President Miguel Díaz-Canel is attending Wednesday the ceremony marking 60 years of Cuba's medical collaboration around the world, in which 605,000 health professionals and workers in 165 countries have participated.
 
The date is celebrated at the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation by protagonists of that humanist work that six decades later is maintained with 57 medical brigades composed of 22,632 collaborators deployed in the five continents.
 
On May 23, 1963, the first brigade of Cuban doctors left for Algeria, although in 1960 a small team arrived in Chile to help after the earthquake that shook that South American country, which were the first experiences in health internationalism after the triumph of the Revolution.
 
It is a collaboration that not a few are determined to discredit and discredit with lies and distortions, despite the favorable balance of each health emergency solved, saving more than eight million lives and performing almost 16 thousand surgical interventions.
 
There are the missions in countries at war or devastated by strong hurricanes, earthquakes and outbreaks of Ebola, cholera and the still latent Covid-19, in which the performance of medical brigades and the Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Situations of Disasters and Serious Epidemics, have rendered their indispensable services.