What Cubans call "the Special Period" produced one notable success: pharmaceuticals. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Cuba got so good at making knockoff drugs that a thriving industry took hold. Today the country is the largest medicine exporter in Latin America and has more than 50 nations on its client list. Cuban meds cost far less than their first-world counterparts, and Fidel Castro's government has helped China, Malaysia, India, and Iran set up their own factories: "south-to-south technology transfer."
Yet at the same time as they were selling generics, the science-heroes of the Cuban Revolution were inventing. Castro made biotechnology one of the building blocks of the economy, and that has opened the door - just a crack - to intellectual property. To date his researchers have been granted more than 100 patents, 26 of them in the US. Now they're setting their sights on the markets of the West.
After the 1959 revolution, Cuba made it a priority to find new ways to care for a poor population; part of the solution was training doctors and researchers. Cuba currently exports thousands of doctors to impoverished countries and caters to an influx of "health tourists," mostly rich Africans and Latin Americans seeking cheap, high-quality care.
Full: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/cuba.html>