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I feel it is my duty to explain these things to you, without straying even an iota from the truth, since you have so steadfastly shown your solidarity with our country in the face of so much deception and lies.

Now then, our internationalist spirit has not falter in the slightest during the special period. It is true that we had to reduce the number of scholarships for foreign students, whose numbers reached 24,000 in the 1980s. We were the country with the highest number of foreign students per capita, among all countries in the world (APPLAUSE), and we did not charge them a single penny.

There are tens of thousands of professionals and technical workers in Africa who studied and graduated in Cuba. I mention Africa, although there were also students from many other countries, but they primarily came from the world’s poorest continent. Their numbers decreased during this past decade.

We also inevitably had to cut back for a few years on our programs to support health care efforts in other countries. But I can now say, with great satisfaction, that today we have more doctors and health care workers providing free services in the Third World than at any previous time. (APPLAUSE)

I would like to make a few brief comments on this subject. After Hurricane George --I do not know why they named it after one of the forefathers of independence in the United States and its first president-- caused great devastation and killed many people, we offered Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere, all of the doctors it needed. (APPLAUSE) Then the same thing happened a few weeks later in Central America with Hurricane Mitch, which brought sweeping rains associated to climatic changes. These were particularly destructive because the forests had been cut down to export timber to the wealthy countries. We offered the same thing to the Central American countries as we did to Haiti, and immediately sent hundreds of doctors and proposed the development of comprehensive health care programs.

We felt it was not simply a matter of sending a number of doctors, helping out for two or three weeks after the hurricane and then leaving, because this hurricane had killed over 30,000 people, according to the highest estimates made at the time. Perhaps the actual number of deaths was around 15,000, since many of those who were missing eventually showed up. We already knew that over 40,000 children die of preventable diseases every year in Central America; I will not even mention the number of adults. This is like an ongoing quiet hurricane, --much more devastating than Hurricane Mitch-- that kills three times as many children every single year as the number killed by Hurricane Mitch, and nobody even talks about it.

The countries of Central America accepted our doctors, primarily those who acted independently; some were prohibited from accepting. The health care programs that were set up at that time are in operation.

Currently, there are about 450 Cuban doctors and health care workers, --including a few technicians to operate the equipment and a few specialized nurses, although almost all of them are doctors-- in the most isolated locations of one of these countries where there are snakes, mosquitoes and no electricity.

These programs are working and expanding. We do not provide the medicines because we do not have them. The medicines are supplied by the governments of the countries involved and some non-governmental organizations. But, our doctors’ services are supplied absolutely free of charge (APPLAUSE).

Today there are several hundred Cuban doctors in Haiti --approximately the same number as in the other country-- who provide medical care to over four million people. There is also a group of Cuban specialists in the country’s main hospital and in other hospitals where there were not enough specialists, and they treat people from any part of the country who need it. They have saved many lives.

Obviously, saving lives is not so difficult if you follow the simple strategy of immunization with vaccines that cost a few cents. And of course, the same is true if you apply the kind of health care policies that permit lives to be saved and people to be cured at a minimal cost. The lives of millions of children who die in the Third World could be saved for just pennies.

We offered Central America about 2000 doctors and Haiti as many doctors as it needed. But that was not all we did. Following cuts to our military spending, we founded a medical school in Cuba at what used to be a major military facility, a former defense school There, about 1000 Central American youth from distant regions and humble backgrounds are studying medicine. (APPLAUSE) First, they do six months of premed studies to level them off followed by two years of basic sciences at that same school. They will then go on to four years of studies in any of our country’s 20 medical schools which, combined with the basic sciences schools, can currently accommodate 40,000 students.

There were years in which 6000 students entered these medical schools but that number was subsequently reduced. Now these schools are used to train not only doctors but also university-graduate nurses and hospital technicians, as well as dentists.

The new school I have described now has over 3000 students. In a few months, when the new school year begins --in some countries high school classes finish in the fall while in others they finish in the summer-- new students will enter the premed course. By March, another group of 1700 students will join bringing the total enrollment to approximately 5000 students. (APPLAUSE)

In three years there will be over 8000 Latin American medical students, who do not have to pay a single penny for their studies and are even provided with better food than the 40,000 Cuban university students on scholarships.

At the moment there are also 80 students at the school from Equatorial Guinea, a Spanish-speaking country.

This is a full program called the Latin American School of Medical Sciences, but it is not limited to the building where basic sciences and premed courses are taught. The program includes all the medical schools spread throughout the country.

I have not said that in Santiago de Cuba we have more than 200 Haitian students. They are excellent students. They have finished their premed and begun their medical studies. Every year they will be joined by about 80 new students. I have also not included the young medical students from the Caribbean who are studying at the medical school in Cienfuegos. At the moment there must be over 4000 students from Latin America and the Caribbean studying medicine in Cuba, and that is a conservative estimate. Soon there will be 10,000. (APPLAUSE) Our country has done this in spite of the blockade and at absolutely no cost to the students who are provided with adequate food and living quarters, laboratory equipment, textbooks and clothing; and other costs are covered as well, such as transportation to and from the school.

The invitation was opened to students from all over Latin America as a way to promote unity, brotherhood, and cultural exchange.

The school has cultural groups representing each country. The students will leave with considerable knowledge about the other countries of the region. Above all, the idea is to create a new concept, a new concept on the role of doctors in society because in the capitals and other big cities of Latin America there are more than enough doctors, but they have not all been educated about the real duties of a doctor. (APPLAUSE) The number of students is not as important as the ideas that guide this program.

You cannot imagine how eagerly these students apply themselves to their studies, how dedicated they are, even more so than our own students, who are as used to having these opportunities as to seeing the sun rise every day. The Latin American students come from very poor regions and studying medicine was a dream. The results have been excellent. These schools will turn out excellent doctors! The effort they put into their studies is more than enough compensation for us.

What are we doing in Africa? It would be impossible to bring tens of thousands of Africans to Cuba. You see, to have one doctor for every 4000 people, Africa would need about 160,000 doctors. Cuba has one doctor for every 168 people, and 2000 new doctors graduate every year.

In order for sub-Saharan Africa to have one doctor to 1000 people, there would have to be approximately 596,000 doctors. How are they going to train them? What is the solution we have implemented through the Comprehensive Health Care Programs for Africa? We have 3000 doctors available for sub-Saharan Africa. Their first task is to immediately open a medical school wherever one is needed. (APPLAUSE) They do this by inviting high school graduates and offering a six-month upgrading course. We have just done this in The Gambia, where 158 Cuban doctors are working. (APPLAUSE) They asked us for 90 more, and we provided them. This was the first country in Africa where the comprehensive health care program was initiated. They had 30 Gambian doctors for a population of 1,200,000.

The second country was Equatorial Guinea where over 100 Cuban doctors are already working and have established a medical school.

We had established a medical school in Guinea-Bissau many years ago, but it was destroyed in a recent civil war with foreign intervention. They have not been able to rebuild it yet, but they asked us if the fifth and sixth year students could continue their studies in Cuba. They were immediately admitted (APPLAUSE), but because the rebuilding of the school has been delayed, they asked us a few weeks ago if we could take the first, second, third and fourth year students as well. We told them, “Send them over right away.” Thus, all these students will be able to continue their studies. This is how we work.

There is a need to train hundreds of thousands of African doctors and nobody cares to do anything about it. There is a very wealthy part of the world that is only interested in oil, diamonds, minerals, forests, natural gas, cheap labor, and nothing else. As a result, the situation in that hemisphere is much worse today than in colonial times, much worse! The population has grown many times over. The situation is dreadful.

Yesterday, at the United Nations they were discussing AIDS. That is a whole other subject. If you will allow me, I will talk about it later. (APPLAUSE)

Why have I spent so much time on the subject of medicine? I will explain. We have offered all the Caribbean countries free university scholarships, for all those who apply in any field of study. There are many countries in the Caribbean but the total population is not large. They speak English.

I recently learned something that really amazed me. We were visited by some members of the Congressional Black Caucus --I am talking about this because they mentioned it to the press but it is the first time I discuss it publicly-- and as I was telling a lawmaker from Mississippi about these programs he said: “Listen, there are a lot of places in my district where there isn’t a single doctor.” I said, “What! Ah, now I see: you people are the Third World of the United States.” (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS) And I said: “We are prepared to send you a few doctors free of charge, the same as we do for other countries of the Third World.”

I suddenly realized the way things really are. You always hear about how wealthy the United States is, about its gross domestic product of over eight trillion dollars, and so on, and suddenly there I was talking to a respected member of the U.S. House of Representatives who said that there are not enough doctors in his district. That is why I said, “We can send doctors.” And remembering the schools I immediately added, “And there is something more: listen, we are prepared to grant a number of scholarships to poor youth in your district who cannot afford to pay the 200,000 dollars it costs to get a university degree.” (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS) When they got back to the United States they discussed this matter, and they have told us that they are studying the question of scholarships, because there are always problems of compatibility among the professional training systems in different countries.

I assured them that our doctors have excellent training. They begin to have contact with community doctors and polyclinics from the very first year, and their six years of medical school include not only theoretical studies with excellent professors but also practical experience. They are constantly in contact with hospitals. Our 20 medical schools --there are actually 22, but two of them are for basic sciences-- were built near the country’s most important hospitals in every province. They do their internships and study their specialties right there, so they do not need to leave the provinces to study in the country’s capital.

The member of the U.S. House of Representatives said to me that other minorities face the same situation and he told to me about the Chicanos, about the Indian reservations and about other parts of the country, and he meant not only to Latinos and immigrants but also to people born in the United States. I said, “Your country is very big, enormous, and we would not be able to do what we do in other countries. I do not know how many people there are in your Third World but I imagine that there must be about 30 or 40 million.” (APPLAUSE)

Do you want to hear something? We have enough doctors for quite a few million people, but I did not dare to offer more because we have a lot of commitments, so I said, “This will not solve your huge problem but I am sure that if you need doctors and request visas for these doctors to go there, the authorities could not possibly turn them down. Otherwise, how could they justify the thousands of doctors they have stolen from us, the 3000 they took away in the first years of the Revolution --half of the 6000 doctors we had at the time, a full half!-- and more than half of our university professors. We were actually left with only 3000 patriotic doctors (APPLAUSE), and with them we developed our plans and took on the challenge. Today we have 67,500 doctors (APPLAUSE), over 20 for every doctor they took from us in the early years. This is the result of tenacity and the determination to do things”. (APPLAUSE)

And what is happening now? There is a policy to promote the defection of our doctors working in internationalist missions. Something happened a few weeks ago. We have 108 doctors working in provincial hospitals in Zimbabwe because they do not have enough doctors, since the apartheid regime in Rhodesia did not train any black doctors. And so what was once Rhodesia, and is now the independent nation of Zimbabwe, after more than 20 years, has many hospitals with no doctors. We spread our doctors around and sent a team of at least eight or ten to almost every province: specialists in comprehensive general medicine, surgeons, orthopedic specialists, anesthesiologists, X-ray technicians, and other technicians to repair equipment. (APPLAUSE)

Two of these doctors defected, evidently taken in by the trillion dollars spent every year on advertising to exalt consumerism which always leads to the defection of a small percentage. It is an honor for our country to be able to say that only 1.6% of all those participating in these comprehensive health care programs have defected. Still, it hurts. (APPLAUSE)

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