by Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine
Saturday, Jul. 28, 2001 at 9:39 AM mgconlan@earthlink.net (619) 688-1886 P.O. Box 50134, San Diego, CA 92165
Karima Mosi is one of eight U.S. students currently on a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba. Cuban President Fidel Castro launched the program two years ago to train people of color, poor people and people from countries where many go without health care to become community-based doctors. Mosi describes her studies and her encounters with Cuban life and culture.
errorKarima Mosi Studies Medicine … in Cuba Young African-American Takes Scholarship to Learn Community Doctoring
“It’s always been a dream of mine to become a doctor,” said Karima Mosi, a 23-year-old African-American woman student, to an audience of 20 at the San Diego International Action Center July 26. But she’s pursuing that dream in an unusual location for a pre-med student from the United States: Cuba. She just returned from her first three months of a six-year scholarship program the Cuban government started two years ago to train doctors for community service in other countries.
Mosi said she got turned off to the idea of going to medical school in the U.S. when she did a summer internship at Yale aimed at showing her what the experience would be like. “I didn’t like the medical-school atmosphere,” she recalled. “There wasn’t much diversity and I really didn’t like the distant relationship between doctors and patients.” Another aspect of U.S. health care she didn’t like was that most of her colleagues in the Yale program were frankly in it only for the money. They wanted to become highly paid specialists, where her interest in medicine was general and family practice aimed at serving her community, she said.
“When I first heard about the Cuban medical school, I was excited,” Mosi recalled. “In Cuba health care is free, doctors work within the community, most doctors are general practitioners and family health doctors, and they work for the community rather than for the money.” Another reason she applied as soon as she got the scholarship information: “I decided to learn for myself what Cuba is.”
Though Cuba has trained aspiring doctors from other countries for community service for years, the program Mosi joined is a relatively new one. It was organized two years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Mitch and the devastation it wreaked throughout Central America. Cuban president Fidel Castro and his minister of health launched the program after seeing how inadequate the health-care systems of other Central American countries were in responding to emergencies like Hurricane Mitch.
The first students were from Honduras, Mosi explained. “Then other Central and South American countries asked to participate, and representatives from the Congressional Black Caucus visited Fidel and he made an offer for poor students and people of color to study there.” Mosi herself learned of the program’s existence in January 2001, applied immediately, was accepted and started her studies in April. She is one of eight U.S. students in the current class.
“Right now I’m still pre-med,” Mosi said. “I’ve taken biology, chemistry, history, math and general science. They put all new students in a class to learn the basic sciences and the history of Latin America. I’d taken these classes before but other students from the U.S. hadn’t. The classes are in Spanish, so I’m encountering the material in another language and it’s really giving me a different perspective.” (Mosi had taken four years of Spanish before she applied and so she hasn’t had a problem with the language barrier.)
The school itself is in a beachfront community on the outskirts of Havana, and is surprisingly isolated from the rest of the country. “The school isn’t really Cuba,” Mosi explained. “It’s an alternate reality where you can meet people, young people, from all over the world.” Mosi said the ages of her classmates range from 18 to 30, but most of them are at the young end of that range; some of the other students call her “grandma” because she’s all of 23.
The program is tough and somewhat scary, Mosi said. “The program is supposed to be six years long, and hopefully I’ll finish in that time,” she explained. “One young man from Chicago named Pepe was really intimidated, even though he already spoke Spanish. We were taking seven classes, instead of the three you’d be taking at a U.S. community college. It’s a lot of work, and you have to be really motivated. You’re hundreds of miles away from home and you can’t call home or e-mail people the way you could if you were away at school in the United States. There’s psychological trauma and intellectual trauma as well.”
The school maintains a closed campus Monday through Friday. Students are allowed to leave only on the weekends, and though Havana itself and some of the other communities nearby offer social opportunities, the isolation has helped make the students each other’s best friends. “You create a whole other family,” Mosi said. “Students who know the material will help you out. You get a stipend, so you don’t have to worry about working. All you have to do is study.”
Most of the questions audience members asked Mosi were about Cuban life in general and whether she’ll have any problem being admitted to practice medicine in the U.S. after she completes the program. She said she’ll have to meet the same requirements as a U.S. medical student: passage of the medical board exam, a three-year residency and a final examination for her actual license. “There have already been people from the U.S. who studied medicine in Cuba and practice here, so there’s precedent,” she explained.
Mosi described weekend life in Havana as “really crazy” and said there’s a lot more tourism than you might expect — from the U.S. as well as Canada, Western Europe and other countries that don’t maintain an embargo against Cuba. She was particularly startled by the contrast between the way she and her fellow medical students lived, and the way some U.S. students on an exchange program to study at the University of Havana lived.
“They’re living at a five-star hotel and getting excellent meals,” she explained. “We have cold showers and no toilet seats. The food is not good, but when you go to Havana you see a lot of tourists from the U.S. there. It’s a really pleasant place to be, and the Cuban people don’t hold it against you that you’re from the U.S. They know the problem is with our government, not us.” However, Cuba is not immune from the usual downsides of urban life; Mosi said she has seen homeless people and beggars on the streets of Havana, much to the disappointment of a few audience members who had assumed there wouldn’t be any such people in a socialist country.
Mosi said the biggest culture shock she’s encountered has been the exaggerated views of U.S. life her other students have picked up from American entertainment media. “A lot of the students think all Americans are rich and spoiled, and they wonder what we’re doing there,” she said. “You have to explain to them what this country really is.” Mosi was startled by one young man who asked her how he could get into the CIA or the FBI. It turned out his entire view of those organizations had come from watching the TV show The X-Files.
According to Mosi, the school — like the whole country — “is a work in progress. Fidel had a dream and a lot of people put it together and made it happen.” She said that because the school is relatively isolated, some of the Cubans she meets don’t have any idea who she is, what she’s doing there, or even where the school is located. “But I have never seen anyone run away from me,” she said. “They’re very open.”