HAVANA.- Cuba today remembers the beginning of a history of solidarity led by its health personnel, who 61 years ago, in Algeria, inaugurated international medical collaboration.
With the departure to that brother country of a medical brigade on May 23, 1963, a work of infinite love of Cubans in the world began, noted in X Roberto Morales Ojeda, Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.
The party leader stressed that since then “doctors and not bombs” is what Cuba has taken around the world, evoking the phrase of the historical leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, which has been the motto of the collaboration of the largest of the Antilles.
There are more than 600,000 health workers who have provided services in 165 nations, with sensitivity, heroism, dedication and professionalism, the minister of the sector, José Ángel Portal Miranda, stressed on the same social network.
During these six decades, the number of patients treated as a result of this solidarity work of Cuba exceeds two billion.
A special page in the history of Cuban international medical collaboration is el Henry Reeve International Contingent, of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemicscreated by Fidel in 2005.
Brigades of collaborators from this Contingent were present after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and in the fight against cholera that same year; as well as in the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Guinea-Conakry and Liberia.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, 58 brigades worked in 42 nations to help control the impact of the disease.
