The Cuban government has been paying Americans through a little known program to study medicine in order to return to the United States and serve underprivileged communities.
by Alan Macleod
Part 2 - “It was like going to the UN”
MintPress News spoke with two American attendees of ELAM to understand why they chose Cuba and how they found themselves on the tiny Caribbean island that has been shunned by American media and foreign policy. “It was like going to the UN,” said Sarpoma Sefa-Boakye, a Ghanaian-American who studied there between 2002 and 2009.
Dr. Sefa-Boakye now practices family medicine in San Diego. Walking to school every day, she said, she passed dorm rooms filled with Africans, Latin Americans and students from other Caribbean islands, all speaking different languages. “The teaching [here] is of the highest quality,” Olive Albanese assures me, with class sizes similar to those in American medical schools. Albanese is a fifth year student from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, currently studying at ELAM. “They actually recruit for students from the most humble communities around the world, people whose families would never be able to afford them a medical education, because we are the ones who will make the most humble and conscientious doctors,” she adds.
While Albanese applied to study because she wanted a university experience that would challenge her in more ways than just academically, Dr. Sefa-Boakye had no idea about the existence of such a possibility until she was spending time in Ghana and was shocked to meet Cuban doctors speaking her parents’ language of Twi. She was even more astonished when they told her that as an American, she could study for free in Cuba. Within weeks, she had enrolled.
Bernie Sanders was roundly condemned for praising the country’s health and medical prowess. “These are flat-out dictators, period, and they should be called for it, straight-up,” former vice-president Joe Biden told him at the most recent Democratic debate in Miami. Cuba preaches the idea of socialist medicine, which can be traced back to the revolutionary Che Guevara, himself a doctor. But the island, beset by poverty and by decades of U.S. sanctions, has had to develop unique methods for dealing with public health.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba was cut off from a major trading partner and a vital source of oil. In a similar fashion to its current actions against countries like Iran and Venezuela, the U.S. greatly increased sanctions on the island, imposing a unilateral (and illegal) embargo.
With no oil and without the ability to pay for imported food or goods, the economy was devastated, and Cuba entered what it euphemistically calls “the special period.” Across the country there was widespread hunger, with caloric intake sharply decreasing and a generalized loss of weight among the population. The death rate among the elderly greatly increased.
With no oil and without the ability to pay for imported food or goods, the economy was devastated, and Cuba entered what it euphemistically calls “the special period.” Across the country there was widespread hunger, with caloric intake sharply decreasing and a generalized loss of weight among the population. The death rate among the elderly greatly increased.
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