Alternative Destinies and Solidarities for Health and Medicine in Latin America Before and During the Cold War

Abstract

In May 1944, Emilio Frugoni, a poet, professor, former senator, and founder of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, arrived in Moscow as Uruguay's first ambassador to the Soviet Union in eight years. 1 Frugoni was accompanied by his personal secretary as well as a scientific attaché, Dr. Lauro Cruz Goyenola, an active member of the Frente Popu lar (Popu lar Front) co ali tion and contributor to the pro-Soviet Diario Popu lar. In addition to serving as the aging Frugoni's personal physician, Cruz Goyenola was charged with studying the organ ization of Soviet health care and the country's system of scientific research. His mission proved trying, and this once "true believer" became disillusioned. Having spent only six months in Moscow, Cruz Goyenola suddenly resigned from his post in late October and returned to Montevideo. This experience might have culminated in quiet disappointment but for one crucial factor: like many visitors to the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s, Cruz Goyenola penned a book about his travels. However, in contrast to the admiring reflections of most (regardless of their ideological orientation)-and violating diplomatic norms of discretion-Cruz Goyenola penned a diatribe, Rusia por Dentro (Rus sia from the Inside). 2 First issued in March 1946, this highly critical account of Soviet medicine and society appeared in almost a dozen editions over the next two years (shifting to a Buenos Aires press after a presidential sanction blocked further publication in Uruguay), igniting a furious polemic among intellectuals, po liti cal parties, journalists, and the Uruguayan public at large. 3 Scores of heated attacks and counteroffensives ensued in the form of pamphlets, newspaper articles, book-length tomes, and countless disputes and discussions in the ubiquitous cafés on both shores of the Río de la Plata.

Health for all?: Histories of international and global health

“…It would be a mistake to assume that peoples targeted by the organizations described above passively accepted interventions from either west or east. In interwar Latin America, for example, recent work suggests that Mexican health administrators selectively adopted lessons from the Soviet Union even as Rockefeller Foundation programs sought to impose American models (Birn, 2020, pp. 12–14).…”