Şehîd Lêgerîn (Alîna Sanchez), an Argentinian physician, joined the Kurdish movement and gave her life for the revolution. She played a significant part in fostering connections between the struggles in Kurdistan and South America. She contributed to building the healthcare system in Rojava, among many other things, and her legacy lives on to this day. The recently published book ‘Lêgerîn – a quest for freedom’ recounts her life through the memories of those who knew her, honouring the indelible mark she left on the hearts and minds of all who crossed her path. We are sharing an excerpt from chapter 5, ‘Building Bridges’, which recounts her return to medical school in Cuba following her initial stay in Kurdistan. Although she wanted to stay in Kurdistan, the people responsible for the Kurdish movement asked her to return to Cuba to complete her medical studies. She returned and began spreading knowledge about the liberation movement in a continent where Kurdistan was still largely unknown.
CHAPTER 5
Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro used what experts called “medical diplomacy” to support, help, and strengthen ties with several neighboring countries and newly formed African states that fought for national liberation and against neocolonialism. A year later, Castro sent doctors to Chile, where a 9.6 Richter scale earthquake hit the country, despite half the medical staff fleeing the country in the previous months. Since then, Cuba has sent doctors on development missions in Africa and Latin America. It became a trademark. Whoever was in need would receive medical support.
Real change happened in 1998 with hurricanes Georges and, less than a month later, Mitch hitting Central America particularly hard. Hurricane Mitch became the second most deadly in history, claiming more than 11.000 victims, the vast majority from Honduras and Nicaragua. Haiti and the Dominican Republic were also severely affected. Cuba dispatched 2.000 medical personnel, and the government thought about going beyond short-term emergency relief. They pointed out that “the permanent hurricane of poverty and underdevelopment kills more people every year than these hurricanes just did…”1
Cuba presented a comprehensive plan to create long-term healthcare solutions for the nations of Central America and the Caribbean, which are chronically poor. The Cuban health care plan aimed to save as many lives yearly as the 11.000 lost in the hurricanes. Cuba has a highly sophisticated and world-renowned healthcare system and a surplus of well-trained physicians. And Havana committed to educating young people to become doctors and creating a healthcare infrastructure to serve future generations in these impoverished nations.
That was not enough. The Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM) was inaugurated a year later. The main campus is a former naval base, reclaimed for the purpose, some dozen kilometers west of Havana. Cuba offered 500 full scholarships per year to students from the four nations affected by Hurricanes Mitch and Georges for the next ten years. The only condition for the students was to commit to going back home. There they would provide medical service in the areas where they were most needed—the poorest, the hardest-hit, and the most remote communities of their home countries. In other words, Castro devised a variation on the “teach-a-man-to-fish” theory. Instead of indefinitely leaving Cuban doctors in disaster areas, he would teach locals to become their own doctors.
Since the beginning, the program has been highly successful and has become very prestigious. Today, the school is said to be the largest medical program in the world, enrolling over 19.500 students a year from 124 countries, including the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Cuban Ministry of Public Health has been able to accommodate the growth because of the large number of trained physicians and professors in Cuba and their unwavering commitment to the program.
There are no tuition fees, and everyone is accepted with a scholarship which includes, among other things, dormitory housing, school uniform, three meals per day, and a small monthly stipend of 100 Cuban pesos—which is roughly four dollars.
Doctors are trained under dire conditions. Due to over 60 years of the US embargo, there is a lack of technical material or medicines, and doctors are taught to operate with minimal resources. This pushed the program to have a holistic approach to health; it doesn’t rely on the latest technology or medicines; the patient is evaluated physically and mentally. Alina used to say that Western medicine put too much emphasis on drugs while the patients disappear. ELAM has several courses on comparative and alternative medicines, which are also quite popular among the students since many of them will return to poor areas with limited medical supplies.
Development missions have also been vital for “medical diplomacy” as Cuban doctors started vaccination campaigns in Angola and Ethiopia, worked in rural South Africa, and started and staffed medical schools in a half-dozen countries like Yemen and Ghana, where doctors are scarce. They treated more than 16.000 victims of the Chernobyl disaster, and even more recently, a whole team was sent to Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since 2006, Cuban doctors have restored vision to 2.2 million Latin Americans through simple eye surgeries.
Dr. Margareth Chan, former Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that people from Cuba are fortunate, praising the Cuban medical system. Today, the tiny country of Cuba, population of 10 million, sends more doctors to assist developing countries than the entire G8 combined. “There are 68.600 Cuban doctors now, and more than 20% of them—or 15.407—are on missions in 66 countries.”
As the school expanded, facilities were also open in other Cuban cities. ELAM has dozens of schools throughout the island. Students are welcome by the locals, who see them as 21st-century heroes.
***
Unlike Alina, who spent the first two years at the Pinar Del Rio school, Emilia Martinez, a student from Montevideo, Uruguay, started her degree on the main campus in Havana. While living in the capital city, Emilia began attending seminars at the Martin Luther King Center, concentrating on popular education. Inspired by their curriculum, Emilia and some other comrades started a collective whose primary focus was developing critical thinking. The group started from Paulo Freire’s thoughts and developed new approaches for making “visible power relations and at the same time transform them.” The collective was also very keen on supporting ongoing resistance to extractivism in Latin America. Many members were also organized in their places of origin, which were linked with the Congress of the Peoples. “What we did was to continue weaving, especially during our time as students in Cuba, to sustain these educational spaces,” Emilia recalls while seated at her home in Uruguay.
For her third year at ELAM, the school started shuffling students around to different hospitals, and Emilia moved to Camagüey. Founded in 1514 by Spanish colonialists, Camagüey grew to be the third-largest city in Cuba, with over 300.000 residents. “As soon as we arrived in the city, we called an organization meeting [of the collective Latino Africano] to build and prepare March 8 [International Women’s Day] activities,” continued Emilia. The meeting point was in the faculty garden, next to the students’ residence. “It was quite dark, and there was a girl there, sitting on a wall, who immediately asked me if that was the meeting point where we would meet. We started talking straight away. It was Alina. She just got back to Cuba after traveling for a year and was a year behind because of that. She told me that she had been collaborating with the Red Crescent2 in the Middle East; she was speaking generically.” Alina didn’t get into further details. After a few minutes, others joined them and started the preparation process. “March 8 arrived, and it was spectacular. It was great.” Soon after, Alina joined a popular culture workshop and moved to a residence close to Emilia’s flat with two other students. “She was not supposed to live with us, but she would spend a lot of time there. We became friends.” Every day, Alina would wake up early and prepare an “Argentinian matecito”—a South American drink made with yerba maté and favored by older people. “I used to tell her we were like grandmas,” Emilia said, laughing.
As she remembered those days, Emilia spoke fondly of Alina: “She was calm, relaxed, sometimes a little messy, very sweet, with a tone of voice … she did not raise her voice. Always kind. Also, she reflected upon everything. She would question everything. Always bringing our ‘upbringings/alliances,’ our families, our countries, too, to the conversation. And well, analyzing that we lived in Cuba, in the Cuban society, and the hospital.”3
Their political activities were predominant in their daily lives. The group was growing, and they would prepare each action altogether. “Ali was helping a lot in there, always bringing articles to develop critical thinking.”
Emilia recalls Alina talking about Kurdistan and the revolutionary process in Mesopotamia. “I remember one of the first activities of the popular ‘formation.’ We [invited] her especially so that she could tell us about Kurdistan, and we invited other comrades from other collectives. There was a whole group of the MCT, several people. We met at a friend’s house. And no, almost nobody knew about Kurdistan. A Mapuche comrade had gone to a meeting in Turkey of native peoples and territorial resistance, and so he knew about the Kurdish revolutionary process. Also, a comrade from Palestine knew the Kurdish history. All the rest of Latin America, absolutely nobody knew. There were not so many of us, we were probably 15 people.” Alina started telling the comrades how she got to Kurdistan, and talked about the ancestral history of the people. She, of course talked about the principles of the Kurdish liberation ideology, the democratic nation, and the thousands of forms of genocide and resistance that the Kurds have sustained throughout history. “She could talk for hours,” said Emilia, adding: “Basically, the first few times, it was a little more general context, and then she would tell you about the revolutionary process of women and how women were separated in their role. What was their role in that process, and she was always trying to contextualize this in a social and cultural environment so different from ours. And that was a bit hallucinating, you know? As usual, our stereotype of Middle Eastern culture is more rigid; I don’t know… And then we began to break [analyze] that, and we began to see how oppressions can be different, but there is no oppression meter [scale of comparison] between the West and the East.”
Emilia remembered how the group was shocked by Alina’s explanation of the praxis of the women’s movement and the political ideology behind the creation of autonomous spaces. “When men are there, because of the patriarchy, those spaces are not open.” The collective thought of creating a separate space free of men, but some within the group refused. “And soon after learning about this history, we started to meet and do training among ourselves. The men collaborated with the logistics, and they brought the food. And it was spectacular. She was a great inspiration.” In other words, “When she talked about Kurdistan, she tried to remind us that we were looking at things from an angle, our angle, our eyes, our experience. And we tried to be attentive to this, to notice how prejudices can affect us and end up limiting us in the dialogue and in the knowledge, in the being and in the expansion, to grow. She insisted a lot on that. And on the importance of popular education, but [she was] always very much connected with Latin America.”
Women’s liberation is the core of the Kurdish liberation movement’s ideology. Autonomy has developed over 40 years of praxis, bringing women to the movement’s vanguard. “We don’t have a role in the revolution; we are the revolution,” said a party militant while asked which function women had in the movement. “This is a very important point. We saw how other revolutions, French or Russian, for example, postponed women’s liberation as if it was secondary. As a result, after the revolution, despite their active roles, women went back to the kitchen and were again oppressed at home,” Emilia added. This is why the Kurdish women’s movement has been able to grow. Abdullah Öcalan has always been very clear about the concept of women’s liberation and how important it is for women to liberate themselves, and claimed the 21st century would be marked by the women’s revolution. He also pushed women to organize among themselves and break free from the patriarchal mentality and, most importantly, organizing autonomously as women away from the male gaze.
“It is thanks to Alina that we got to know the work of Abdullah Öcalan,” explained Nico, who was in Cuba at the same time, studying pedagogy. He met Alina, along with two other female comrades, because he got to know the popular education movement and wanted to participate as well. “The first time I met her, she was on a particular bicycle that we call a ‘Chinese bike.’ I don’t really know why it is called that; In any case, she had a blue skirt and a blouse.” Since Alina was researching a lot about the indigenous population and Nico was a K’iche Mayan, the two developed a tight bond. “She was really interested in us, in our history, and how we survived [through several genocides]. She understood well my situation.” For many of the participants, the collective left an indelible mark; the process, the political ideas, and how the praxis was critical. They motivated people and, according to Nico, “…is what keeps me moving forward. From the moment I met the three women, my life changed. The popular movement helped me find my path and kept me motivated.”
The group read a lot and discussed. Trying to interpret the world and make sense of it. There was a lot of respect. “I felt, for the first time, that these friendships that developed among each other were horizontal [equal] and not vertical [hierarchical]. I think this process transformed Alina and us. We established friendships which last until today. And according to our cosmovision, she is still with us.” The group had internal principles: no interrupting another comrade, listen carefully to one another, and raise your hand before talking. “A very important one was that we should never run out of mate, [the drink, previously referred as matecito]” continued Nico, smiling. These norms helped Nico a lot in his own development. “Really, often we are authoritarian in the way we use our words. The idea of the popular education was that we break away from all the codes enforced on us by capitalism, as well as patriarchy and colonialism. We can’t say we are struggling if we are reproducing those dynamics. This process helped in creating the group.” There was also a lot of care for emotions and feelings. “For example, I couldn’t lie to Alina or to anyone in the group and say I am fine while I was not. I also couldn’t hide my machismo or bad attitudes. Thanks to Alina and the group, there was never a place where I felt loved as much. I was able to completely open up. I could speak my own words, I could show myself as the person I am without anyone judging me. My history is really special, regarding my people, my family: [I experienced] 36 years war, lies, 36 years of misrepresentation of being a human [being treated as less than human].” The collective process healed Nico. “It was kind of therapy,” which also helped the group to analyze how the whole content is full of hidden stories and lies to cut people from their roots. The group examined the historical oppression: from the Spanish invasion to the later US interventions, and the influence of modern European culture in their societies. “These were the constructions we noticed in ourselves and shared to each other. [We were not] just criticizing the system, we were transforming ourselves.”
Although Nico is clear that there was a collective process, he highlighted how he and Alina connected on a deeper level. She pushed him to connect to his roots and ancestral history. And to use “the knowledge of native people as a source of strength.” There were always frank exchanges that would facilitate personal growth and positive change.
The bond with Kurdistan grew every day. Alina was always writing to different comrades she had met in her travels, and she continued reaching out, never losing contact. Erai, whom Alina first met in Germany before heading into the Kurdish mountains the previous year, went to visit her during that period. “When I met her fellow students, acquaintances, and friends, I was amazed at how much these people knew about the Kurdish liberation struggle. Lêgerîn had told her entire environment about the Kurdish resistance and liberation struggle and aroused their interest. She had convinced medical students to travel to Kurdistan after their studies and support the Kurdish people.” In fact, Alina and Emilia started building the medical brigade as a bridge between Kurdistan and South America.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/
1 https://ifconews.org/our-work/elam-medical-school/
2 Comparable to the Red Cross, the Red Crescent is an autonomous organization established in the Middle East
3 All students in their curriculum practiced at the local hospital.