Rodrigo Álvarez Cambra, a life devoted to Cuban orthopedics

August 2, 2018

For the eminent Cuban physician Rodrigo Álvarez Cambra, the construction and development of the Frank País Orthopedic Hospital, in the capital of the island, was the greatest work he undertook in his long and fruitful professional career, as he confessed to Sputnik in an exclusive interview.

"In 1968, Commander Fidel Castro, who was coming along with Celia Sánchez [executive secretary of the Government] picked me up in a jeep and took me to the old and small facilities of the hospital named National Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled [ONRI]; they were two small buildings on 13 hectares of land, and he tells me: 'Your task will be to build here the largest orthopedic hospital in Cuba and Latin America,'" recalls the physician at a distance of 50 years.

This medical facility, built and directed by Dr. Álvarez Cambra, constitutes today the most extensive and comprehensive hospital complex in the world, with 677 beds, dedicated to orthopedic, traumatological, reconstructive and rehabilitative surgery of the bone, neurological and articular systems and where the Ibero-American School of Orthopedics and Traumatology has been located for several years.

Sputnik went after the life of this orthopedic surgeon, titular professor of the Cuban school of Medicine, researcher of merit, honorary and emeritus professor of different medical schools around the world, and member of nineteen foreign societies, among many distinctions in his extensive academic curriculum.

"The Prof," as almost everyone calls him, is the son of a Spanish emigrant, Asturian to be precise, from the westernmost of the Cuban provinces, Pinar del Rio, from the rural town of Manga Dulce, in the Candelaria area.

His mother —he recounts—, pregnant with twins, had to move to a hospital in Havana thanks to the arrangement of a doctor who was a friend of the family, due to the danger of a delivery that could be risky, and by those quirks of chance, he was born in the capital, in December of 1935, although his twin sister did not survive childbirth.

His father, a commercial expert, wanted Rodrigo to be a roads and bridges engineer, an idea that appealed to him in his early years, but at 14 years old, his father became seriously ill with tuberculosis and died, causing the family's economic ruin, which made him decide to study medicine to save people from this suffering.

In 1952, at 17 years old, he enrolled in the School of Medicine at the University of Havana, a period in which he became involved in student struggles against the dictatorship imposed by General Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958), studies which he interrupted when the institution of higher learning closed due to government repression.

The physician recounts that in one of the demonstrations against the Government he was wounded in an ankle, and ended up at the general Calixto García University Hospital, along with other injured young people, being placed on a stretcher, from where he could see the orthopedists placing casts on the many who arrived as victims of police beatings.

Upon noticing that his wound was not serious, he decided to jump off the stretcher and began to help the physicians in the immobilization of fractures.

Smiling, Álvarez Cambra remembers a saying among doctors that says: "He who gets wet with plaster as a student ends up being an orthopedist," and at that moment he opted by opposition for a position of official student intern at the Calixto García hospital, and although he did not earn a salary, that position gave him the right to breakfast, lunch and dinner, and he had the obligation to do three shifts a week.

Already in 1956 —he adds— still being a medical student, he performed orthopedic surgeries alongside his professors, just at the moment when he decides to go underground, given his commitment to the insurgent movement Revolutionary Directorate, composed mostly of university students.

Taken from Sputnik