[News] Aleida Guevara, Che's daughter

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424776.200

Printed on Mon Dec 27 15:14:58 GMT 2004


Interview: Aleida Guevara, Che's daughter

By Liz Else

Aleida Guevara March - her full name - studied medicine at the University 
of Havana, spending her final year at the University of Managua in 
Nicaragua. She specialises in children's allergies. She has worked as a 
doctor in Angola, Nicaragua and Ecuador, and she helps run the Che Guevara 
Studies Center of Havana. Her father qualified as a doctor in 1953, 
specialising in dermatology, and he and his wife Aleida March travelled the 
world between 1961 and 1965 as ambassadors for Cuba. He was killed in 
Bolivia in 1967 when young Aleida was six

Were you following in your father's footsteps by becoming a doctor?

I follow the steps of my people!

But had you always wanted to be a doctor?

Yes, at the age of 4 I said I was going to be a doctor specialising in 
children. And I was loyal to that. I always liked children. My mother gave 
birth to four children, and for every one she had a Caesarean. The last 
time there was something that was not right. There was a stitch that wasn't 
right when the Caesarean was done with that last baby and it got infected. 
I helped disinfect the area with a bit of alcohol. I was just 
four-and-a-half when that happened.

What is it like being a doctor in Cuba today?

Sometimes people joke that we are always giving away doctors. There are 
thousands of Cuban doctors in Venezuela. We've got 25,000 health 
specialists helping other people around the world. So the ones remaining in 
Cuba have to work more. We offer our help to whoever wants it. This is very 
important now. Fidel Castro has said to the developed world that we will 
bring the human element, but they have to bring the material things. So we 
have been taking part in very interesting projects in developing countries 
with the UK, France, Germany. They send money to buy medicines and 
materials and we provide all the professionals.

How many doctors are there in Cuba per head of population?

One doctor per 164 inhabitants.It used to be 1 per 168 but it has come 
down. We live as a poor nation but we die as a rich one.

What kind of effect does the US blockade still have on Cuba?

The US is isolating Cuba, and that is very costly for the country. For 
example, my hospital, the William Soler Children's Hospital in Havana, has 
400 beds but it has only one X-ray machine, and that is more than 40 years old.

Are you short of medicines?

Thanks to European solidarity, there's a project in Europe called MediCuba 
in which they buy raw materials and send it to Cuba. We manufacture the 
medicines, and they are sold at the price it costs to manufacture them. So 
that organisation skirts the blockade, and it also encourages Cuba to 
promote its own pharmaceutical industry. We don't get all the materials we 
need, but it has been an important help. We buy other raw materials with 
funds from tourism.

Sometimes we have to use intermediaries because if the US detects who has 
been selling the raw materials to us, they sanction them. So it's very 
expensive for Cuba - and it's very difficult. Something that would normally 
cost $500, Cubans might have to pay $20,000 for it.

That sounds like you need your own full-blown pharmaceutical industry?

The objective of every country is to develop its own industry. It's not 
good for us to receive things if we are unable to produce them. While there 
has been some progress, I think that we are doing better in areas like 
biotechnology.

So Cuba has great ingenuity, but still very little in the way of scientific 
equipment or state-of-the-art technology?

Yes. It's a problem. But we manage, thanks to courageous companies who are 
interested in having their techniques used in Cuba. For example, when we 
started to deal with haemorrhagic dengue fever, we discovered that in 
Europe they were producing interferon. We learned from them, and now we are 
producing it better than those who taught us, because we have access to 
plenty of blood in Cuba and we can work with more certainty.

Why is that?

Because the people of Cuba will always donate blood. We have to tell them 
stop giving blood. When the Twin Towers were attacked, Cubans gave blood to 
New York citizens immediately - our quarrels are not with them - and it was 
sent. When there are catastrophes in South America or other places, Cubans 
always give blood. We think that the duty of a nation is to help other 
nations, and we can do it. It is beautiful. It is important to feel good 
with yourself, and Cuban people feel satisfied when they do this type of 
thing. I think they are very positive things. And we've got to do more.

You've worked as a doctor all your working life - and now you are also 
speaking for Cuba at all sorts of international events.

I've been a doctor since I was 23. I'm now 43 and I've been campaigning 
round the world for a while, since my daughters were grown up. But before 
that I was working a lot behind the scenes.

Should science have a higher profile with people who say another world is 
possible?

We who are of the left are fighting so that there will be more people in 
the world who will have all of the possibilities. I think that for us 
science is crucial, starting from the way we use our resources to the way 
we will be able to use whatever comes to us. For example, in the early 
1960s my dad said that he would like to study nuclear science because at 
the time it was something from the future.

He also wanted to bring it into perspective, bearing in mind the realities 
of the planet - to develop science without killing the world. That is 
something we must bring back in our time. The challenge is to make use of 
the very interesting scientific developments that are being carried out 
without destroying the environment. There has to be a balance.

What about the relationship between indigenous peoples and science. What 
have you learned from your travels?

There are big issues here. Many people say that Africans, for example, 
don't know how to make use of science. But those people don't realise that 
for Africans there is an element of survival attached to it. If they accept 
all the scientific development and the industrial development that the 
white man gives them, then they lose their own culture and they lose the 
opportunity of being able to keep their land. So we must take care when 
dealing with aboriginal peoples. We must bring science to them without 
breaking their important traditions.

Indigenous people can teach us a lot of things. For example, when I was 
visiting a tribe in Venezuela, a woman said she didn't want to be seen by a 
white doctor. Why? Because, she said: "What is the link between my name and 
the pain I feel?" Then I realised that as a doctor the first thing I did 
when a patient came to see me was to ask for their name, surname, address, 
age - and only then did I ask what the matter was. The indigenous lady 
taught me that the first thing I should ask is what's the matter. These are 
all small things that modify human behaviour.

What would your father have thought of what you do now?

If he were alive I wouldn't be doing it. I would be next to him all the time.

Is he still your hero?

Yes. No doubt about it. He is the most complete man I've ever met.

Do you remember him clearly from when you were a little girl?

I remember very few things as a small child, but my mother loved him very 
much and she brought that to us and taught us about him. We found out a lot 
more as we read all the unpublished and published material about him, like 
The Motorcycle Diaries. That's natural: he became not only my dad, he's now 
my friend, my teacher. He is very important for me.

Do you still talk to Fidel Castro?

Not as much as I would like. We do speak. He loves me very much like an 
uncle, and I love him. He says sometimes he dreams my father is still alive.


Poor but proud

Few Cubans would be surprised to know how highly the UN rates their 
country's level of development. Its 2004 Human Development Report 
consistently ranks Cuba in the top band, outranking middle-band nations 
such as Belarus and Bangladesh, and far ahead of the likes of Burkina Faso, 
Niger and Sierra Leone.

The national health spend shows Cuba allocating just over 7 per cent of GDP 
to healthcare, amounting to $229 per capita, compared with 13.9 per cent 
and $4887 per capita in the US, and 7.6 per cent and $1989 in the UK.

Despite the low per-capita spend, life expectancy at birth is an 76.7 years 
(77 in the US and 78.1 in the UK). Infant mortality has fallen from 34 per 
1000 live births in 1970 to 7 per 100,000 now; in the same period, the US 
figure fell from 20 to 7, and the UK from 18 to 5. Some 98 per cent of 
Cuban 1-year-olds are fully immunised against measles (91 per cent in the 
US, 83 per cent in the UK). Cubans, Americans and Britons all have the same 
level (95 to 100 per cent) of "sustainable access to affordable essential 
drugs".

Medical excellence

One of the biggest differences is the number of doctors, and here Cuba is 
streets ahead. According to the UN report, Cuba boasts a total of 596 
physicians per 100,000 people, while the US has 279 and the UK only 164. 
Patrick Pietroni, who organised two GP study trips from the UK to Cuba in 
2000 and 2001, says Cuba has a family doctor for every 500 to 700 people, 
compared with one per 1800 to 2000 in the UK.

Medical exports and services are ranked sixth in the country's economy, 
earning foreign exchange worth $250 million in 2002, of which biotech 
contributed $150 million. The country's researchers discovered a 
meningitis-B vaccine in the late 1980s, which GlaxoSmithKline plans to 
market under licence in Europe and possibly in the US. Over the past few 
years, the biggest earner has been a hepatitis-B vaccine, which Cuba has 
exported to more than 30 countries.

Finding a bigger foothold in the international pharmaceutical game will be 
tough going, given the US blockade. But Cuba does have some joint-venture 
European partners to help with the costly process of developing cancer 
treatments, including the promising TheraCIM h-R3 for head and neck cancer.

Printed on Mon Dec 27 15:14:58 GMT 2004




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