The first members of a team of Cuban doctors and health workers unload boxes of medicines and medical material at the Freetown airport; Sierra Leone; October 2, 2014. (FLORIAN PLAUCHEUR / AFP / GETTY)

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ven in this age of international coalitions, the one arrayed against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is impressive. In September, more than a hundred and thirty nations voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring the virus, which is rampant in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, a threat to international security and creating the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, or UNMEER, devoted to fighting the virus. The mission was put under the control of Anthony Banbury, a veteran U.N. troubleshooter, who hoped to tackle the job without the red tape that often bogs down U.N. missions. Within a week, Banbury had assembled a team of international experts, selected from thousands volunteers from the U.N.’s myriad agencies, and headed off to kick-start operations at his new field headquarters, in Accra, Ghana.

President Obama has also made Ebola a top priority, ordering sixty-five health professionals, supported by nearly four thousand U.S. troops, to Liberia to help oversee the construction of eighteen mobile health clinics there. The United Kingdom has undertaken a similar initiative, dispatching seven hundred and fifty troops and medical teams to Sierra Leone, a former British colony. Other countries, including Japan and India, have made donations of money, equipment, and small teams of medical personnel. Last week, after coming under criticism for not doing more, China announced that it will send its own sizeable military contingent and medical corps to the region.

Cuba’s outsize gesture in West Africa has not gone unnoticed, and may pave the way for the start of some Ebola diplomacy between Havana and Washington. On October 19th, Secretary of State John Kerry named Cuba as a nation that had made an “impressive” effort in the anti-Ebola campaign. Ten days later, following a Havana conference on Ebola that was attended by two American officials representing the C.D.C., in a highly unusual break with procedure between the two nations, which do not have normal diplomatic relations, Raúl Castro said, pointedly, “Cuba is willing to work side by side with all nations, including the U.S., in the fight against Ebola.” Returning on Friday from her own fact-finding tour of the Ebola-struck countries, the U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power also pointedly praised the Cuban mission.

The Ebola diplomacy follows a friendly handshake that Raul Castro and President Obama exchanged at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa, last December, and has added to anticipation that the Obama Administration may seek to finally lift the remaining restrictions in the United States’ trade embargo against Cuba. The embargo has been in place for forty-three years; removing it would pave the way for a full restoration of diplomatic relations. (Thanks to the Helms Burton Act, which Clinton signed into law, entirely lifting the embargo requires an act of Congress. But Obama can apparently scrap most of its provisions by executive order.) The Times editorial page has twice in the past month called for a lifting of the embargo, citing Cuba’s Ebola initiatives in its second piece. On Tuesday, and not for the first time, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo against Cuba. This time, the vote count was a hundred and eighty-eight to two. Speaking at a conference called “Cuba in Transition” that was held at Columbia University in mid-October, Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer and former White House counsel, pointed out that the time for Obama to move on Cuba was coming up very soon, or not at all. He said that the ideal time to do so would be after the U.S. midterm elections, thus minimizing any domestic political fallout, and before the Summit of the Americas, a meeting of the hemisphere’s leaders that is convened every three years, and which will be held in April, in Panama. Both Obama and Raul Castro—who has been invited at the insistence of the other leaders, in an unprecedented vote at the last, summit in 2012, have already said that they will attend. If Obama and Raúl Castro do meet there, it will be the first time in more than half a century that an American leader and a Cuban leader have sat down at the same table across from each other. At Columbia, Craig said his advice to Obama was simple: “Just do it.”

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JON LEE ANDERSON is a staff writer for the The New Yorker who began contributing in 1998. Since then, he has covered numerous conflicts for the magazine, including those in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia. He has also reported frequently from Latin America and the Caribbean, writing about Rio de Janeiro’s gangs, the Panama Canal, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and a Caracas slum, among other subjects, and has written Profiles of Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Gabriel García Márquez. He is the author of several books, including “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan,” “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” “Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World,” and “The Fall of Baghdad.” He is the co-author, with Scott Anderson, of “War Zones: Voices from the World’s Killing Grounds” and “Inside the League.” He has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, and in 2013 he was honored with a Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean. He began his career in 1979, reporting for an English-language weekly in Lima, Peru, and now regularly teaches workshops for Latin-American reporters.

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO OUR PERIODICAL BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES.