Jorge Aldereguía Valdés-Brito

It has been said with sufficient reason that one year is not enough time to, now definitively closed, judge with justice and fairness the balance of a life that has been dedicated entirely to any of the branches of knowledge or public action.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to begin early the accounting of the facts of these existences and their partial assessment because this will undoubtedly facilitate the work of true historical analysis that only the perspective of time and the serene knowledge of the totality of the work accomplished allows us to achieve.

The life of Dr. Jorge Aldereguía Valdés-Brito begins in the early years of the fierce dictatorship of General Gerardo Machado, combated relentlessly by his father, with which the mediatized bourgeois republic enters a political and economic crisis from which it will only partially emerge in the years of apparent economic prosperity of the second post-World War period, only to fall again into another bloody dictatorship that will lead the people of Cuba to their definitive national consciousness and to enter into revolution, directed by a leader who synthesizes all their long tradition of revolutionary struggle, Fidel Castro, until culminating it with the establishment of the first socialist system in America.

In this brief essay we propose to analyze the revolutionary life and the work of social hygienist of Dr. Aldereguía Valdés-Brito, framed in that historical context in which our people have achieved principal rank in the Contemporary Era of humanity.

Paternal Influence in His Revolutionary and Scientific Formation

In the bosom of a family small bourgeois by its economic position, but with deeply rooted Marxist-Leninist principles, Jorge Alfredo Aldereguía Valdés-Brito was born in the Vedado neighborhood, City of Havana, on September 6, 1926.
His father, Dr. Gustavo Aldereguía Lima, already then though young, a famous physician specialist in internal medicine and diseases of the respiratory tract, who had won by opposition a position as assistant professor in the Medical Clinic chair at the University of Havana and who a year later would achieve by brilliant opposition exams another position as a tisiopathologist in the Covadonga Health Center of the Asturian Center of the capital, which resulted in a comfortable economic position, was becoming increasingly radical in his political thinking alongside leaders of the student body and working class of the stature of Julio Antonio Mella and Rubén Martínez Villena.

Throughout the 1920s, his revolutionary activity was tireless: he was among those who founded the Association of Friends of Russia, with which they managed to send various aid to the nascent October Revolution; he participated prominently in the I National Student Congress, although already graduated in medicine; he was part of the Cuban Action Phalanx, the Anticlerical League and the Anti-imperialist League; he taught social medicine at the Popular University José Martí, founded by Mella; he attended to this student leader, engaged as a working-class leader and founder of the First Communist Party of Cuba, during his famous hunger strike in protest against the outrages of the Machado dictatorship and managed to get him out of Cuba secretly; he worked with the clandestine party of the Cuban working class and confronted dictator Machado from the pages of the press, the political tribune and finally closed his office to take up arms, disembarking in a revolutionary expedition in the town of Gibara, in which combat he was wounded, taken prisoner and imprisoned for six months.

Upon leaving prison, he went into exile with his wife and two children. There Jorge, barely five years old, came to know the family's economic hardships in order to maintain his revolutionary principles and his love for his homeland.

With the dictatorship fallen, Dr. Aldereguía was appointed director of the Antituberculosis Sanatorium La Esperanza and took his family to live in the institution itself, in the house designated for those in his position. From this period Jorge would remember as an indelible image the last days of the great poet and communist revolutionary leader Rubén Martínez Villena, consumed by pulmonary tuberculosis and cared for solicitously by his parents, in a pavilion located in front of the house where they resided.

The strike in March 1935 against the impositions of the new strong man of North American imperialism in Cuba, Colonel Fulgencio Batista, launched the Aldereguías into exile again, from which they would return the following year.

Irregularly, given the family instability during these times, Jorge pursued his primary education in the private schools "La Luz" and "Instituto Edison", until entering the High School Institute of Vedado, Havana, in 1939, to begin his pre-university studies.

During his time at this educational center, a period that coincided nationally with the first Batista dictatorship and internationally with the Second World War, he participated in student demonstrations and protest actions against the dictatorship, as well as in acts organized in support of the anti-fascist struggle and against Nazism, of which his father was a true champion.

This active revolutionary environment in which his entire childhood and early youth took place allowed him to meet men whose memory and example would help forge his strong revolutionary spirit, such as Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Ramiro Valdés Dausá, Raúl Roa, Juan Marinello, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and the Latin American revolutionary Carlos Aponte, whom he met living hidden in his father's medical office.

On January 5, 1945, he received his degree as Bachelor of Letters and Sciences and enrolled in the medical program at the University of Havana, in the already begun course of 1944-1945.

This late beginning of the first year of the program allowed him to only enroll in three of the five subjects, one of which he passed in ordinary examination and two in extraordinary exams, so he was able to enroll in the second year, but burdened with the two most difficult subjects of the first: Descriptive Anatomy 1st course and Biological Chemistry.

In the second and third years of the program, Jorge Aldereguía had to study hard to move on to the fourth year, with only the subjects corresponding to that year.

From then on, his grades increased considerably without having to take any extraordinary exams and being able to dedicate more time to hospital practice and to learn from his father not only solid political formation, but also the vast body of his scientific knowledge. He would work with him in his office and in the Clinical Institute of Havana, where he would begin his preparation in the specialty of diseases of the respiratory tract in general and tuberculosis in particular.

One month after beginning the sixth year of the program, October 5, 1950, he informed the Dean of the Medical School that he was choosing as the subject of his future degree thesis the vocational rehabilitation of tuberculosis patients, which was accepted at the end of that same month.

The seventh and final year of studies would be the most brilliant of his career, in which he obtained five excellent grades and two good grades in the seven subjects that comprised it, and on July 31, 1951, he submitted his completed thesis and requested to take his degree examinations.

Due to the thesis subject, it had to be accepted by the chair of Pathology, Clinical Medicine and Therapeutic Hygiene of Tuberculous Diseases and be discussed before a tribunal formed by his professors, which constituted a true challenge on the part of the Aldereguías.

In 1928, Dr. Gustavo Aldereguía had aspired to the position of auxiliary professor of that chair and had to interrupt the brilliant examinations he was conducting in protest against the maneuvering by which they wanted to prevent a man of his political ideas from occupying a university chair. The fact, although it exposed the immoral dealings used in such exercises at the time, denied Cuban youth the opportunity to have had a teacher of his quality, and twenty-three years later his son, who achieved an excellent grade in taking the subject, would discuss his thesis, in which there was so much of his father's wisdom, before a tribunal made up of the three professors of the chair, Dr. Alfredo Antonetti Vivar as president, Manuel Ampudia González as vocal member and Orfilio Suárez de Bustamante as secretary and rapporteur, at the headquarters of the same, the Institute of Respiratory Diseases of the General Teaching Hospital Calixto García.

Dr. Jorge Aldereguía Valdés-Brito (1926-1988)
Figure 13. Dr. Jorge Aldereguía Valdés-Brito (1926-1988).

On August 6, 1951, the tribunal found the thesis acceptable, and two days later Jorge Aldereguía defended it with a final grade of excellent and a recommendation for its publication. Dr. Gustavo Aldereguía, in the person of his most genuine disciple, demonstrated once again why the Cuban medical profession considered him the best tisiopathologist in the country.

In the dedication of the thesis, Jorge Aldereguía put all the sensitivity of his spirit:

"To my mother. To my fiancée. To my father, in whose efforts for the tuberculous my life was formed as a student, as a physician beginning his journey, under his guardianship, along the paths of Medicine.
To his clean life as a Cuban, as a physician, as a man".

The Vocational Rehabilitation of Tuberculosis Patients, a true book of 167 pages, in which influenced by the ideas of the famous "Trudeau School of Tuberculosis", in which Gustavo Aldereguía had graduated during his first exile, and by this man's own ideas, who maintained that tuberculosis was more than a medical problem constituted a great tragedy engendered by different social factors, Jorge Aldereguía reviews this fascinating subject with a genuinely social hygienic approach in five broad chapters.
In them his study begins with the terminology of vocational rehabilitation of the sick, continues with the historical evolution of sanatoriums as centers specialized in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, to delve into the vocational rehabilitation of tuberculous veterans of the last world war in the sanatoriums of the United States in the post-war period, to describe critically what he calls the Vocational School of Rehabilitation in service to tuberculous patients, the Saranac Lake Study and Craft Guild, to end with a self-critique and final comments whose last words we cannot refrain from transcribing:

"Grieved by the current Cuban panorama, so desolate and with such dark tones, which closes and enervates the struggle against tuberculosis in frank disintegration and retreat; grieved that the tuberculous of my land lack so many things, with no dawn of hope appearing for them: the promising dawn of rehabilitation, I raise my thesis with a promise: to struggle tenaciously, as my father has struggled, without haste and without respite, so that someday it becomes a reality, fulfilled in our soil, the vocational rehabilitation of tuberculosis patients in Cuba, so that soon it is understood and proclaimed as a postulate the motto of this essay, modest and earnest: It is not enough to cure when one cures, one must always rehabilitate".
And he will more than fulfill his promise by struggling without haste and without respite alongside his father not only for the vocational rehabilitation of the tuberculous patient, but for the eradication of this disease as an endemic problem in Cuba and the definitive liberation of his people.

During his university student stage he will participate in street demonstrations and other acts against the misgovernments of Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás, as well as in student assemblies where he spoke out against the sending of Cubans in support of the war carried out by the North American government against the people of Korea.

Dignified Exercise of the Profession and Revolutionary Activities During the Batista Dictatorship

Although his father was a founder and shareholder of the mutual health center Clinical Institute of Havana, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía began working there, recently graduated, from the lower positions; first as substitute physician and later as internal physician and for house visits.

That same year of his graduation he married Dr. Daisy Henriques Rodríguez, his companion until his last breath of life, in whom he always found understanding and close collaboration in revolutionary activities and constant encouragement for his scientific advancement.

Desiring to deepen his knowledge, not only in the clinical treatment of tuberculosis, but also in its surgical treatment, he joined the thoracic surgery team of Dr. Ernesto Iglesias de la Torre, with whom he worked for several years, separating from him when Dr. Iglesias became politically committed to Batista's dictatorship.

The reduced family income, despite both spouses working, led him to establish a medical office in the fishing population of Casablanca, where in a short time he gained prestige for his medical knowledge and disinterested professional activity, and in 1956 to join as a general physician in the Hospital of the League Against Blindness, an organism directed by a board of trustees.

The need to occupy so many low-paying positions for the support of his family, which increased with the birth of two children, without coming into contact with the evils of the medical profession during that period, was not an obstacle to him completely fulfilling his civic and revolutionary responsibilities, before and during the Batista dictatorship.

Thus, in response to the call to national conscience launched by the unforgettable leader of public honesty, Senator Eduardo R. Chivás, upon separating from the corrupt government of Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín and founding the Cuban People's Party (Orthodox), alongside revolutionary and university figures such as Isidro Figueroa, Leonardo Fernández Sánchez, Pastorita Núñez, Luis Orlando Rodríguez, Manuel Bisbé, Salvador Massip, Manuel F. Gran, Rafael García Bárcenas and Fidel Castro, Jorge Aldereguía affiliated with it to work in its Professional Section.

In 1952, after the military coup of March 10 of that year, he joined the most radical ranks within his Party, to abandon it definitively after the assault on Moncada Barracks and the release from prison of its participants, upon becoming part of a cell of the July 26th Movement that was organized at the Clinical Institute of Havana.

From then on his revolutionary activities became increasingly intense. He participated in printing and distributing propaganda of the Movement, in the sale and distribution of bonds, in the organization of other cells in medical institutions and provided spaces for secret meetings.

Once war was established in the mountains and the clandestine struggle in the cities and towns of the country, he contributed by sending medicines and weapons, with the preparation of medical personnel and equipment for caring for the wounded in armed actions, such as the one organized to assault the headquarters of the Radiomotor Police Section, which was denounced and cost the lives of some participants on Ayestarán Street, and he was part of the Medical Sector of the National Workers' Front.

Close relationships with outstanding clandestine fighters such as Julián Alemán (Domingo), who was assassinated by the dictatorship; Jorge Fernández (Higinio), assassinated and disappeared, from whom he received instructions for the strike of April 9, 1958, in which he organized from the day before the collection and distribution of blood in various places in Havana, such as churches and private homes, and admitted to the Clinical Institute, as patients, revolutionary combatants who were concentrated waiting to receive weapons for the next day's actions, and with the commander Faustino Pérez Hernández, with whom he collaborated, among other activities, in medical care for wounded combatants, hidden in an apartment on 22nd Street in Vedado. Also in this final stage, he facilitated with his help the asylum of some clandestine fighters in the embassies of Uruguay and Paraguay.

First Responsibilities in the Revolutionary Period

Upon the triumph of the Revolution, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía resigned his position as internal physician at the Clinical Institute of Havana, where he had worked for eight years alongside his father, to enter for the first time the state public health system, now purged of the evils it had suffered during almost the entire period of the Bourgeois Republic, as head of the Antituberculosis Hospital of Cangrejera.

Undoubtedly this appointment constituted an advancement in his medical career as it recognized his preparation as specialized in diseases of the respiratory tract and tuberculosis.

He will hold this position, jointly with that of the Hospital of the League Against Blindness, when briefly appointed in the second half of 1959 as director of the Anti-Infectious Hospital Las Ánimas due to a crisis that arose there, and also, briefly and for the same reason, as director of the National Tuberculosis Council in 1960.

These first years after liberation were to be of intense ideological struggle throughout the country, in which Jorge Aldereguía took a prominent part in being one of the founders of the Medical Party of the Revolution, a party organization within the medical profession, in order to confront those of Immediate Action and Federative Unity, both controlled at those moments by their most reactionary members.

The Medical Party of the Revolution, which brought together mainly physicians who had fought in the mountains and in the cities, had as its fundamental objective to achieve leadership within the National Medical College, a powerful organization that grouped all physicians in the country, and put it at the service of the high interests of the triumphant Revolution.

Jorge Aldereguía was nominated for the important position of general secretary of said College by the Medical Party of the Revolution and carried out intense scientific work of recruitment among physicians throughout the country until the December 1959 elections, in which at the General Assembly of the College, held in the halls of the San Carlos Club in Santiago de Cuba, from December 20 to 21, in an atmosphere heated with passion, in which the most violent confrontation occurred in the ideological struggle sustained within the medical profession after the revolutionary triumph, Dr. Oscar Fernández Mel was elected as president of the National Medical College, commander of the Rebel Army, and Jorge Aldereguía as general secretary.

He will hold this position until 1962 and from it he set about, together with other colleagues, to organize the National Front of Professionals and Technicians in which he held the responsibility of general coordinator.

On August 1, 1961, a fact of extraordinary importance occurred, which would give its principal characteristic to the first decade of the development of revolutionary public health, with the promulgation that day of Law No. 959, which designated the Ministry of Public Health as the director of all health activities in the country, including those of private and mutual aid units.

From this law begins the period of integration, into a single one of national character, of the three systems that, completely independent of each other and with the private and mutual aid not forming true systems, made up the organizational structure with which the people of Cuba counted for the care of their health until 1959.

Dr. Jorge Aldereguía, who, having been trained as a physician in it, perfectly understood the characteristics of mutualism in Cuba, on one hand in its important function of covering the health needs of a large sector of the country's population that was not satisfied by state services and on the other as a source of profits for a few and generator of long labor conflicts with the medical profession which felt its work was being exploited in it, was appointed to the important task of creating the bases for what a year later would culminate in the Ministerial Decree No. 20 of December 31, 1962, through which private and mutual aid units were integrated into the Mutual Aid Company, an organization dependent on the Subsecretariat of Medical Assistance, but which retained its own character.

The full importance of this work has not yet been given, but this is an example of dialectical synthesis applied to a phenomenon of Cuban public health development. Everything spurious in mutualism was eliminated and its benefits marched parallel to the development of public health organization, integrating into it step by step in the following years until completely merging with the state organization in a Single National Health System in 1970, the first on the American continent, upon incorporating the last of its units, the historic Juridical Charitable Center of Workers of Cuba.

Other urgent needs took Dr. Jorge Aldereguía away from such important work, for which he was so well equipped and of which he was the initiator in very difficult times, upon being appointed in 1962 as director of the Teaching and Advancement Directorate Carlos J. Finlay.

For five years he held this position, during which time he dedicated all his efforts and enthusiasm to creating the mid-level technical personnel that the needs of a constant increase in medical-preventive units throughout the country demanded in unprecedented variety and quantity in our homeland.

This practical experience gained in the performance of so many positions of very diverse kinds within the health organization would be enriched theoretically during this stage, through continued study he conducted, mainly in postgraduate courses such as those he took in Czechoslovakia on Organization of Health Services (1960), in Cuba on Organization of Socialist Public Health (1962) and in Hungary, also on Organization of Health (1965).

But the revolutionary leader needs something more than administrative experience and theoretical knowledge, and it is his complete identification with the masses of workers in the sector he leads in particular and in general, with the entire working class of the country, and this Dr. Jorge Aldereguía achieved in abundance by being elected in 1966 General Secretary of the National Union of Health Workers and member of the National Committee of the CTC and in 1967, by joining as a founding member of the new Communist Party of Cuba.

In the Central Direction of the National Health System

Upon being called in 1967 by the Minister of Public Health, Commander Dr. José R. Machado Ventura, to occupy the position of Vice Minister of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía was found to be completely formed as a social hygienist and therefore highly qualified for its performance. So true is what we affirm that two other ministers, Dr. Heliodoro Martínez Junco and Dr. José A. Gutiérrez Muñiz, ratified him in such an important function.

In the second half of that same year of his arrival at the governing position of hygiene and epidemiology in Cuba, a major outbreak of typhoid fever occurred in the historic city of Bayamo, due to contamination of the city's aqueduct water, which tested the quality and organization of the vice ministry under his direction.

Dr. Jorge Aldereguía traveled to that population with his team of advisors and officials and personally directed and supervised investigations into the causes that produced the epidemic, the application of preventive and curative measures, the organization of hospital wards, the opening of new temporary units for patient care, and the campaign to inform the population.

The Minister of Public Health, Dr. Heliodoro Martínez Junco, was also there the entire time the epidemiological emergency lasted, personally overseeing the substantial resources that were mobilized and the organization of the work carried out, providing a clear example of how our National Health System acts, at all its levels, in cases like that.

These were years of great achievements for Cuban epidemiology. In 1967 itself, the centuries-old endemic malaria in the country was declared completely eradicated, with no new indigenous cases reported; three years later diphtheria disappeared from Cuba; during 1970, 1971 and 1972, the last isolated cases of acute anterior poliomyelitis in unvaccinated children were reported, a disease that had stopped causing mortality since the first vaccination campaign in 1962, and in the following years the state of health of the Cuban population began to be considered among the best in the world.

In 1976, with the establishment of the new administrative political division, the installation of the organs of People's Power and the implementation of the System of Direction and Planning of the Economy, with which socialism was institutionally consolidated in Cuba, major changes occurred in the organization and structure of the National Health System.

The Ministry of Public Health, as the central organism, became subordinated to the State and Government of the Republic, the provincial and municipal health directorate and municipal level health directorates of their respective instances of People's Power, and the regional directorates were eliminated. The vice ministries disappeared as organizational units, being replaced by vice ministers who direct and are part of the Minister's direction council, and to whom the minister delegates the functions of attending to groups of organizational units constituted by national directorate and independent departments.

In this new structure, with which the National Health System was incorporated at the different levels of the Cuban State making it much more dynamic and efficient, an incongruity was committed, however, which brought negative results to the country's health organization, when the Vice Ministry of Hygiene and Epidemiology was dissolved with its activities being integrated into Medical Assistance.

Dr. Jorge Aldereguía, within the Minister's Direction Council, opposed this measure which weakened the work of such an important activity, which became apparent soon after when facing the dengue epidemic that the country suffered beginning in September 1977, for which it was not adequately prepared, rectifying said error in view of such a regrettable experience.

Upon the disappearance of the Vice Ministry of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Dr. Aldereguía was appointed in 1976 as vice minister in charge of Development for Health, from whose functions he would direct his efforts mainly toward the founding and expansion of a research center in the field of public health organization, the Institute of Health Development, which would be inaugurated two years later, and whose direction he would assume in 1982.

During the time he performed his work in these vice ministries, which corresponds to the final years of the integration period of the National Health System and the entire period of its consolidation, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía occupied on several occasions the direction of the Ministry of Public Health as minister by regulatory substitution, and would develop a tremendous activity as Cuba's representative in international health organizations.

Thus he was part of our delegation at the 18th (1965), 20th (1967), 25th (1972), 27th (1974), 28th (1975), 31st (1978), 32nd (1979), 33rd (1980), and 34th (1981) Assemblies of the World Health Organization (WHO), in Geneva, Switzerland; he chaired the delegation at the 27th and at the 33rd presided over Technical Discussions; he attended meetings of the Governing Council of the Pan American Health Bureau (PAHO) in Washington in 1961, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1978 (Granada), 1979, 1980, and 1981; he participated in the I (1978), II (1979), III (1980), and IV (1981) Meetings of Health Ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Geneva, chaired the V held in Havana, and was part of Cuban delegations to the International Congress of the Association for the Study of Living Conditions and Health (1971) and to the World Conference of the International Women's Year, Mexico (1975).

In all these important international meetings or events, he was always one of the drafters of the reports or position papers of the Cuban delegation and earned the respect among delegates from around the world for his indisputable competence and among subordinate and service personnel for his frank and affectionate treatment of all. For this reason it is not surprising that when the news of his death became known at the central headquarters of the Pan American Health Bureau in Washington, delegates from all American nations and officials of the institution observed a minute of silence in memory of such a distinguished Latin American social hygienist.

During this intense period of work in his life, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía found time to continue increasing his scientific and political knowledge by taking in 1969 a course on Tuberculosis Control Programs, in 1976 another on Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, and in 1981 a third on Organization of Public Health in the USSR, as well as obtaining, by validation, his title of First Degree Specialist in the specialty of Organization and Administration in Public Health on March 29, 1980, and the Cuban Society of Hygiene and Epidemiology and the Cuban Society of Health Administration named him a titular member in 1974.

Last Positions Held

Upon being appointed in 1982 as director of the Institute of Health Development, Dr. Aldereguía left behind fifteen years of intense work in the central direction of the National Health System, in which he had given the best of his fruitful maturity and his visibly weakened health.

But the Institute was not a place of rest for him. From the direction of this institution, created with the principal objective of giving the country's health plans a truly scientific basis far from any improvisation, he continued to expand research in all branches of public health organization, carried out by multidisciplinary teams of young researchers guided by the best of our veteran leaders, forged in the performance of important functions at the different levels of the National Health System and in the systematic study of our main health problems.

Those unforgettable sessions of his Scientific Council are worth remembering, where the protocols and final reports of his research were rigorously discussed, in which more than eighty of these were approved, and if not all were carried into social practice, that was not the fault of his researchers nor of the institution.

At the Institute, Dr. Aldereguía joined in teaching and taught the subject of Administration of Health Services and Programs, as well as presiding over and being part of numerous state tribunals for the examination of Health Administration specialists and mentored the completion of residency work.

During these years he had the opportunity to participate in research and published his results in numerous works, either as author or collaborator, which appeared mainly in the Cuban Journal of Health Administration, which he directed until his death, among which we will only cite: "Health and the New International Economic Order" (1983), "Economics of Public Health: Considerations on the Importance for the National Health System" (1983), "The Role of the Institute of Health Development in Primary Medical Care" (1984), and "Organization of Research" (1985), all in the journal under his direction, and "The State of Health of the Cuban Population" (1983) in the International Journal of Health Services.

There are also numerous works he presented at the III Scientific Conference of the Institute of Health Development (1983), at the National Workshop on Health Research (1984), at the II Provincial Conference on Health Administration (1984), at the Congress for Health for All - 25 Years of Experience (1984), at the Latin American and Caribbean Workshop on Health Research (1984), and at the International Seminar on Population and New International Economic Order, University of Havana (1984).

His great experience in international events meant that, even taking into account his health limitations, he was sent in 1983 to the Meeting of the Group of Experts on Mortality and Health Policy in Rome; on a study visit to the Maxim Zetkin Institute of the German Democratic Republic; to the PAHO Meeting on ALAESP and Emergency Health Administration in cases of natural disasters in Washington; and to the International Conference on Population in Mexico, and in 1985, he participated in the XXIV Meeting of the Advisory Committee for Health Research, held in Havana.

For all this extraordinary work of 26 years in Cuban revolutionary public health, which culminates as a researcher and publicist in the field of social hygiene, the National Commission on Scientific Degrees of the Republic of Cuba, by Resolution No. 3 of January 27, 1985, granted him the degree of Candidate for Doctor of Medical Sciences, and the National Department of Specialization and Scientific Degrees of the Ministry of Public Health granted him the title of Second Degree Specialist in the specialty of Organization and Administration in Public Health on December 16, 1985.

When the Institute of Health Development closed its doors in the second half of 1986, Dr. Aldereguía spent a brief time in the position of Advisor to the Minister of Public Health, until he took retirement the following year, forced by the advancement of his illness.

From this period is his letter in which he presents his resignation as president of the Cuba-Laos Friendship Association, in which his strong spirit in the face of adversity, his courageous optimism, and the leader who calls for fulfilling duty are so evident:

"As you know," he says to the members of his Board of Directors, "my state of health has been so compromised that it limits my possibilities for action to continue this activity. And the truth must be accepted, however hard it may be.

On the other hand, as my situation improves—we must always be optimistic—I will in some way cooperate in work of such high political and human values as this.

I know from the magnificent relationships we have created and from the revolutionary quality of you all, that it would be excessive to ask you to strive to maintain the pace of the beautiful tasks of friendship and solidarity with Laos, but I do consider it an obligation to request that you increasingly increase this work, improve its quality, and that the Laotian brothers feel that we are always closer to them and that our friendship strengthens with a permanent character."

His colleagues respond to this letter with these words that are the highest recognition of his long record:

"You, with your clean and active life as a revolutionary, your profound sense of solidarity, and your firm decision to develop and strengthen friendship with sister peoples, particularly the people of Laos, have been an example for all of us and for new generations.

We recently learned from you yourself your concern about not being able to continue fully performing your duties as President due to your health problems.

We appreciate and understand, in all its magnitude, the meaning, the great ideological lesson, and the profound revolutionary character of your statement, expression of your condition as a simple man dedicated to the most just of causes. However, we have thoroughly analyzed your request and want to express to you our decision to ask you to continue at the head of the Association, because we need you."

And Jorge Aldereguía will remain there, as well as in the direction of the Cuban Journal of Health Administration and incorporated as an advisor to the director of the National Center for Medical Sciences Information, his oldest son, Dr. Jorge Aldereguía Henriques, until his sudden death on June 25, 1988.

Representative Figure as a Forger of Cuban Revolutionary Public Health

During his thirty years in the performance of such diverse positions in the National Health System and in the country's political life, Dr. Aldereguía received honors such as being elected delegate to the I Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (1975), member of the National Leadership of the CDRs (1977-1985), delegate to the I Congress of the CDRs (1977), president of the Cuba-Laos Friendship Association (1976), honorary member of the Board of Directors of the Cuba-USSR Friendship Association (1985), honorary member of the VI Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (1979), merit diploma VI Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (1979), honorary member of the Chilean Society of Public Health (1971), member of honor of the Cuban Society of Microbiology (1976), XX Anniversary Medal of the Cuban State (1975), Manuel Fajardo distinction of the National Union of Health Workers (1976), recognition diploma for contributions to the preparation of the II Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (1980), Medal of Underground Fighter (1981), September 28 distinction (1982), and Certificate of Founding Member of the Communist Party of Cuba (1983).

His personal qualities of firmness of character, affable treatment, kindness, and exquisite human sensitivity, which inclined him from childhood to the closest relationship with the humble; his enormous capacity for work always placed at the service of his people, but above all his unlimited modesty that led him to always see the high positions he held as opportunities to serve his homeland, simply and naturally as José Martí asked, and never as a reason for personal self-aggrandizement, all of this made Dr. Jorge Aldereguía one of the most respected and beloved leaders of our National Health System.

The last scientific event he attended was the I National Congress of History of Medicine, held in Cienfuegos from June 22 to 25, 1988, in honor of the memory of his father, Dr. Gustavo Aldereguía Lima