Doctor Pedro Caba, a historic militant of the PCE who treated opponents during Franco's regime and became vice president of the WHO, has passed away. His figure inspired the novel Jardín de Villa Valeria and the famous painting El abrazo. For many, his life recalls those who risked their careers to help political persecutees. His legacy unites medicine with the fight for freedom.
Open source against the dictatorship: lessons from a clandestine network 🛡️
Caba's work relied on an infrastructure of contacts and safe houses, similar to a decentralized network. Today, technologies like encrypted messaging or VPNs replicate that protection model. In development forums, there is debate on how to apply these resilience principles to free software, where information flows without central nodes that censor it. A digital health system based on these concepts could guarantee anonymous assistance to dissidents in current regimes.
The hug that wasn't such a big deal, but look where it got us 🤝
Turns out the famous hug in the painting wasn't a hippie gesture, but a ruse for the doctor to go unnoticed with the antibiotic prescription in his pocket. Now, every time you see two colleagues hugging at a foro3d meetup, think: maybe they're not greeting each other, maybe they're passing a WEP key. History was always more about conspiracies than feelings, and Caba was the king of medical camouflage.