He always wanted to be a doctor, but there was a moment when he could have turned aside to other needs. Karel Peña González is 31 years old, is a doctor, a specialist in Anesthesiology and Reanimation, and works at the Ernesto Guevara hospital, in Las Tunas.

Turin, Italy.- Single, without children. He lives with his 71-year-old mother and has no siblings. She raised him alone, and it wasn't easy. "My mom spent a lot of work," she tells me, "she did a lot of things, and I did my jobs, helped my cousins in the fields and they paid me. I had an uncle who cared a lot about me. I grew up in the field, on a farm; it was a family of farmers."

"Later, with my former wife, who is now a stomatologist, we worked a piece of land, because we wanted to be independent while we studied. I always wanted to help my mom, take responsibilities away from her. Although in medical school little is needed, they gave you everything, food, books, uniforms; you spent fewer clothes, but yes, there are always needs. Now I am a doctor, and I have a stable salary.”

He was not a model student in the Pre, although he got good grades. And at some point, he wanted to take a shorter path, but fate stopped him: he signed up as a social worker, and his reputation as undisciplined, well earned then, made him seem like a bad candidate. “In the end, they did me a favor, because the following year I applied for Medicine, I had finished with very good grades, my degree came and I did it smoothly, and I automatically obtained residency in Anesthesia, where I had already done an assistantship."

It was not luck, he built his own. He took advantage of the opportunities given to him. In 2017, when he was in his fourth year of residence, he served for six months in Venezuela, in the State of Zulia. "In Venezuela, I left many friends;" he recalls, "I still have those friends, the coordinator, a native of Caimanera, is a tremendous person, we made a good friendship, and also Venezuelans, who are more like us than the Europeans. We did more than 250 surgeries. The most important part of that mission was the experience I acquired - because I had to work alone - the friendships I left, to know the State of Zulia, part of Venezuela, its history.” His mom suffered that separation. These were difficult days; the Bolivarian government faced a strong onslaught from a paid and led counterrevolution by the United States, which carried out guarimbas, and public lynching. She got sick of the nerves.

When they called him to ask if he agreed to fulfill another mission, he was in "Amancio," a distant municipality of Las Tunas in more than 100 kilometers. He had to return earlier than planned, because the next day a taxi would come to the door of his house to pick him up. What was said then about the pandemic in Italy was terrible, between 600 and 800 deaths a day, "imagine, when I tell my Mom that I am leaving for Italy, she opened her eyes like that, but said nothing." He was almost the last person to join the brigade (the last one was me).

“Here the medical experience has been very enriching. I have had the opportunity to compare myself with them, we always comment on whether or not we are good doctors, what we lack and what we have in Cuba. I was able to compare myself with First World doctors, who do Medicine with more technology, with more economy than us; and I concluded that we are very good doctors with what we have, we are doctors who feel the patients a lot and they feel very grateful, they are surprised because they do not expect it, and in these months they have incorporated this way of doing Medicine a bit into their work. I have learned something from new technologies; we incorporate that knowledge quite well. Friends are left here in Turin, there is a large community of Cuban-Italians concerned about us. I leave many Italian friends, the young doctors who worked with us; we have very good relations with everyone.”

So I commented on the perception that exists in Cuba of Cuban doctors and nurses in Italy: "We have seen how they received those who were in Crema; sometimes one believes that we do less and people see something else. When you adapt to everyday work, you say, well, we are doing our job. The only peculiarity is that all our patients tested positive for the COVID-19, that is what people see as heroic, the risk that you are taking… But yes, anyway they receive us, we will thank them. At least me, and I think it is the feeling of all the comrades, we already want to be in the Homeland, to be with the family again.”