Vol. 74/No. 44      November 22, 2010

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
AND MARY-ALICE WATERS  
BATA, Equatorial Guinea—“It took a lot of effort and will power. We had to learn how to study, and how to study long hours. But today we’re graduating as doctors. We will be working to improve the health of the Guinean people,” said Benjamín Ntutumu Mbá.

His remark captured the pride and confidence of the 21 doctors who graduated August 5 from the medical school here. They were among 102 students in the class of 2008 at the National University of Equatorial Guinea (UNGE) who received their diplomas. Now they are starting their first jobs as MDs at hospitals and clinics across the country.

The university’s medical school in Bata, led and staffed by Cuban doctors for almost a decade, opened in 2000 as part of a program of medical cooperation between the governments of Equatorial Guinea and Cuba. Cuba committed itself to send brigades of doctors, nurses, and lab technicians—today they number 160—to help staff hospitals and public health centers throughout this Central African country. The medical school is training hundreds of Guinean doctors and nurses whose goal is to progressively replace the Cuban personnel currently providing almost all primary health care.

The training of Guinean doctors, committed to improve health conditions in their country, is no small achievement in one of the least industrialized countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Equatorial Guinea shares with the rest of the region a centuries-long legacy of colonial and imperialist domination. As in much of Central Africa, malaria is endemic, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and sleeping sickness are widespread, and the incidence of HIV/AIDS infection, while lower than in much of the region, has been increasing.

The health-care crisis inherited by Guineans is magnified by the very workings of the world capitalist system. Drawn by the lure of much higher salaries, better living conditions, and enticements of personal “career” advancement, medical personnel migrate to imperialist countries from Africa and other parts of the semicolonial world. The head of Ghana’s public health service, for example, reported in 2005 that the country had lost 30 percent of doctors trained there to the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Some 5,300 physicians from sub-Saharan Africa were practicing in the United States alone, according to a 2004 study by Human Resources for Health.

The training offered by the Cuban-run medical program, like the Cuban Revolution itself, imbues students with a different class perspective. Instead of promoting personal “advancement,” it is based on social solidarity and providing health care as a human right. It seeks to instill a determination to bring medical services to working people in isolated rural areas and small towns for whom such care has previously been inaccessible and unaffordable… .

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

In 1963 the very first Cuban medical brigade volunteered to go to Africa. They went to newly independent Algeria, less than a year after the French colonial regime had been defeated by the Algerian National Liberation Front in a long and bitter war.

That same year, Cuba responded to a request by Algeria’s workers and peasants government to send weapons and volunteer combatants to help deter an imperialist-backed assault by the Moroccan regime. Over the decades, Cuban internationalists have fought alongside anti-imperialist forces throughout Africa—from the Congo to Guinea-Bissau to Angola—as well as in Latin America.

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.
 
 
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‘Cuba in Revolution’ photo exhibit in N.Y.  
 
 
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