You're listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Marcia Vega.

I'm taking you back to the 1980s when Cuba sent workers thousands of miles away to Angola to support their communist comrades there.

It's October 1986 and we're in Angola on the west coast of Africa.

The countries in the middle of a civil war when a 26-year-old Cuban doctor called Elayda arrives at a hospital in Nwanda, the capital.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw when the doors opened.

Imagine that I arrived at the hospital and the woman who cleansed the floor of a vast space with many rooms was using the same water to clean from the very beginning to the end.

The children had pee and been sick on the floor among other things.

I had to rush to the window that face out towards the sea to open it and breathe because there was the most appalling putrid smell.

It's impossible to describe.

So what was Elayda doing in Angola during the civil war?

To find out, we're going to Havana, the capital of Cuba, to the 1st of January 1959.

At the end of Cuba's revolutionary war, communist rebels led by Fidel Castro, gained the upper hand and ousted the oppressive military dictatorship of Fahentio Badista.

Castro then assumed power as Prime Minister and would go on to transform Cuba into a one-party state.

Elayda was a child then and rarely saw her father, but in fairness he had an important job in Castro's government as Minister of Industry.

He spoke on behalf of Cuba in 1964 at the United Nations General Assembly.

We want to build socialism. We have declared that we are partisans, although to strive for peace.

We have declared ourselves to fall within the group of non-aligned countries, although we are Marxist and then innocent.

Because the non-aligned countries as our own fight in terrorism. We want peace. We want to build a better life for our people.

Elayda is the daughter of Che Guevara, the Argentinian-born icon of the Cuban Revolution, who was Castro's second in command during the guerrilla campaign.

While the world remembers her father for his radicalism, to Elayda he was simply a very tired papar whose raw battle was never having enough time.

During the first years of the revolution, my dad worked up to 16 hours every day.

On his way out of the house, sometimes he would take me to nursery, but on his return I was obviously sleeping.

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