Amílcar Cabral, the leader of the African Party of Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), led the struggle for national liberation in those Portuguese colonies. His half brother and close aide at the time, Luís Cabral, is quoted extensively in these excerpts.

Conflicting Missions is a compelling history of Cuban internationalist policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and its inevitable clash with Washington’s course of deepening intervention to back colonial rule and reinforce imperialist domination. Gleijeses backs his presentation with a range of original sources, including government archives in Cuba, Europe, and the United States, as well as interviews with government officials and leaders of independence struggles in Africa. The book’s extensive maps, illustrations, and notes make the material accessible to those unfamiliar with the period.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses is Copyright © 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher and the author. http//:www.uncpress.unc.edu.
 

A veteran of the struggle against Batista, Luis Peraza, a doctor in the UM 1546, was one of the first to go to Guinea-Bissau….

He left aboard the Lidia Doce in May 1966. “We didn’t bring any food with us because we expected to eat whatever the guerrillas ate. Once we got there we discovered that there was almost no food in the jungle; I lost forty pounds in three months.” His group included ten doctors but no nurses; the first nurses (all of whom were male) arrived in December 1967 with the second group of doctors. “Havana learned from our experience,” Peraza recalled. “They decided to send an equal number of doctors and nurses, working as a team, and to send food from Cuba.”

When heavy fighting was expected, the doctors accompanied the combatants. Otherwise they stayed behind in makeshift hospitals of two or three huts: one hut would be an operating room, the others were for patients. “Whether they were with our guerrilla units at the front, or in our field hospitals, the Cuban doctors…won the hearts of our fighters and our people,” Luís Cabral writes. “They taught our health care workers, who had received minimal train-ing abroad, how to serve our people better. The Cuban doctors and nurses…fulfilled all our hopes….”

Throughout the war, all but one of the foreign doctors in the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau were Cubans. The exception was a young Panamanian, Hugo Spadafora, who had become impressed with the PAIGC while living in Cairo and started to write to Amílcar Cabral volunteering his services. “He wrote so many letters that Amílcar finally decided to let him come,” PAIGC leader Fidelis Cabral recalled. “At that time we didn’t have any doctors.” Spadafora arrived in Conakry on February 10, 1966, and was sent to the village of Boké, in Guinea near the border with Guinea-Bissau, where the PAIGC had recently opened a hospital staffed only by a few nurses. “With my limited experience I had a hard time running the hospital,” Spadafora wrote. Within a few weeks, however, the first Cuban doctors arrived, bringing a “large supply of medicine, surgical and medical equipment, and supplies … [and] the quality of the hospital’s care increased exponentially.” Spadafora left Boké in July for Guinea-Bissau, where he worked for nine months. In May 1967 he returned to Panama. “Had other foreign doctors volunteered to come to Guinea-Bissau, Amílcar would have allowed it,” Fidelis Cabral surmised. It is impossible to say, based on the available evidence, whether others did volunteer. What is certain, however, is that during the war Spadafora and the Cubans were the only foreign doctors in the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau.

In Guinea, on the other hand, there were non-Cuban doctors at the two PAIGC hospitals in Boké and Koundara, a village near the border with Guinea-Bissau. At Boké, there were only Cubans until 1969, when a new, well-equipped hospital, built with Yugoslav money, became the flagship of the PAIGC medical services. Its staff included one or two Cuban doctors, one Yugoslav (Ivan Mihajlovic, a surgeon who was the hospital’s director), and three or four Yugoslav medical technicians. The smaller hospital at Koundara was staffed for several years by Dr. Binh, a Vietnamese professor from the University of Hanoi. “Only a great people like the Vietnamese would have offered us a doctor when they themselves were enduring one of the longest and cruelest wars,” Luís Cabral writes….

The PAIGC also had a small hospital in southern Senegal in the town of Ziguinchor, just ten miles north of the border. It was staffed by only one doctor, at various times Portuguese, French, Angolan, or Dutch. If a surgeon was needed, Luís Cabral writes, “the [Cuban] surgeon Mariano Sixto or another Cuban doctor would come across the border at night.” This was tricky because the Dakar government barred all Cubans from entering Senegal. “I myself went to get them,” Luís Cabral continues, “and they accepted the risk of entering Senegal just like they accepted all the other risks of the war…. I would take them back to the border very early in the morning.”  
 
 
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