Medical assistance was an integral part of Cuban internationalist aid to the Algerian revolution from the beginning. In December 1961 a Cuban ship delivered weapons and ammunition to Algerian liberation forces fighting against French colonial troops. That same ship returned to Havana with wounded Algerian National Liberation Front combatants and children from refugee camps, most of whom were war orphans.

After Algeria won its independence in 1962, Cuba sent several volunteer medical teams to Algeria. It also provided weapons and troops to aid the young Algerian republic when it was threatened with military intervention by the imperialist-backed regime of King Hassan in Morocco.

The revolutionary government headed by Ahmed Ben Bella collaborated to aid revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America. On June 19, 1965, the workers and farmers government headed by Ben Bella was overthrown in a coup led by the Defense Minister Houari Boumédienne.

The experience Cuban doctors and soldiers gained in Algeria served them well as they fought and healed on other battlefields for African independence.

Copyright 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher and the author. http://www.uncpress.unc.edu
 

It was during Ben Bella’s visit that Fidel Castro thought of a way to continue his country’s aid to the Algerian revolution. A few hours after the prime minister’s departure, Castro delivered a speech at the opening of a medical school:

Most of the doctors in Algeria were French, and many have left the country. There are four million more Algerians than Cubans and they have been left a great many diseases by colonialism, but they have only a third—or even less—of the doctors we have. In terms of health care, their situation is truly tragic.

This is why I told the students that we need fifty doctors to volunteer to go to Algeria.

I am sure that there will be no lack of volunteers…Today we can send only fifty, but in eight or ten years who knows how many, and we will be helping our brothers…because the revolution has the right to reap the fruits that it has sown.

There was indeed no lack of volunteers. They were motivated by a spirit of adventure and, above all, by the desire to respond to Fidel’s appeal. “When Fidel spoke, we were moved,” remarked Sara Perelló, who was then a young doctor. “My mother told me: ‘We must help this muchacho [young man]’ (my mother called Fidel muchacho) ‘and those people.’” Perelló wrote a letter volunteering and handed it to the director of the hospital where she worked. A few days later she received a telegram telling her to see the minister of public health. She went and was accepted.

Time passed and nothing happened. “Then, all of a sudden, we were told that the medical mission had to leave for Algeria at once,” Dr. Manuel Cedeño recalls….The volunteers left on May 23, 1963 on a special flight of Cubana de Aviación. “None of us had a passport; we just had a sheet of paper from the Foreign Ministry,” remembers Dr. Angela Morejón. “ We didn’t even know how long we were going to stay,” adds Perelló, “or where [in Algeria] we were going, or anything at all.” Cuban officials knew little more. The two countries had not yet signed an agreement, and many important points (such as the duration of the mission) had yet to be decided….

The minister of public health, José Machado Ventura, led the group, which included twenty-nine doctors, three dentists, fifteen nurses, and eight medical technicians….“The majority,” wrote a journalist, “had only a hazy idea of what Algeria was like. They thought of deserts and palm trees; of beduins and the Foreign Legion; of French terrorists and Arab guerillas; of Ahmed Ben Bella and [French General Jacques] Massu; of bombs and Arab dances….But they were all agreed on one thing: it was a heroic country that had won its independence with its own blood. It was like Cuba. And Fidel Castro had said it needed their help.”

With the arrival of this medical mission in Algeria on May 24, Cuba’s technical assistance abroad began. It was an unusual gesture: an underdeveloped country tendering free aid to another in even more dire straits. It was offered at a time when the exodus of doctors from Cuba following the revolution had forced the government to stretch its resources while launching its domestic programs to increase mass access to health care. “It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew that the Algerian people needed it even more than we did and that they deserved it,” Machado Ventura remarked. It was an act of solidarity that brought no tangible benefit and came at real material cost.

“It was a special moment,” a member of the mission mused thirty years later, “because it was when this process of internationalist aid began…Nowadays when you say that you have been on a mission people understand what you mean; there is a history, a tradition. Back then there wasn’t any. We were taking a first step; we were launching out into the unknown.”

How truly unknown it was is described by Dr. Cedeño. “Before we left Cuba,” he recalls,

They gave us a lecture about Algeria at the Foreign Ministry; the speaker was the official in charge of North Africa. We wanted to know about the climate, about what kind of clothes to pack. He told us that Algeria was a tropical country and that we should take short-sleeved shirts. This was the full extent of our preparation! When we arrived in Algeria it was very cold…

The French and Algerian doctors looked at these strange newcomers from across the Atlantic with some suspicion. “They couldn’t understand why we weren’t charging for our services—it puzzled the Algerians, and the French even more,” Perelló remarked. “And we were doing a lot of things that the doctors there [in Algeria] didn’t do. The men [in our group] did their own washing and ironing. We didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have a car—so we walked everywhere! But the French and Algerian doctors drove their cars. And to make matters worse, we wanted to put in longer day than they did.”

The Cubans also found things that unsettled them. Coming from a society that had established free health care, some were shocked that in Algeria, the revolution notwithstanding, patients had to pay for examinations and drugs. And while machismo certainly existed in Cuba, many of the Cubans who went to Algeria were deeply troubled by the treatment of women there…

The first medical mission remained in Algeria for a little over a year, until a second arrived in June 1964 with twenty-four doctors, four dentists, twenty-four nurses, and nine medical technicians…The first mission, however, retains a special aura. Looking back some thirty years later, one member remarked:

“Our work there was extremely difficult in emotional terms. First, I found a country with habits and customs completely different from mine; an Arab country, Muslim, very different from our culture. Second, the different language—Arabic and some French. There were some unbelievable situations, like when we had to form a chain of translators just to understand what the patient was saying…There aren’t many things in life that you remember thirty years later with a feeling of pride and warmth. Now, with more than sixty years under my belt, I still remember my stay in Algeria as something good, something that helped me, something that made me the man I am today.”  
 
 
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