With more than three decades as a medical graduate, Dr. Luis Enrique Pérez Ulloa stands out for his extensive record of service in favor of the health of the Cuban people and other parts of the world, particularly Venezuela, Andorra and Italy, where he currently serves as head of the island's medical mission in that European country.

A second-degree specialist in Hematology, he carried out his first mission abroad 20 years ago in the Venezuelan state of Táchira. There he worked first as head of the area and then directed a clinic in the same region. Due to his outstanding work, two years later he became vice-rector of the Simón Bolívar Hospital in Carabobo and, soon after, he became the main director of that institution until April 2009.

Pérez Ulloa describes that first experience outside Cuba as very positive and endearing. From those years, he recalls the care provided to entire families suffering from iron deficiency anemias, who, when they went to see the professionals on the island, were satisfied with the quality of the assistance and the very close relationship they achieved with the patients, a hallmark of Cuban medicine, which has a great impact all over the world.

COVID-19: Cuban medical presence also in Europe

The months from March to July 2020 deeply marked Luis Enrique. Once again he would leave the country to assist people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the cause of COVID-19, a pandemic that paralyzed the planet and turned Europe into its epicenter during that fateful year. This time his mission was to lead the brigade of 39 collaborators of the Henry Reeve Contingent that worked in the principality of Andorra.

According to his account, upon the arrival of the Cuban specialists, this nation, located between Spain and France, had the highest rate of infection per inhabitant, out of a total population of around 78,000 people. In a period of three and a half months, despite the inevitable deaths, the last infected patient was returned home healthy, and with the peace of mind that none of the Caribbean professionals contracted the disease, which speaks of the responsibility and rigorousness in complying with the sanitary protocols.

But the fight against COVID-19 in Cuba also had Dr. Perez Ulloa among its protagonists, and his experience in Andorra was very valuable to face the pandemic peaks in provinces like Santiago de Cuba, Pinar del Rio, Havana, Matanzas, with one of the most widespread outbreaks of those recorded on the island.

Away from his family, this physician from Sancti Spíritus recognizes that Cuban medical collaboration goes beyond the humanity and altruism involved in exposing one's own life to save that of others, and highlights among its strengths how the bonds of brotherhood among the cooperators, ethics in the exercise of the profession, solidarity and, above all, love for the homeland are refined.

Luis Enrique Pérez Ulloa is proud to be part of that humanist legion of white coats that for 60 years has been bringing light to the remote places of the world, where the health missions of the largest of the Antilles reach.

By Beatriz Vaillant RodríguezTomado de la Revista Destino Salud