Despite El Bloqueo Americans Go to Cuban Medical School

Despite 'El Bloqueo,' Americans Go to Cuban Medical School

New America Media, Commentary/Feature, Patricia Johnson, Mar 31, 2006

Editor's Note: Surviving frogs in the showers, Cuban food and the
high-stakes game of U.S.-Cuban relations, a group of young Americans
receiving free medical training in Havana may show the First World that
it has a thing or two to learn about community health. Patricia Johnson
writes for New America Media.

HAVANA--At odds with the United States since 1959 and determined to hold
his ground until the end, Fidel Castro's parting gift to a world fed up
with America's superiority complex may well be batches of young
Americans who survive medical school in Cuba.
author and student
I traveled to Havana to learn about the students' odyssey from my friend
Carmen Landau, who was among the first Americans invited into the Latin
American School of Medical Science (ELAM). That's Fidel Castro's public
health diplomacy project that offers free medical training to 5,000
young people from the Americas and Africa. The young Americans I met
said a free medical education was a dream that couldn't come true in the
United States, but did here.

With little to no supervision or mentoring, the first 26 young American
students were billeted in an old naval academy, now the ELAM campus on
the outskirts of Havana. Unlike the students from Latin America and
Africa, the Americans were given refrigerators in their dorm rooms,
trotted out for diplomatic visitors and interviewed on television.

Like celebrities, they were isolated from the school's mainstream. The
pressure was corrosive. Fights scandalous enough for reality TV broke
out, and the stress drove many home, defeated or homesick, or maybe just
hungry. The ELAM cafeteria's rice and runny beans for lunch and dinner,
with a slab of ham if you're lucky, was even worse than standard Cuban
cuisine, which gets little international praise. I was shocked by
Carmen's weight loss when she visited home after her first year.
Motorcycle
The eight remaining students developed survival strategies, and Carmen's
was to keep to herself. She illegally rented an apartment in Havana,
breaking not only Cuban law, but also school rules, and started a life
separate from the American ELAM students. It paid off. She was the first
ELAM student to pass the first step of the American medical board exams
-- and at press time only three others have done the same.

On my last night in Havana we hitchhike to a hip-hop show at a small
outdoor amphitheater, along the slow river that cuts through the city.
On stage, a young DJ nods his head to the set up music, but he's not
pumping the Orishas or Mac Dre. It's a Spanish cover of "Total Eclipse
of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler's pop hit from 1983. He grabs the unplugged
mic stand and belts out the chorus.

I dance with a guy who shows me his ID card to prove his name is
Usnavis. His mother named him after the U.S. Navy ship she saw out her
window in Havana Bay, invoking an image in my head of the whole island
surrounded by a futile blockade of bloated U.S. naval ships reinforcing
the American presence in everyday Cuban life.
Class
Carmen and I hear two young women speaking in English, and it turns out
they are also ELAM students. Sarah Igbokwe, from Texas, and her friend
Nikita Thomas, from New York, are in their second year and have had a
radically different experience than Carmen. Their brigade is very close,
and they've only heard rumors about the first brigade's problems. The
program is now run by Lucius Walker's Pastors for Peace, which screens
applicants and gives orientation support.

Carmen warns them, "Don't try to take the board exam after your second
year, no matter what anyone tells you. You will fail. Wait 'til you get
through the third year rotations, when you learn everything." The
exchange is easy, we're all laughing. Sarah and Nikita tell of adjusting
to frogs in the showers and no toilet seats, but they don't seem to
carry the same diplomatic burden Carmen felt as a program guinea pig.
They can't believe the stories Carmen tells about the first-year drama.

A slow hip hop version of "Guantanamera," the unofficial Cuban anthem
about a beautiful girl from Guantanamo, floats out of the speakers and
gets mixed with a Lauren Hill classic. I'm reminded that on the far tip
of the island other Americans are sweating at the U.S. military base
with the same name.
Students, lauren and other
These conversations leave Carmen hopeful. "If my brigade had been tight
like they are, we could start an association to put pressure on the
American health care system and raise the profile of community health
approaches." Maybe the others will make it happen, she hopes. "It just
wasn't my experience."

Castro now has a friend in Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, who is
bankrolling free eye surgery by Cuban doctors for poor Latin Americans.
Launched as "Operation Miracle" in 2004, Chavez' program looks and talks
a lot like Cuba's public health diplomacy project at ELAM. Now there are
murmurs he'll extend the program to low-income communities in the United
States, like those that benefited from discounted Citgo oil this winter.

Though spun on altruistic grounds, the twin programs seem to turn the
Peace Corps model on its head -- the supposedly impoverished, repressive
Third World giving alms to the left-behinds of the American capitalist
empire.

"Let's bounce," Sarah says. The live performers didn't show, and she's
probably had enough of amateur Cuban emcees mixing outdated American
conscious rap with Cuban folklore. But when she leaves this island,
she's taking the mix with her. Ready or not.

Photos by author Patricia Johnson

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