Students from Latin America and Africa are in Havana studying medicine for free
CNN. From staff and wire reports June 11, 2000 Web posted at: 10:39 p.m. EDT (0239 GMT)
HAVANA (CNN) -- Luther Castillo says there is not a single doctor in his remote community of 3,000 people in Honduras' Miskito Coast.
"The tragedy of my area where, when someone gets sick they have to walk for hours to get to a hospital, awoke in me from childhood the desire to study medicine," Castillo said.
He is one of the 3,400 students obtaining a free medical education at a former naval academy in Havana that has been converted into the Latin American School of Medical Sciences.
Another student, Carolina Unamuno of Chile, said: "In my country studying medicine is very expensive and not everyone has access to that kind of career. Even if we want to, we don't have the resources."
Students have to serve their communities
Cuba says its only requirements for these future doctors is that they come from families unable to pay for this kind of education and that they must make the commitment to serve their poor, mainly rural communities when they return home.
And there is another facet of Cuba's medical diplomacy: the thousands of its own doctors deployed in needy areas all over the world, especially Africa.
Cuba explains its international deployment of doctors and the free medical training it offers by saying its Communist system is committed to international solidarity.
But it can sometimes backfire and result in a setback for the country's international image -- as recently happened when two Cuban doctors who had been working in Zimbabwe decided they did not want to return.
Two Cuban doctors seek asylum in Zimbabwe
The doctors tried to seek political asylum but say armed Zimbabwean security agents and Cuban diplomats abducted them in the middle of the night in an attempt to force them back to Cuba.
After repeatedly denying knowledge of the physicians' whereabouts, Zimbabwe's government said there had been an attempt to deport the Cubans. It promised to release them and allow the doctors to seek asylum, according Kris Janowski of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.
Zimbabwe has had hundreds of its physicians trained in Cuba, recently
In the meantime, be it out of altruism or for propaganda reasons, Cuban President Fidel Castro has invited about a dozen black American students from underprivileged areas of South Carolina to study medicine in Cuba.
The invitation came after a recent meeting with visiting members of the United States Congressional Black Caucus.
Havana Bureau Chief Lucia Newman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
© 2000 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved.
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