Angola Facing Another Peril as Cuban Doctors Leave

Outside Lubango pediatric hospital in southern Angola, a young woman screams, throws her dress over her head and flees down the street wailing. She has just learned of her child’s death.

Behind this small tragedy lies a little-publicized aspect of the Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola. Pleading insecurity, Cuban doctors are also withdrawing, leaving as abruptly as they arrived in 1975, and Soviet doctors will soon follow.

“There are not enough experienced Angolan surgeons,” a foreign medical worker explained, “and they fear operating, especially on children. I stand with them in the operating theater trying to give them confidence, but sometimes they hesitate too long. This child died of acute appendicitis.”

Cuban doctors and teachers have played a key role in Angola’s civil administration. Lubango’s main public hospital, which serves four provinces and has 200 beds, is typical.

Its staff previously consisted of 25 Cuban doctors, 15 Soviets and three Angolans, two of whom were interns.

On July 25, all the Cubans left. And the Soviet doctors will not renew their contracts when they run out at the end of November.

As a stopgap measure, the government has contracted two Bulgarian doctors and 14 Vietnamese, three of whom are acupuncturists, for Lubango. But hospital staff still feel incapable of treating the vast medical problems of the region, which include injuries from the new round of fighting between government troops and rebels.

Twenty casualties have recently been admitted, principally with flesh injuries from anti-personnel mines.

Dr. Constantina Furtado Machado, the clinical director of the hospital, said it is already in crisis because of a shortage of drugs, specialists and equipment.

“We have one week’s supply of antibiotics here,” she said, “and our only analgesics are aspirin.”

The health problems of Lubango, stemming from the debilitating effects of a war economy, arise from the lack of a clean water supply, malnutrition (contributing to the wide incidence of cardiac congestion) and tropical illnesses such as malaria and dysentery.