The Cuban doctor

Posted by mauer

Posted: January 21, 2007 - 1:15 pm

AMMAN, Jan. 21 — The plane just landed and there’s Marwan, a very dapper man in his 50s or 60s, carrying my name on a sign.

“How did you know my name?” he asked.

“Nancy told me.”

Nancy is Nancy Youssef, the outgoing bureau chief in Baghdad. I’ll catch up with her in Amman before she returns to the States to be McClatchy’s Pentagon correspondent. Her place in Baghdad has been taken by Leila Fadel, recently of the Fort Worth paper.

Marwan, a fixer extraordinaire, zips me through the visa line, immigration and customs, and deposits me with my driver. I asked him what languages he spoke. “English, Croatian, and of course, Arabic.” Croatian? He spent time there, when Tito was still in power and it was part of Yugoslavia. He remembered it fondly. “Whenever you live some place for a while, you always have good thoughts about it,” he said.

I had thought the man sitting next to me on the plane had the look of a Jordanian businessman, except he was wearing a white guayabera. Then he took out his computer and started to read medical documents in Spanish. Thankful to be sitting next to someone whose language I could speak, I asked him if he was from Spain.

“Cuba,” he said.

“¿Médico?” I asked.

“Sí,” he said, he was a doctor.

I asked where he was going. To Iraq, he said.

A few minutes later, I came across a passage in a book I was reading, “The Fall of Baghdad.” The author, Jon Lee Anderson, spoke of coming across an Iraqi physician with whom he was able to communicate in Spanish. The Iraqi had been a pupil of Dr. Rodrigo Álvarez Cambras, a famed Cuban orthopedist who had treated Saddam Hussein. I showed the name to my neighbor. Yes, he knew him. In fact, he said, Álvarez Cambras was famous throughout the Middle East, including Lebanon, for treating the seriously injured.

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