way of seeing the world and my understanding of human values. So too has my time in Cuba over ten visits during the last 27 years.
Researching their breakthroughs showed me incredible data– 84% of those patients on a trial (of over 3 years) have either had their symptoms stabilize (stop declining) or improve, with 54 of the 84% in the improvement category.
Being shown this, in the clearly loved and prioritized medical research facility Centro Immunologico Molecular by teams of almost exclusively women (the top scientists in Cuba are 80% women) helped me understand intellectually– and 9 times out of 10, that’s exactly what I’m going for.
The pie charts used to explain things with the advent of yet another PowerPoint presentation? It worked; I was able to understand enough from my non-scientific perspective to extol the virtues of this treatment to others in a similar boat.
But that’s where my investigation was lacking, and I needed more. I am not a researcher, but even after death, once one becomes a caregiver to someone with dementia? You stay that way forever. That’s the primary lens that the world is seen through.
With or without NeuralCIM, Cuba has always shown rhetorical and real-world priority towards elders and others who are more vulnerable. But I can’t really internalize the effectiveness of the ‘Magic Drops’ without talking to those people who live it.
By live it, I don’t mean the elder or loved one who has been afflicted with dementia. I mean the family, the caregivers, the people around them who see every little tiny variance in their behaviour.
When you are a caregiver, you not only mentally plot their decline, you memorize immediately what just happened prior when something goes better than anticipated. When a bit more of the personality of the individual you look after shows up, however briefly, you examine the music, the room temperature, the food, the drink, medications, company, lighting– all of it. Surely, something that just happened helped that moment exist?
This is the life of a caregiver: you lose track of yourself and become their stand-in. You are a bodyguard, yes… but you are also a brainguard and a heartguard.
So in June, when I returned to Cuba to further research NeuralCIM and bring supplies to assist civilian survival during this oil blockade, what I needed the most was a chance to speak to other caregivers. The family members who live with the patients who are now months or years into taking the medication that slows, stops, and sometimes reverses dementia itself.
For example, I simply cannot trust the second-hand statements of a doctor—or even a scientist– about whether or not the drug reduces stress. Sure, they can explain to me how the ‘monoclonal antibodies’ are being targeted. If they explain it slow enough, I can fake understanding what that means long enough to get out of the uncomfortable moment. But they simply can’t tell me what it’s like to see someone who fought about everything from meals to medications re-learn that they are actually safe and okay, and be able to calm down.
When the test scores around competence return to scores of well above 25 out of 30 on the “mini-mental ” (I, through lessons from experts with long degrees), can understand that means that legally they are able to look after themselves, but when someone who had lost their job goes back to work and is able to be productive and plan a future again? That’s what I emotionally understand, as that is beyond a dream through all of the years of memory markers in caring for my mother.
So when I interview caregivers who say:
“Well, before she started the treatment, I didn’t realise that months earlier she had been getting aggressive. We went to the house with my husband. After she started the treatment, after a couple of months, I noticed that it hadn’t happened again; she has remained stable.”
What I hear from them is great hope. Those were the words of a daughter whose mother had declined to the point of fighting over meals, medication, clothing changes, and more. In other words, someone I understood instinctively.
When a person tries to think, and it doesn’t work, anxiety becomes all-consuming, and this is where the fights between caregivers and those looked after begin. If you can’t understand the need for changing your clothes, you only know that someone is trying to forcibly take them off you, and no sweet-sounding words will change that. The mere dream of gaining stability– no further declines, and a chance to adjust within your current mind– was something too grand, too far into dreamworld to even entertain.
See, I can’t give the terms that are “clinically used,” for example it wasn’t until many years after my mother had been living with me I learned that when many people with dementia, placed in unfamiliar surroundings, will try to go home. The ‘experts’ want me to call it “exit seeking” but I bristle. This doesn’t happen at home, so it’s not mere exits being sought. They are trying to go home.
Dealing with the conflict that arises when an elder has a conviction of an incorrect moment is enough– no joke here– stress to help provoke dementia later in life for the caregiver. So for someone who had previously become aggressive and unable to be alone, to move towards this:
“There are things that sometimes she doesn’t remember, where I put this, where I put that. Well, now, for example, we have a small café in the house, and I know that I cannot leave her in charge, neither selling nor anything like that.
But, well, I say to her: ‘Look, here you have a notebook, you have a pencil. If a neighbour comes looking for something, you tell them to write it down there, and then when I come back…’
Do you understand?
So that if she forgets, she already has it written down there. Because I know that at some point she is going to forget something.”
This type of thing– using mental tricks like leaving yourself notes– is something I am familiar with as someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to just get through a day, but more importantly, as a caregiver, it is something I tried to do from the first day my mother came home. I had made plans for the telephone company to come over to our home and make installations.
Mom was relaxing in the bedroom, one she knew well. I explained to her multiple times that someone was coming over, and that this note was for them, and to please have them call me if there was an issue and so on. I discussed it with her multiple times. I even got her to say back to me what was going to happen, and then a friend and I went to finish putting other items into storage.
I received a call about an hour later, from the phone company telling me that the woman (my mother) who answered the door was completely convinced that no one was coming, was uninterested in the various explanations going on, and that my friend had to apologize to the worker and rush back to the apartment.
Without the possibility of NeuralCIM types of intervention, this was the first in a line of shocking moments where things went horribly wrong, and stress-filled anxiety took over the home.
My ADHD and stress-addled mind had trouble recalling things for my own life, and now had to remember everything for two entire lives.
Even right from the beginning, being able to deal with the little gaps in between safe and dangerous as a team would have been a transformational gift for the home.
I also spoke with another caregiver, this time of her husband. I asked her how they got involved with NeuralCIM, and why.
“They started doing all the studies on him because I brought him here because I saw that anomaly. In 2024 [two years prior to this interview] they started doing a study, a deep neurological study, MRIs, a lumbar puncture, quite a few tests. And that was when his state was seen, and that is why I see the improvement he has had, because I see that he is maintaining it.”
“Well, he remains as I brought him. I observe that he has never completely lost his mind. Because I brought him here when he was always saying: “I forgot this”, “I forgot that”, “where did I leave it?”.
At the moment, he says: “oh, I forgot,” “let’s go and look for it”. And he finds it.
He continues doing his blacksmithing work, because he is a blacksmith; People still come to look for him, and he still does jobs. He knows who I am, he hasn’t lost his mind, he recognises me. We have our dialogues, our conversations.
There are times when he says to me: “No, why you?”, and I say to him: “No, because I…” normal marriage things. And well, I see that he has maintained his state, that he has had a small improvement, but you could say it is stable. It is stable. He is stable. I don’t see anything else out of the ordinary. He is stable.”
Two years of being able to maintain doing work, going out into the community, remembering the person you married, and so on. These descriptions, revealed to me matter-of-factly, are the baseline of a miracle. To be many years into Alzheimer’s and yet be able to maintain such relations with the society you live in is precisely what caregivers like myself were cautioned to never dream of.
“No matter how well you take care of them, they will keep getting worse.” This is the mantra given to the caregiver at the outset of the journey. It’s a mercy to try and stop you from believing in false miracles. But, thanks to these discoveries, they are no longer false.
So the procedure to get the NeuralCIM treatment must be cumbersome, complicated, and take place in a sterile office several times a week, right? If you took your loved one to Cuba– especially given the current oil blockade of the country– you’d be forced to stay there and make a go of life while the United States is starving the country of basic needs?
“At the moment, through Cuban Medical Services, there are two sites where patients can go. In other words, patients outside of Cuba can go there with the aim of inquiring about the treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (mild or moderate), which is what the use of NeuralCIM is indicated for. These are La Pradera, which is an international health centre, and CIREN, or the International Centre for Neurological Restoration, which is also a centre that has this— this possibility [in western Havana– MS].”
“So there are the two centres for the attention for non-Cuban people. So you can do the procedures via the website, and we will send you the procedure for that, perhaps. And you can be in communication with doctors, and get the orientation for that.”
I asked specifically about international patients– people like my mother ten years ago, what would she need someone like me to do for her?
“Also about the possibility of receiving treatment with NeuralCIM through the commercial department. Which is another route. Because the intention is also to try to expand a little the possibility of other sites being able to provide the treatment with NeuralCIM. Other sites in Cuba that have that possibility, right? To provide service internationally.”
In July of 2026, Marco Rubio and the US regime took direct aim at the Cuban medical system itself. Along with the decades-old lies calling the Cuban doctors who work in other countries serving people in conditions most Western doctors would never endure, Cuba also offers some of these types of medical interventions unavailable elsewhere to international patients. While, unlike for Cuban citizens, it is not free, it most certainly is cost-effective and does two things: It provides hope for families in the most heartbreaking situations, and it provides capital for the population of Cuba to secure needed food, medicines, and multiple other resources.
This is why the US government targets the Cuban medical system itself. For most of us, myself included, this means our needed efforts are to bring much-needed resources into the country and help civilians survive this brutal siege. For family members who desperately need the hope and treatments that Cuba is now offering?
They need to be able to travel to the country, visit with the experts at La Padera, and to begin the process that allows their elders to see them in the eye, recognize them, and say “Thank you.” And we thank Cuba by helping them feed their children, hydrate their elders, and defend their independence.
Macdonald Stainsby is a writer on social justice, a caregiver and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to a better world. His Substack is at: https://substack.com/@macdonaldstainsby and you can reach him at mstainsby@resist.ca
Cuba made a turn towards research and development of new medical treatments and other scientific breakthroughs in health during the hard days of the Special Period that followed the dissolution of the USSR and corresponding trade deals. It has borne the most heartening advances in treating the most painful of conditions.
Trying to involve myself in solidarity with Cuba at this moment of extreme US interference and imposed suffering already, accepting the chance to meet and learn from top researchers and scientists about such remarkable stories of hope was an easy decision.
I was my mother’s caregiver when she developed and lived with vascular dementia for almost a decade beyond her independence. Like other caregivers, it profoundly shaped my psyché, my way of seeing the world and my understanding of human values. So too has my time in Cuba over ten visits during the last 27 years.
Researching their breakthroughs showed me incredible data– 84% of those patients on a trial (of over 3 years) have either had their symptoms stabilize (stop declining) or improve, with 54 of the 84% in the improvement category.
Being shown this, in the clearly loved and prioritized medical research facility Centro Immunologico Molecular by teams of almost exclusively women (the top scientists in Cuba are 80% women) helped me understand intellectually– and 9 times out of 10, that’s exactly what I’m going for.
The pie charts used to explain things with the advent of yet another PowerPoint presentation? It worked; I was able to understand enough from my non-scientific perspective to extol the virtues of this treatment to others in a similar boat.
But that’s where my investigation was lacking, and I needed more. I am not a researcher, but even after death, once one becomes a caregiver to someone with dementia? You stay that way forever. That’s the primary lens that the world is seen through.
With or without NeuralCIM, Cuba has always shown rhetorical and real-world priority towards elders and others who are more vulnerable. But I can’t really internalize the effectiveness of the ‘Magic Drops’ without talking to those people who live it.
By live it, I don’t mean the elder or loved one who has been afflicted with dementia. I mean the family, the caregivers, the people around them who see every little tiny variance in their behaviour.
When you are a caregiver, you not only mentally plot their decline, you memorize immediately what just happened prior when something goes better than anticipated. When a bit more of the personality of the individual you look after shows up, however briefly, you examine the music, the room temperature, the food, the drink, medications, company, lighting– all of it. Surely, something that just happened helped that moment exist?
This is the life of a caregiver: you lose track of yourself and become their stand-in. You are a bodyguard, yes… but you are also a brainguard and a heartguard.
So in June, when I returned to Cuba to further research NeuralCIM and bring supplies to assist civilian survival during this oil blockade, what I needed the most was a chance to speak to other caregivers. The family members who live with the patients who are now months or years into taking the medication that slows, stops, and sometimes reverses dementia itself.
For example, I simply cannot trust the second-hand statements of a doctor—or even a scientist– about whether or not the drug reduces stress. Sure, they can explain to me how the ‘monoclonal antibodies’ are being targeted. If they explain it slow enough, I can fake understanding what that means long enough to get out of the uncomfortable moment. But they simply can’t tell me what it’s like to see someone who fought about everything from meals to medications re-learn that they are actually safe and okay, and be able to calm down.
When the test scores around competence return to scores of well above 25 out of 30 on the “mini-mental ” (I, through lessons from experts with long degrees), can understand that means that legally they are able to look after themselves, but when someone who had lost their job goes back to work and is able to be productive and plan a future again? That’s what I emotionally understand, as that is beyond a dream through all of the years of memory markers in caring for my mother.
So when I interview caregivers who say:
“Well, before she started the treatment, I didn’t realise that months earlier she had been getting aggressive. We went to the house with my husband. After she started the treatment, after a couple of months, I noticed that it hadn’t happened again; she has remained stable.”
What I hear from them is great hope. Those were the words of a daughter whose mother had declined to the point of fighting over meals, medication, clothing changes, and more. In other words, someone I understood instinctively.
When a person tries to think, and it doesn’t work, anxiety becomes all-consuming, and this is where the fights between caregivers and those looked after begin. If you can’t understand the need for changing your clothes, you only know that someone is trying to forcibly take them off you, and no sweet-sounding words will change that. The mere dream of gaining stability– no further declines, and a chance to adjust within your current mind– was something too grand, too far into dreamworld to even entertain.
See, I can’t give the terms that are “clinically used,” for example it wasn’t until many years after my mother had been living with me I learned that when many people with dementia, placed in unfamiliar surroundings, will try to go home. The ‘experts’ want me to call it “exit seeking” but I bristle. This doesn’t happen at home, so it’s not mere exits being sought. They are trying to go home.
Dealing with the conflict that arises when an elder has a conviction of an incorrect moment is enough– no joke here– stress to help provoke dementia later in life for the caregiver. So for someone who had previously become aggressive and unable to be alone, to move towards this:
“There are things that sometimes she doesn’t remember, where I put this, where I put that. Well, now, for example, we have a small café in the house, and I know that I cannot leave her in charge, neither selling nor anything like that.
But, well, I say to her: ‘Look, here you have a notebook, you have a pencil. If a neighbour comes looking for something, you tell them to write it down there, and then when I come back…’
Do you understand?
So that if she forgets, she already has it written down there. Because I know that at some point she is going to forget something.”
This type of thing– using mental tricks like leaving yourself notes– is something I am familiar with as someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to just get through a day, but more importantly, as a caregiver, it is something I tried to do from the first day my mother came home. I had made plans for the telephone company to come over to our home and make installations.
Mom was relaxing in the bedroom, one she knew well. I explained to her multiple times that someone was coming over, and that this note was for them, and to please have them call me if there was an issue and so on. I discussed it with her multiple times. I even got her to say back to me what was going to happen, and then a friend and I went to finish putting other items into storage.
I received a call about an hour later, from the phone company telling me that the woman (my mother) who answered the door was completely convinced that no one was coming, was uninterested in the various explanations going on, and that my friend had to apologize to the worker and rush back to the apartment.
Without the possibility of NeuralCIM types of intervention, this was the first in a line of shocking moments where things went horribly wrong, and stress-filled anxiety took over the home.
My ADHD and stress-addled mind had trouble recalling things for my own life, and now had to remember everything for two entire lives.
Even right from the beginning, being able to deal with the little gaps in between safe and dangerous as a team would have been a transformational gift for the home.
I also spoke with another caregiver, this time of her husband. I asked her how they got involved with NeuralCIM, and why.
“They started doing all the studies on him because I brought him here because I saw that anomaly. In 2024 [two years prior to this interview] they started doing a study, a deep neurological study, MRIs, a lumbar puncture, quite a few tests. And that was when his state was seen, and that is why I see the improvement he has had, because I see that he is maintaining it.”
“Well, he remains as I brought him. I observe that he has never completely lost his mind. Because I brought him here when he was always saying: “I forgot this”, “I forgot that”, “where did I leave it?”.
At the moment, he says: “oh, I forgot,” “let’s go and look for it”. And he finds it.
He continues doing his blacksmithing work, because he is a blacksmith; People still come to look for him, and he still does jobs. He knows who I am, he hasn’t lost his mind, he recognises me. We have our dialogues, our conversations.
There are times when he says to me: “No, why you?”, and I say to him: “No, because I…” normal marriage things. And well, I see that he has maintained his state, that he has had a small improvement, but you could say it is stable. It is stable. He is stable. I don’t see anything else out of the ordinary. He is stable.”
Two years of being able to maintain doing work, going out into the community, remembering the person you married, and so on. These descriptions, revealed to me matter-of-factly, are the baseline of a miracle. To be many years into Alzheimer’s and yet be able to maintain such relations with the society you live in is precisely what caregivers like myself were cautioned to never dream of.
“No matter how well you take care of them, they will keep getting worse.” This is the mantra given to the caregiver at the outset of the journey. It’s a mercy to try and stop you from believing in false miracles. But, thanks to these discoveries, they are no longer false.
So the procedure to get the NeuralCIM treatment must be cumbersome, complicated, and take place in a sterile office several times a week, right? If you took your loved one to Cuba– especially given the current oil blockade of the country– you’d be forced to stay there and make a go of life while the United States is starving the country of basic needs?
“At the moment, through Cuban Medical Services, there are two sites where patients can go. In other words, patients outside of Cuba can go there with the aim of inquiring about the treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (mild or moderate), which is what the use of NeuralCIM is indicated for. These are La Pradera, which is an international health centre, and CIREN, or the International Centre for Neurological Restoration, which is also a centre that has this— this possibility [in western Havana– MS].”
“So there are the two centres for the attention for non-Cuban people. So you can do the procedures via the website, and we will send you the procedure for that, perhaps. And you can be in communication with doctors, and get the orientation for that.”
I asked specifically about international patients– people like my mother ten years ago, what would she need someone like me to do for her?
“Also about the possibility of receiving treatment with NeuralCIM through the commercial department. Which is another route. Because the intention is also to try to expand a little the possibility of other sites being able to provide the treatment with NeuralCIM. Other sites in Cuba that have that possibility, right? To provide service internationally.”
In July of 2026, Marco Rubio and the US regime took direct aim at the Cuban medical system itself. Along with the decades-old lies calling the Cuban doctors who work in other countries serving people in conditions most Western doctors would never endure, Cuba also offers some of these types of medical interventions unavailable elsewhere to international patients. While, unlike for Cuban citizens, it is not free, it most certainly is cost-effective and does two things: It provides hope for families in the most heartbreaking situations, and it provides capital for the population of Cuba to secure needed food, medicines, and multiple other resources.
This is why the US government targets the Cuban medical system itself. For most of us, myself included, this means our needed efforts are to bring much-needed resources into the country and help civilians survive this brutal siege. For family members who desperately need the hope and treatments that Cuba is now offering?
They need to be able to travel to the country, visit with the experts at La Padera, and to begin the process that allows their elders to see them in the eye, recognize them, and say “Thank you.” And we thank Cuba by helping them feed their children, hydrate their elders, and defend their independence.
Macdonald Stainsby is a writer on social justice, a caregiver and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to a better world. His Substack is at: https://substack.com/@macdonaldstainsby and you can reach him at mstainsby@resist.ca
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário