I really admire what Cuba has done in the last half century. They're a fairly resource poor island nation who were cut off suddenly from the trading partner who accounted for 85% of their trade. While they're constantly struggling financially, they have a huge rate of tertiary education, better female participation in the professional workforce than almost all nations, a decent happiness score and a now a better life expectancy than the richest nation in the world.

However, the creation of COVID vaccines was not difficult. COVID is not that dissimilar to a number of existing viruses which we already have vaccines for. The production of a simple vaccine is easy, but rounds of testing and approval take a long time. This is how come Cuba could create vaccines based on existing techniques with slight tweeks.