"An Island on a Continent"

– ELAM has graduated 30,636 students from 120 countries, including Africans and Americans.

Havana. – The Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba (ELAM) celebrated this November 15, 23 years since it was founded by the leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, who is considered a promoter of the training of human resources in this sensitive sector.

ELAM –located in the west of the capital– has 18 graduations in its history, in which 30,636 students from 120 countries graduated.

The emeritus professor and consultant of the school Luis Estruch recently declared to Prensa Latina that the campus is proof of the humanism, internationalism and altruism in the thought of the Commander in Chief.

Fidel had the concept that without the training of human resources it is impossible to guarantee health services, for that it is necessary to have doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel, and that is a problem to be solved in poor nations and many with notable development, explained Estruch.

What the Latin American School of Medicine modestly does is instruct young people, and this means that they return to their homeland with a university education.

They – he added – can work in communities in primary care and help their people a lot, said the specialist with 52 years of experience in the sector.

He recalled Fidel Castro’s presence in the US city of New York in 2000, when he attended a United Nations General Assembly session.

They invited him, the black and religious community, to a meeting at the Riverside Church, where there were more than five thousand participants, and he offered 500 scholarships so that young people from the place could come to study at the Latin American School of Medicine.

That task was given to me by the Commander in Chief, and nobody wanted to believe that, that boys from the first economic power traveled to Cuba to train as a doctor, that was a long political and ideological battle, he pointed out.

More than 500 young people from the United States came to Cuba, and more than 250 opted for the specialty of Medicine and graduated, and a large part of them have already passed very rigorous academic procedures to receive validation and practice in the United States, the doctor highlighted.

This battle had Fidel Castro and the Reverend Lucius Walker (1930-2010) as protagonists, and I believe that we did not achieve the massiveness that the «Comandante» wanted, but many of them -and I have had the opportunity to see them in Harlem and the Bronx- they already work in hospitals and communities.

That was Fidel’s idea, and it is not that we are going to solve the problem of that nation, but it was a small quota of hope for the poor who in their communities will be able to be served by young graduates in Cuba.