Teresita’s Dream: Cuba’s Battle Against Alzheimer’s is a modest film about a drug for Alzheimer’s disease that breaks new ground in more than one respect. First of all, because the drug has been developed in Cuba, which is no mean feat. Second, because of its own unusual character as a documentary about the development of a drug.
Produced by Belly of the Beast, a Cuban-US media collective, Teresita’s Dream is narrated by Dr Teresita Rodríguez Obaya, a biotech research scientist whose mother suffered from Alzheimer’s. She has been instrumental in developing the new treatment and gives us her own story of the how and why.
I found this to be a heartening story, which brings together my long-standing involvement with Cuba and my more recent concern with Alzheimer’s, after first a cousin and then my brother were afflicted by the disease.
The big pharmaceutical firms in the Global North have spent billions of dollars over several decades trying to develop drugs for Alzheimer’s, with only limited success. Cuba, which is prevented by the blockade from accessing US drugs, set up its own biotechnology institute in the 1980s. Despite the constraints it is under, it has since produced successful vaccines for various cancers, meningitis, and hepatitis B, not to mention COVID-19.
The big pharmaceutical firms in the Global North have spent billions of dollars trying to develop drugs for Alzheimer’s, with only limited success.
I first learned about the initiative soon after it was set up. During a break in filming a report on Cuba for Britain’s…
Auteur: Michael Chanan
