In response to Hurricane Mitch (1998) in Central America, which claimed over 30,000 lives, Cuba sent medical brigades to the affected region and constructed the Latin American School of Medicine just outside Havana. This medical school offers a free six-year medical education to students from rural and marginalized communities in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States. This establishment is a logical continuation of a long-standing tradition of Cuban medical internationalism that emphasizes investment in human capital. This is a progressive movement not just in foreign policy but also in community medicine that has an important place in dialogues about capacity building and human security strategies for the twenty-first century.

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This article explores how the concepts of 'food security' and 'human security' build common language between action-based researchers and policy-makers for effective knowledge translation. Both concepts are important examples of how research can inform policy aimed at social justice. While human security is still building a sense of itself, the concept of food security demonstrates how broader issues can be excluded from the common language and how this limits dialogue. In the process of building common language between researchers and policy-makers, the agreed definition of food security excluded many important issues. As a result, the excluded, more radical issues have been pursued by off-shoot movements that do less to directly engage the policy-making process. Human security is a similar concept that is at risk of abandoning its radical origins in order to be considered workable by policy-makers and academics alike. I argue that social justice theorization must maintain the audacity to envision radical improvements to the human condition, albeit pursuing working definitions for policy-makers. Social justice and action-based research should not shy away from theory that seeks to overcome inequity and injustice; it should work to meet the needs of people rather than meet the needs of existing policy-making technocracy.

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