TIM HAYES'

In early 1971 I found myself in Havana Cuba along with about a four other members of the Black Panther Party who were not among the dozen or so who already lived there for various legal reasons. One day a Cuban military officer Cuban Major Manuel Piñeiro Lozada gave a speech about the export of the Revolution to Africa. Not sending a fighting force but sending medical teams and engineering squads to maybe Angola or Guinea-Bissau. I was about twenty years old and still stupid enough to think of this as an adventure. I asked if I could be among the first to go. 6 other Panthers also asked to go. At that time tuberculosis, as well as one of the scaryest things I have ever seen, Dracunculiasis or ” guinea worm disease (GWD)”,were a major problem, Guinea worm is caused by drinking the water from a pond or stream and ingesting the worm larvae. There are sometimes no other symptoms for years but eventually a blister, very painful shows up. The worm sometime tries to come out or may stay for years and grow,sometimes up to four feet long, still inside the body. This is an horrible thing to see when half a village may be in some stage of the disease. As it is very painful when the worm bores its way out of the body. I had to watch and sometimes assist as Cuban doctors would extract the worms from the legs of screaming children in Guinea -Bissau, where I went first. The real reason I was there was to dig wells to secure clean water..the best way to prevent the disease. Still a horrible job with all the biting insects and leeches… and trust me this was not an exciting adventure at all. The whole time we were in Africa with the Cubans we were assigned to a “cadre” of three with the fourth person being a Cuban soldier. In Guinea-Bissau and later in Angola I had Antonia Guzman who spoke English as well ..maybe better than we did, as well as French, and some of the local Portuguese. Which was one reasons why our next stop was Angola, then still a Portuguese colony and already in a fierce struggle for independence, Angola was all about Tuberculosis and getting as many children vaccinated as we could in three weeks, in the town of Huambo, as well as a secondary location called Andulo..I think. This was to become very dangerous work. It was my first time ever in a real war zone.. I still have bad dreams about diving to throw my body over some child to shield the body from debris ,while they were in the middle of some medical procedure.. we got bombed almost every day from what I later found out were American supplied planes and ordinance.. which the Cubans found very funny “uncle Sam no help you now..ha ha ha” was a frequent joke. This went on for about a month. Bombs falling daily and sometimes having to pack up and move in the middle of the night…trying to keep the locations of our makeshift clinics unknown. But it was not a bomb but some large caliber bullet that shattered the skull of Antonia Guzman and sent bits of bone and brains all over my face and in my mouth. We had to run for what seemed like miles to get away from the Portuguese patrol that found us one morning. I could still taste Antonia’s brain tissue hours later..something you never forget… Some poor soul had informed on us for probably a meal for his family… and the pigs found the medical camp…We never went back to find Antonia’s body. She was beautiful,, smart, funny and had a little girl somewhere in Oriente, Cuba. And she looked a lot like the woman in the lower left hand corner of this picture. This picture is of Female Cuban soldiers marching in a MayDay parade. I like to think that Antonia’s spirit and the spirits of other freedom fighting women live on in women like this.

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