NEWS

Latin American School Welcomes International Students

Judith Randal

Opened in Havana in 1999 on the seaside campus of what was once a naval and merchant marine academy, the Latin American School for the Medical Sciences is the newest of Cuba’s 15 medical schools. Unlike the rest, however, it is not training its students to practice in Cuba, and none of the students are Cuban.

Instead, they are from other Latin American countries or the Spanish-speaking Republic of Guinea in West Africa and will be expected—after they graduate—to return to their homelands to work in poverty-stricken rural areas where public health measures are few and healthcare is unavailable, unaffordable, or both. Would-be students, in fact, must be from humble backgrounds themselves to qualify for the school, although their own governments further select them on the basis of good secondary school records, test results, and interviews.

The school is a byproduct of Hurricanes Georges and Mitch, which devastated large portions of several of the Caribbean region’s poorest countries in the autumn of 1998, said Juan Carizo Estevez, M.D., director of the school. When the Cuban government sent in medical assistance teams, he explained, it then took the longer view that these places—and others like them—deserve to have their own doctors to cope with public health problems and practice community-based medicine.

In its first year, the school had 1,900 students. Now it has 3,400 from 20 countries and will eventually have 5,000. Blacks and the indigenous people of Central and South America are well represented among the students, half of whom are women. All of the student body’s educational and living expenses are fully paid for by Cuba, as are its medical and dental care.

The first 6 months of the curriculum are devoted to premedical subjects such as physics, chemistry, and biology, after which come 2 years of more advanced courses in embryology, biochemistry, epidemiology, and the like, as well as anatomy. The final 4 years of work and study will be spent at Cuban neighborhood doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals, and there may be supervised rotations in the students’ home countries, too.

Eduardo Penton, M.D., Ph.D., of the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, teaches biochemistry at the school. He said the school has Internet access and appropriate equipment, but there are not enough of some items—photospectrometers, for instance—to fully meet instructional needs. Similarly, he said, all the students are taught English to enable them to use the medical literature, but many have trouble developing sufficient reading proficiency because English language journals are scarce.

Recently Fidel Castro—perhaps with tongue-in-cheek—told a visiting delegation of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus that Cuba could have the school train low-income Americans to become doctors who would then serve the poor and uninsured in the Colossus of the North. Strictly an international gesture of goodwill, this likely was not. Still, the symbolism of the offer and its irony were hard to miss.



             
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