Cuban missions

Cuba has spread its doctors and health specialists around the world in the coronavirus season. They have reached everywhere, from Mexico to Andorra, in large or small groups, through different agreements or conventions. The informative display that usually surrounds them, whether from apology or condemnation, hardly ever does them justice, while they seem to move between asceticism and epic.

This type of humanitarian action is the last political letter and one of the few financial guarantees of certain efficacy that still remains for the Havana regime. There should be no issue for the island's rulers that is more sensitive and important than that, a piece that is so obsessively polished with the cloth of propaganda. It is a close subject for me. My parents are doctors, they went to Angola in 1986, when they finished their degree. Almost 30 years later, I wrote the chronicle of Reinaldo Villafranca, a nurse from a lost municipality in the west of the country who went to Sierra Leone to fight Ebola and died of malaria.

I have never felt like that again the fury of the Cuban State, its disgust and helplessness because the story of a man whose life ended with a point of heroism had been published, but whose journey attempted against the ways in which the official account has been willing to understand and rudely manipulate these frequent feats.

According to the authoritative interpretation, the figure of the hero is culminating and absolute, and his past, as soon as he acquires this condition, is diligently excised and suppressed. A hero was not and could never have been anything other than what he ended up being. The martyr annuls the man, stabs him, and, more importantly, the hero is an instrument that loses any kind of meaning of its own. His altruistic act, namely, the offering of his life, is only the punctual expression that the true institution of genuine solidarity, the magnanimous Revolution and its proven vocation of sacrifice, adopts for a moment.

Villafranca was poor, black, gay, he never had it easy, and he went to Africa at the end of 2014 because with the mission's savings he planned to buy a new house and become independent for the first time from his family. He was 43 years old. Revealing the magnificent details of that life, or of any other particular experience of Cuban internationalist doctors, their most justified and understandable purposes and intentions, is a kind of blasphemy for the Cuban regime, even treason, and it is because in that way the person recovers his full individual condition, his altruistic features are restored to him as part of an imperfect complexity and not of a manipulated abstraction, and also full awareness and determination about his decisions and actions.

The propaganda machine must thus return the capital that it has stolen and that it has tried to monopolize. That capital is the consciousness of good apparently in the hands of power. Health volunteers would no longer be tokens or objects that are only moved by a superior will that puts paper flags in their hands to be waved like figures in front of the press, when they reach the world's airports.

It can be said that these doctors and health professionals have grown within a culture capable of delivering to them, wrapped in the cellophane role of doctrine, a package of values ​​that allows them to then enter risk areas to heal strangers thousands of kilometers from their houses, but what you need to know is that these missions do not respond today to a historical sense of justice, to a political practice of the brotherhood, or to any other type of remarkable conviction of a secular State, but that Cuba, the country in capital letters, it works rather in reactionary charitable terms, like a kind of Teresa of Calcutta of communism.

That comparison is not idle, since behind there is only one benefactor, an almighty gentleman who, like God, is also the exclusive bearer of goodness and a device of evil: Fidel Castro. Similar to the Catholic institution, Cuba distributes blessings to the outside, giving itself on Sunday walks to the parishioners who still want to kiss the cold old bones of the cadaverous Stalinist hand, but rape their disciples from the inside.

What makes these missions a hypocritical act at the government level is the bitter contempt, so often gratuitous, with which the regime treats its health professionals as a quasi-feudal workforce or as a military body with highly restricted or void. Under the (false) excuse that they have been trained for free, and having to pay the sentence of a public education that is presented as a gift or deference from the Government, and not as a universal right, Cuban doctors who travel to Other countries respond to contracts from which they receive a tiny part of the profits, and over which they have no decision-making power.

If one of them decides to escape the suffocation of an official delegation, he cannot return to Cuba in eight years. This, however, is seen as progress, because before the immigration reforms started in 2013, they could never return. So much weight on their backs is due to the fact that they also have to support, along with tourism and the sending of remittances, the decimated economy of the country, as if saving lives was not enough. Likewise, a large part of the western press classifies them as agents of Castroism, carriers of an ideological virus that they would subtly transmit through their professional facades. These attacks, for the most part, are sterile, since almost always people receive them with great emotion and gratitude. Indeed, what can any judgment or thesis do before someone who saves a life?

The mistake of interpreting the nature of such missions only as the sending of white-coated soldiers of the Cuban regime, that is, of interpreting them in the same way that the regime conceives of them, is that it ignores individual merit, solidarity as a latent reservation in the medical ethics and in the labor code of these specialists, even when the political system that represents them has corrupted these values ​​and turned altruism into a demagogic apparatus for generating propaganda and good press, nothing far from the most capitalist philanthropy. vulgar.

That gesture, however, unknown by neoliberal logic, should be rescued for a world whose relationship with itself, after the coronavirus, would necessarily have to change. The gesture, let's say, technically in solidarity, a socialist act charged for the future with a full sense, and not sustained, as in the case of Cuba, by the really existing ideology of socialism, which uses the humanitarian facade as a credit to the community international to commit excesses and deny that same democratic practice in the national darkness. It would be like grabbing a valuable object and shaking off the dirt around it.

I give an example. The delegation of 52 Cuban doctors specialized in infectious diseases, who arrived in Milan at the end of last March, was received with open arms. Just a few days earlier, Maurizio Massari, a senior representative of Italy in the European Union, stated that his country had already asked the entity to activate the mechanism that would provide "medical equipment for individual protection", but no member of the community had responded. Until now. "This is certainly not a good sign of European solidarity," he concluded.

The West says condemning Cuban communism, but the West is functional to Cuban communism, and in many ways it needs to remain in its current state. Meek, but alive. Cataleptic, but still with some kind of active presence in regional geopolitics. Cuba does not represent a danger to anyone, except for the Cubans themselves, and their doctors, in the midst of the disaster, still seem to carry something that the world needs.

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