By Frank Posillico
Maritza Gonzalez-Bravo, the director of ELAM explains how medical school in Cuba works and what differences there are from schools in other countries. (Kevin Lizarazo / JWW)
The Latin American School of Medicine, known by its Spanish initials ELAM, was founded in 1998 in a fulfillment of Fidel Castro’s hope that students from around the globe would study medicine here and then take what they had learned – especially about preventive care and the need to focus on the wide community – into their own countries and communities.
“I wanted to go to a school that would train me to be the kind of doctor that I want to be, not just a school that would train me to be any type of physician,” Ross said, adding that ELAM has “ideals that I feel are important about becoming a doctor.”
Cuba is known the world over for its adherence to community medicine, and from day one the students at ELAM are taught how to be part of their community.
The program, which lasts six years, is free for all students and is targeted at students from impoverished countries or low-income neighborhoods of wealthier countries, such as the United States.
The 50-year-old American embargo against Cuba limits travel for Americans, but as of yet there has not been an issue with the American students who have been going to ELAM.
“Here I love that there are students from all over the world, and since there are students from all over the world anybody can become a doctor,” Ross said. “It’s not just an exclusive group of people or the ones who had the most money or the ones that came from the best background or the ones that had parents that knew the dean.”
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, even subsidized state medical schools in the United State charge an average of $25,000 for state residents and $48,000 for non-residents.
The cost of ELAM, however, is much less. It’s zero, in fact.
Tachira Tavarez, a student at ELAM in her fourth year, writes a blog about her education and has pointed out that her budget — transportation and other costs that come out of her own pocket — came to $6,250 for the most recent school year. She said it was her most expensive year yet.
The Latin American School of Medicine is completely free for students from other countries, the idea is to train students and send them back home to their communities to practice. (Kevin Lizarazo / JWW)
The school was part of a response to the devastation left behind by hurricanes George and Mitch in 1998. Cuba sent medical brigades to the areas most hurt by the disaster, and ELAM was Castro’s longer-term solution –- training young doctors from these areas and sending them back to help their hard-hit communities.
When ELAM opened, Castro said that Cuba would graduate 10,000 students for the world and so far ELAM has graduated 15,000 students.
“This opportunity was something that I could financially afford …Our schooling, food, board and things like that are paid for here in Cuba,” said David Lavender, 31, from Texas. “I could come here, learn a different language and come out being a doctor.”
Like many of the other Americans at ELAM, Lavender liked the idea of focusing on preventive medicine. Plus, he had great respect for the Cuban health care system in general.
Though the American students said they liked their host country and its health care system, most indicated they plan to return home after finishing school. Some may decide to stay or to go off to another country to practice medicine, ELAM officials said, but that is rare.
Ross said that when she graduates, she plans on going back to her hometown of Blakely, Georgia, and focusing on the community she left behind there.
“I wouldn’t need to stay here. Just because it’s good here, doesn’t mean it’s better,” Ross said. “It just means it’s different. The U.S. it still has its pluses too. There are things that Cuba could learn from America.”
Photo Gallery
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- The Latin American School of Medicine is completely free for students from other countries, the idea is to train students and send them back home to their communities to practice. (Kevin Lizarazo / JWW)
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- Maritza Gonzalez-Bravo, the director of ELAM explains how medical school in Cuba works and what differences there are from schools in other countries. (Kevin Lizarazo / JWW)
Your article about ELAM is well written and fascinating. One of your sentences did leave many questions unanswered. While the medical school is reported by you to be free of charge, you quote Tachira Tavarez as saying her out-of-pocket expenses amount to $6,250. I can only assume that she and the other students are not obligated to pay for their schooling but that they do have other costs associated with going to the medical school. Your article would have been more enlightening if you had expanded on what other costs are encountered by students wishing to attend medical school at ELAM. Are students sponsored by families, friends, clubs, associations? Another question left unanswered is what will the students do specifically when they return to the United States. Will the states in which they practice in the United States recognize their training as legitimate? Will the students be granted licenses to practice in the United States? Will they be required to go to a medical school in the U.S. to fulfil U.S. and state requirements for doctors? If the graduates of ELAM return to the U.S. and to their local communities, will they be practicing illegally if they fail to meet standards set up by their states? What costs will the students incur when they return to the U.S. where additional schooling may be required? Your article tends to gloss over the issues I have raised. While being educated free in Cuba sounds like a noble thing, I suspect that the outcome is not as simple as you make it seem. with best regards, Ed Rabel
Perhaps some of what you are discussing here reletas to what society, or politicians, have come to value as quality education. As Professor X argued in The Atlantic, a heck of a lot of people are not cut out for university or college, not because they are failed people, but because what is expected of those attending college and university falls within a certain skill set, a skill set not equally shared by everyone. Likewise, in high school, where there is an overlarge focus being placed on math, science, and high end academic language skills, again a large percentage of students are left by the wayside. School boards across North America decided to cut home economics programs, music programs, shop classes, phys ed programs, art programs, etc, and the tragedy is that this is all a result of the narrowing of the concept of what an education is. While I hated high school in some respects (the social dynamics in particular), I also loved high school for the bands I was able to play in, the musicals I performed in, my art and photography classes, my creative writing classes, playing football, rugby and basketball, and having the chance to delve into politics. I loved high school so much that I failed some courses on purpose, just so I would have to stay another year to fulfill my graduation requirements. But none of what I loved about high school had anything to do with academics whatsoever, and of the purely academic courses I studied, very little of what I spent inordinate amounts of time on has played any part at all in my life since graduation.Really, it just makes you want to sigh. When you stop to think about it, what really is the percentage of people in our society whose knowledge of high end maths, science, or academic scholarship factors into their day to day lives? Do doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers make up the majority of those employed? It is as if, collectively, in North America we have chosen to push the great mass of youth through a teeny tiny bottleneck towards a few rarefied professions, while devaluing and even denigrating everything else.The answers to the problems of demotivated students are not that hard to solve. What is hard to deal with are the politics, and the collectively held, ideologically rooted, and idealized notions of what the word “education” means.