Cuba offers 5000 scholarships for Central American Medical Students
Excerpts from the speech of of President Castro to 12th National Science and Technology Forum, November 21,1988.

President Fidel Castro:

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"We're offering 500 scholarships a year for a period of 10 years. Initially we didn't mention this detail, but our idea is to grant 500 medical school scholarships a year, for a period of 10 years to young people from Central America, who have already graduated high school. In other words, Cuba is really offering 5000 scholarships -not 500.

One of the things that pleased us very much in the conversation our foreign minister had yesterday with the president of Guatemala was that he expressed great interest in those scholarships. But he pro- posed an idea: he wanted half of those awards to be granted to young students from ethnic communities. What an excellent idea! In that country over 50% of the population is Indian. In many towns all are ethnic people. It seemed to me a marvellous idea.

Now we are thinking about how to make selections for the scholar- ships. The work must be done as quickly as possible. The impact of the news of Cuba's offer of 500 awards per year has been incredible, really incredible in both Guatemala and Nicaragua visited by Robaina. In the 2 days since the announcement of this program was made, it has been widely covered by radio,TV and press throughout Central America and telephones to our embassies there and to our Honduran Interests.

We asked our charge d'affaires in Nicaragua, for instance, how many people entered universities each year and he gave us the yet to be confirmed figure of 5000 students in majors, altogether. Numbers of people graduating from high school each year were between 20000 and 25000. Thus there is an enormous pool of young people in that country from which to select those to study medicine.

Now we have to discuss the selection criteria with each country. I already explained that the president of Guatemala expressed special interest in at least half of those selected being from the Indian community. In our opinion we must train professionals willing to work in the most isolated, most difficult places. We must analyze the criteria and methods of selection with the health ministers and authorities.

I imagine it to be the same in all of Central America. We should take advantage of the 5 or 6 months before September to give inten- sive courses in preparation for their first year of medical studies. We are also looking at our capacities in basic sciences at Giron Medical School and others, and at what has to be done to begin receiving them as early as January for preparatory studies.

The demand is so great right now that we are even thinking that within the 10-year program we might enroll 1000 the first year, instead of 500 after understanding the enormous interest in the scholarships on the part of the authorities and young people.

When they are being trained, their countries will have the services of our doctors. And not just Cuban doctors; we don't want to be alone there. We have proposed that this be a Latin American program, with the inclusion of Latin American doctors; we're even proposing that it be an Ibero-American program, including Spain and Portugal. It could even become a Euro-Ibero-American program, because I think there are possibilities and some Western European countries might want to contribute economically to a program such as this, and to contribute skilled personnel.

So at the end of 10 years there would be 5500 medical students who had received scholarships. We're going to wait, but we've already communicated to some governments in the area the idea of increasing the number of scholarships this first year, because in that year there's going to be great pressure.

We have the capacity and we are training doctors from the Caribbean; -all the Caribbean countries want to train doctors. We are also training doctors from South Africa and other countries. You can see that we really don't publicize or propagandize around the cooperation we give to a number of Third World countries.

A country like Paraguay requested scholarships a while ago, and there are now 120 Paraguayan medical students on scholarships here. Not a word has ever been said about that. There are others who help to pay the costs of their studies, who pay a certain amount. During the special period that formula was established for some cases.

But to our Caribbean neighbors we offer all those scholarships free of charge; these young people studying medicine were selected with a preference for those living in the country's interior, I understand -I'm talking in approximate terms -but there are also 80 who are paying to study medicine in our country. Most Paraguayans study free.

I am told now that there are 500 paying medical students and 800 free scholarship students. Right! Those without free scholarships pay $5000 dollars per year for their study and living costs.This compares with probable US costs of maybe $15000 or up to $30000. Who knows?

We have 60 to 70 South African medical students here, their fees and expenses paid by the Sth African Ministry of Health. It is a country with considerable resources, but given the social problem that exists there, where all the villages, for example, are asking for Cuban doctors, more and more, we actually proposed to them that we send them medical professors so that they can train doctors there in much larger numbers.

It should be taken into account that the black population in South Africa had very few possibilities to study in the Universities. It was a privilege for the wealthy class which supported apartheid. We expressed our concern about that situation in which only a few dozen black students have completed their studies.

Given the budget available to the Ministry of Public Health in Sth Africa -led by a woman who was a great fighter against apartheid, and who visited Canada and explained what I have just told you -the number of medical students it can send to Cuba is limited. We told them that we really didn't want to charge for those 60 students, that we were going to renounce payment for a few dozen students, that they had to send more, and taking into account the travel expenses, they had to promote massive medical studies in Sth Africa itself, with Cuban professors. Otherwise they will never meet the current need for doctors in that country, doctors who are willing and able to work in the villages.

Did you know what our medical schools capacity is? Thirty thousand! There are about 15000 studying medicine now, which of course includes some foreigners. We had been progressively reducing the number of Cuban new students from 6000 per year to 2500, more or less. We had essentially met our needs for medical personnel contained in our ambitious health programs. Now we only have to prepare replacements and maintain a reserve.

In the program we designed in the '80s we had the idea of having 10000 available to help the Third World. During that period all the medical schools we now have were created, long before the special period. Then came the special period, limited resources and other difficulties which in a certain sense altered the programs. Part of the capacity designed for medical students was utilized for univer- sity degree programs in nursing and other health technicians. But we have reserve capacity.

The English-speaking Caribbean countries, who are our closest friends, who were at the forefront of the fight against our isolation in this hemisphere, who have given Cuba courageous support in the United Nations, in the Lome negotiations and in all international forums, who are small countries, have a combined quota of no less than 1000 scholarships for various majors. If they need more they can have all they need.

In Namibia I had the satisfaction of seeing some people who came to Cuba as children, at the ages of 10 or 12, survivors of the massacres at Cassinga in southern Angola, one of the great crimes the fascists of apartheid committed there.

We created a school for them on our Isle of Youth. On my recent visit to that country, I had the satisfaction of meeting with the doctors and professionals who had been those children that I visited so many times at that school. It's really impossible to measure what we did from a moral and humane point of view. Some have risen to the level of government ministers. The head of one of Namibia's most important ministries, given its bountiful seas, the Ministry of the Fishing Industries, is a doctor trained in Cuba, quite a young man, who came here when he was 12, a survivor from Cassinga. It's imposs- ible to measure the value of sowing those seeds throughout the world.

We came to have 22,000 foreign scholarship students in our country's schools. No other country in the world ever had so many scholarship students per capita as Cuba did and they are now spread all over Africa and other regions of the world. That also helps to explain the Third World's solidarity with Cuba; that also helps to explain the 157-2 vote in favor of our UN General Assembly resolution condemning the blockade, although we didn't do it for that reason; we did it because of our ideals and our feelings of solidarity and internation- alism. (Sustained Applause)

That is our ideology, and that is what we preach, not with words but by example, and backed by the freedom of being, perhaps, the only country in the world -look at that word -I'm not saying the only free country in the world, but rather the only country in the world that can speak with absolute freedom, with 100% freedom. Take off .5% if you want, because there are times when -without lying, because we never lie -strictly out of diplomatic courtesy, we must be careful in what we say on some subjects. (Laughter) But we're a country that goes to the United Nations, to any forum, anywhere, and say what some good and honest friends cannot say for one reason or another which is important for their countries, such as a credit from the IMF or the World Bank, or such and such a regional bank, or the Export-Import Bank of the US. But our country does not depend on any of those inst- itutions. It learned to survive under very difficult conditions.

It has struggled for 40 years for that independence which we hope to preserve forever, whether or not there is a blockade, because if one day the blockade disappears and if relations are even normalized -and we already know what it means to have normal relations with the United States -we will continue to live in a world where the truth is necessary, and we will never renounce our right and our freedom to tell the truth.

We have many international relations; we have diplomatic relations with who knows how many countries, and every day there are more. But we discuss the basic, fundamental, essential ideas of Cuba's inter- national policy and our Revolution's ideology everywhere. And I can assure you that there is nothing as productive as that freedom and that possibility of telling the truth. Under the most dissimilar and incredible circumstances, we are preaching with word and by example, and that brings great results.

We're not thinking of results for ourselves. We will continue to fight very very hard for ourselves and for our people's maximum well- being. We are an example that can help the world very very much and we have ideas that can help the world very very much, a world that within 50 years will have 10 billion inhabitants and which must survive, which needs solutions and which will not survive without an example, ideas and truth.

These are elements of judgment I wanted to give you. Later on I'll remember if I overlooked something.

IN TODAY'S WORLD, THERE WILL BE NO SOLUTIONS FOR ANY COUNTRY IF THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS FOR THE WORLD...

Of course there is still one more thing, and that is thanking this forum, (applause)because it is due to all of you and millions of men and women that our country can write this page of glory, this page of honor, this page of humanism. Because of millions of men and women like you, our country has resisted, and not only has it resisted but it has moved forward; and not only has it moved forward, but it is contributing in a significant manner to the advances in our world.

We must get used to the idea that, in this world in which it is our lot to live now, no country can solve its problems all by itself. In today's world, there will be no solutions for any country if there are no solutions for the world. A very eloquent example are the Asian Tigers, which grew and grew, with brilliant economies, reserves of tens of billions of dollars,and by virtue of neoliberal globalization of that system which has been imposed on the world, they were ruined in a matter of days. No country on earth is secure.

Europe is uniting, because a single European country can't survive economically. Britain can't survive on its own,and the US speculators devalued its currency and placed it on the verge of ruin. France can't survive on its own, nor Spain, nor Italy, nor Germany, even though it is one of the world's greatest industrial and economic powers. They can't do it! They have to unite in order to survive in the total economic, political and military domain, and in the cultural field -which is becoming U.S. imperialism's number one weapon. We could see that in our congress of writers and artists, the attempt to impose a cultural empire, its fundamental weapon today.

Someone well-versed in these matters called it the nuclear weapon of the 21st century.

Economically, no country in the world will have nor can it have security. They are the only ones who possess a relative security -and really, its just a certain level of security, because they are the ones who print the world's money. They have appropriated that privil- ege for themselves. They have all the money they want at everyone else's expense, and they are the ones who invest the most in the world; they invest other people's money -the bills other people received and deposited in their central banks or in U.S. banks, and they use them to buy companies anywhere in the world, to build fact- ories. But that has a limit.

And in the past few months the world was on the edge of that limit- that is, on the verge of an economic catastrophe, although, as we have said, they still have the possibilities and the resources to delay the crisis, to postpone it, which is what they're doing.

The system cannot be saved; the established domination cannot be maintained. That is the reason we have told many people that no country can solve its problems on its own.

This very Revolution, now, in this moment, if it had triumphed in 1998, if they had let it triumph, if they hadn't tried to crush it almost before we returned to Cuba on the 'Granma', or left Mexico; no, this Revolution today would be a revolutionary power that could not exist. We can exist because we were born in a specific moment and circumstance; we managed to gather together all this strength of con- sciousness and human values. This is Cuba today despite all the problems."

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