Ann Eveleth
Dr Luis Peraza has seen enough examples of post- revolutionary health care in his 61 years to convince him that South Africa’s current staffing crisis is little more than a “growing pain”.
One of 99 Cuban doctors deployed in February to bolster South Africa’s overstretched medical system, the snowy-bearded doctor-revolutionary has worked in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia.
After five months of often gruelling surgery marathons at Pietermaritzburg’s Grey’s Hospital, Peraza says “South Africa has a very good health system. The problem — the shortage of medical officers — I think that will settle and in time you won’t need foreign doctors.
“We had the same problem in Cuba in 1959,” he says. “When the revolution came we had 6 000 doctors and half of them left because they were afraid for their positions. In 20 years we were able to change everything and today we have 52 000 doctors.”
Peraza admits Cuba’s health system travelled a long road to get where it is today: “The government invested a huge sum in health care and first tried to cover the rural areas. We introduced a programme of social rural medicine where medical students would spend three years working in a rural area,” he says.
South African doctors have balked at similar proposals, but Peraza claims that in Cuba most doctors volunteer for rural service, which is considered “a great honour”.
A self-confessed idealista, the Cuban Communist Party central committee member says he is optimistic about the prospects for South Africa’s “social revolution”: “I was surprised to find that racial integration has come so quickly,” he says, pointing to the number of black patients at the formerly white hospital.
After years of contact with Southern Africa’s liberation struggle, delivering medical services to victims of the war in Angola and training African National Congress doctors in Havana — including one who later cared for the late Oliver Tambo in exile — Peraza was eager to join the Cuban medical detachment to South Africa: “I wanted to see [the new South Africa] for myself,” he says.
Born into a revolutionary family, Peraza was a member of Cuban President Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement, which ousted US-backed dictator General Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Despite his family’s apparent anti-US sentiment, Peraza’s father sent him to study there. Returning to Cuba three years later, Peraza joined a student cell of the 26 July Movement. “We blew up 20 or 30 post offices,” he says.
Peraza, his mother, father and one brother were imprisoned and tortured, while a second brother fled to Mexico and joined Castro and Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s guerrilla army. Upon his release, Peraza joined his brother in Mexico. He later received military training himself from Guevara.
“I only did what everybody my age did in Cuba,” he says. “We were involved in the struggle against colonialism and it is an honour for us to serve in that struggle. Many Cubans died in Angola and in Ethiopia but some people were crying because they couldn’t go. When the CIA killed two Cuban teachers in Nicaragua, the next day 20 000 teachers wanted to take their place.”