The agreement reflects the increasing politicization of the battle over AIDS drugs. Health ministers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, including India, Indonesia and Iran, on Tuesday also backed South Africa's legal battle against 39 pharmaceutical companies over the right to sidestep patents by importing generic drugs to fight the AIDS crisis. Challenging AIDS drug patents is fast emerging as the defining issue of a new Third World solidarity, although this time it's directed at improving their leverage in the world capitalist system rather than overthrowing it.
In many ways, the AIDS-drugs issue was tailor-made for Castro, a strongman who harbors both an epic hostility to capitalism and a developed pharmaceutical industry. The Cuban leader once revered among Third World revolutionaries has become a rather lonely ideologue in the post–Cold War years, as the Marxists of yesteryear made their peace with globalizing capitalism faster than you could say International Monetary Fund. But the AIDS crisis has spawned a battle in which even the most resolutely capitalist governments of the poverty-stricken developing world see themselves ranged against the patents and profits of giant pharmaceutical corporations.
Intellectual property is one of capitalism's more ethereal concepts, and has been known to arouse considerable skepticism in the developing world — particularly when Western corporations set out to "patent" traditional remedies used in those countries for centuries. And when it bumps up against a humanitarian crisis threatening the lives of millions of people, the sanctity of intellectual property is far from assured. While the U.S. may have managed for the most part to stamp out industrial-scale piracy of CDs and movies in the developing world, life-saving medicines are another matter. Companies in India and Brazil, for example, have copied AIDS treatments and distributed them in the developing world at a fraction of the cost charged in the West for the brand-name product. Whatever the outcome of the resulting disputes in the courts and at the World Trade Organization, the moral weight of life-saving necessity may have already won the case in the court of public opinion. Indeed, some pharmaceutical companies have agreed either to supply the drugs at no profit, or to waive their patent rights to allow the production of generics. Even then, the court battles continue.
The danger for the pharmaceutical industry, of course, is that the battle over AIDS drugs has fashioned a new solidarity among Third World governments, which, despite their capitalist orientation, seek to challenge the terms of trade with the industrialized world. And that's a battle the Quixotic old warrior in Havana is only too willing to join.