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This article first appeared in the May 4, 2004, issue of The Durango Herald. It is reproduced here by permission of Herald Publisher Richard Ballantine.
Medical 'soldiers' study in free Cuban program
By Lewis McCool
With the demise of the Soviet Union and subsequent loss of financial aid from the communist superpower, Cuba's military shrank to less than a quarter of its peak size during the 1990s.
Instead of supporting foreign insurgents, what's left of the military is involved in domestic duties, assisting in construction projects, industrial activities and even tourism.
Cubans now have a new foreign "army" in training, and we American journalists visited its base outside Havana.
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Americans James Creedon and Sarpoma Sefa-Boakye, students at Cuba's Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, guide journalists on a tour of the facilities. |
It is the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina, the Latin American School of Medicine, once a naval academy. Now it trains foreign students to become doctors.
It was Castro's idea, said Viviana Rodríguez, head of international relations for the school. "Fidel said the best way to help other countries was to train their own doctors."
Given that mandate in 1998, the school opened a year later. The six-year program will graduate its first doctors next year. About 7,000 students, representing 24 countries, are in the program, including 1,600 that arrived in March to begin their training. Eighty-five of the students are from the United States.
According to a U.S. State Department spokesman, the students are there legally, under existing travel-licensing rules.
Second-year student James Henry Creedon, 26, of Brooklyn, N.Y., told the visiting journalists, "I've never had an experience so powerful as I've had in Cuba."
Creedon was a full-time paramedic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. That job took him to Ground Zero in Manhattan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack.
Now he expects to be a doctor in the city, "serving the people who are most in need," he said.
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Kathy Ballanfant of Houston, Texas, left, listens to the translator for Viviana Rodriguez, head of international relations at the Latin American School of Medicine. . |
After completing what he termed "a rigorous application process," Creedon found himself in Cuba, "very impressed by the quality of the education."
The entire program is free to the students.
To qualify, they have to be 18 to 25, high school graduates from impoverished families, physically fit and free of addictions. They are screened through an interview process, and they have to pass a pre-med exam.
Their commitment, Rodríguez said, is to go back to their countries to practice medicine.
"It's a moral commitment. … Cuba is a poor country. We cannot deny that," Rodríguez said, "but we share with the needy ones."
The American students come from a wealthy country, she said, "but the wealth is not properly distributed."
The students' first two years are spent at the medical school, becoming fluent in Spanish and taking other classes to balance their educational level, in addition to the requisite science and medical courses.
After two years, the students are sent to various clinical environments around the country where they interact with Cuban medical students.
The retention rate is high: 75 percent of the initial class passed. The rate is now over 95 percent, Rodríguez said.
Sarpoma Sefa-Boakye, 25, lives in Diamond Bar, Calif., but her family hails from Ghana. She is eager to return to California as a doctor to provide care for the poor in the Los Angeles Basin.
She praised the school for its integration of alternative medicine with traditional western medicine.
"I don't have a fully worked-out plan (to fit into the U.S. medical system)," Sefa-Boakye said. "There is a whole variety of models. We have to find out what will work for us."
After graduating from the Cuban program, the American students will have to complete a medical residency in the United States before they will be able to practice on their own, helping to turn Castro's vision of an army of medical soldiers into reality.