Vol. 78/No. 37      October 20, 2014

Below is an excerpt from Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa by Mary-Alice Waters and Martín Koppel. Reporting from Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa, the authors focus on the social transformations unfolding as revenues from offshore oil extraction are used to build infrastructure on which rising productivity, industry and progress depend. Pulled into the world market as never before, both a capitalist class and a working class are being born. This piece highlights the work of volunteer Cuban medical brigades there as the living example of Cuba’s socialist revolution. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARTIN KOPPEL
AND MARY-ALICE WATERS 
At the end of our two-week tour, [Dr. Juan Carlos] Méndez and [Dr. Tebelio] Concepción took time from their busy work schedules with the medical brigades posted throughout the country and at the school in Bata to tell us a little more about the work Cuban volunteers are carrying out.

The medical cooperation between the Cuban and Guinean governments, they emphasized, aims to train Equatorial Guinean doctors and nurses who will work to transform public health care in their country. This is a principle guiding all Cuba’s medical missions in every country where they are invited to work, they noted.

To accomplish this goal, Méndez said, “we are committed to stay as long as necessary.”

Such medical collaboration is an expression of the proletarian internationalist course that has marked Cuba’s socialist revolution for half a century. …

That tens of thousands of Cuban medical personnel are today providing health care in the most hard-to-reach parts of countries the world over is one of the most demonstrative expressions of the socialist character of the revolution that Cuban workers and farmers carried out, overturning capitalist property relations and transforming the consciousness of millions. No other country in the world is capable of anything remotely comparable, nor does any other government want to do so.

As Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, himself a physician, explained and demonstrated by his own example, “To be a revolutionary doctor, you must first make a revolution.” In Cuba not only has health care — an expensive commodity under capitalism — become free and available to all as a basic right, but those who become medical workers are educated in that spirit.

As of 2008, more than 38,000 Cuban doctors, dentists, nurses, and medical technicians are working as volunteers in 73 countries, according to Cuba’s Ministry of Health. That includes 1,500 medical personnel in 35 African countries. Cuban personnel are responsible for medical schools not only in Equatorial Guinea but in Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Eritrea. …

Conquests of Cuban Revolution

Some had previously served in Angola, Iraq, Western Sahara, Ethiopia, or other countries — one was on her fourth internationalist assignment. For most of them, however, it was their first time living and working outside Cuba. While they vary widely in age and work experience, most are in their forties or early fifties.

“Here we discovered a reality we ourselves had never encountered in Cuba,” said Dr. Laura Cobo. “We’ve seen preventable diseases we had previously only read about in books. We’ve seen children dying of malaria or dying of hunger.” Some of the doctors noted that many diseases common in Equatorial Guinea had ravaged working people in Cuba as well, before the socialist revolution triumphed in the early 1960s and began transforming social relations. Even the oldest of the brigade members, however, are generally too young to have experienced those capitalist conditions firsthand.

In Equatorial Guinea, Cobo said, Cuban medical personnel often treat patients for polio. “In our country it’s been years since we’ve seen a case of polio. In Cuba children receive thirteen vaccinations in their first year.”

One of the hardest experiences here, several doctors told us, was seeing children with malaria or other curable illnesses who were brought to the hospital too late to be successfully treated and died. At the same time, Dr. William Pérez added, “there are cases of children in critical condition who, despite our limited resources, we are able to restore to health. That gives us tremendous satisfaction.”

Dr. Rubén Romero told us he has been teaching in Bata two years. “This medical school is a big step forward. Now the third class of students is graduating,” he said. “We can begin to see the fruits of our labor.”

Cobo said the hardest thing she’s had to get used to is that “health care here is a commodity.” In Cuba high quality medical care is free for everyone. But here “patients have to pay for everything, from medicine to emergency operations. If they can’t pay we’re not supposed to treat them.”

Some doctors told us they find this so difficult to carry out that they not infrequently forget to tell patients they have to pay.

“This experience prepares us to work better on behalf of the Cuban Revolution,” Cobo said. “When we return home, we’ll be able to use these experiences — despite all the material shortages we face in Cuba — to explain the gains of the revolution,” to explain what a socialist revolution means.

The conditions the Cuban doctors describe are the reality millions confront in Africa and other parts of the semicolonial world. Most satisfying of all, they say, is the opportunity to be part of changing this reality.
 
 
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