Getting it right about the Cuban-trained doctors

Nov 03, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Come on Mr. Freddie Kissoon, your intention is so obvious. Let us break it down so everyone reading can understand. Twenty nine new medical doctors, well Cuban-trained are now injected into the local health system. Good things are happening.
At GPHC, for example, it is my opinion that there has been an increase in the number of patients visiting this institution. Many more are being seen, treated and cured. This is obviously a worry for certain private institutions; they are losing patients or clients as they say.
It is my opinion that you were hired to write against the Cuban-trained doctors in just another effort to vomit on national development and the government’s progress.
I believe that you write without facts. Below I will leave some links so you can furnish your brain with the necessary information on Cuba and its medical system.  First since you seem so interested in comparing UG and the Medical Schools of Cuba let’s go. Cuba has more than 22 medical schools attached directly with their respective provincial hospitals. In a Vigil state understand that I am not even talking about Municipal hospitals. Medicine in Cuba is lectured by professors, not General Medical Practitioners. Take for example my medical school; we had a total of 18 cadavers for study purposes opened 24 hrs a day besides fresh cadavers at the provincial hospital a stone throw away; a provincial hospital that is based in a province of more than 1 million people and that has its doors opened 24hrs for medical and training purposes.  Get the picture as yet? I guess not knowing your low IQ. Well let me go on and use even more simple language. Cuba provides TOTAL, INTEGRAL and FREE health services to the entire 12 million population. There is nothing like having to pay for a dialysis or hip replacement or sending patients abroad for corrective surgeries for any purpose what so ever.
Still not getting the picture?  Well I advise you to visit the country to understand it.
I think you are a victim of schizophrenia. Ethics which I also did in Cuba does not permit me to diagnose you without clinically exploring you , but I think you may be suffering from this disease.
Mr. Freddie Kissoon I will now do an analysis of your column:
You are saying: “No one in this wide world can lecture to me about the crisis in education delivery when a country’s economy slumps and money vanishes. I am in my 25th year as a university lecturer and I saw (and am still seeing) how the quality of education drastically declines when university services get stuck on hard times.
The pitiful result is that the level of skills touches rock bottom. Competence no longer obtains.”
In Cuba, resources are focused on health, education, sports, military and tourism mainly. Although the lifestyle is not luxurious and the Cubans earn small salaries at least the necessities for a quality life is guaranteed.  In Cuba you will be intelligent, you will be protected, you will be guaranteed the best quality of health for any medical condition. You will be integral and probably be a sportsman and with a boasting reputation in tourism, of course, your country harbours beauty and paradise, again I shall leave links at the end for reference.
A next point I wish to comment on is where you boast of your 25 years as a lecturer. You are saying: “How does this work? Here is where my experience comes in. Limited resources reduce the availability of teaching materials. Here is where the types of knowledge become important. If you are teaching history, you can still deliver a fairly adequate product because books and periodicals and primary sources do not have to be in plentiful supply for a student to obtain competence. How many books do you need to provide a student with if they have to do world history, Caribbean evolution, West Indian literature? You can in fact photocopy the seminal
works in each subject and distribute them to the students.
Chemistry, biology and medicine are completely different affairs”
Now let us analyze again:
This is your experience. May I ask, what is your training in the medical field? How dare you make such comparison. You are not even skilled in this field to compare and speak. Cuba has digital information like www.infomed.sld.cu and a virtual health library http://www.bvscuba.sld.cu  provided free of cost to the entire health professional body of Cuba where all medical literatures for study, research etc are found. Intranet services aided by computer laboratory in all faculties enable the medical student to connect and get the information , There is also google.cu  where numerous Cuban medical sites and WHO sites are available . Get your Spanish dictionary, go to the sites and read a little.  Now please note that every medical school in Cuba has VARIOUS LABORATORIES for the students and health professionals. There is an anatomy laboratory, there is a computer laboratory as I mentioned, sometimes two or three depending on the demand. There are science laboratories, a complete reference library and then of course there is the provincial hospital that is a teaching institution stocked with everything including facilities for the student and also for the patient even MRI and CAT scan just to mention a few provided free of cost to the patient that need them .
You are saying: “To continue without lab experiments, what UG did was to offer the courses without the lab content. The result had to be under-trained scientists.”
I know of this in fact this was one of my very reason for leaving UG in 2003. I was doing Biology with the intention of going into medical school locally but after learning all of these very facts coupled by the excellent medical program of Cuba I left for that destination.
You are saying: “The consequences for a nation having an incompetent historian as against an under-trained medical doctor are horrendous”
This is not so, studies have shown that for  nation development  the highest trained being is equally as important as the common man.
You are saying: “Lives are at stake when a dunce of a medical doctor is treating patients.”
Now listen be it UG, be it Cuba , be it the world , many can graduate from medicine but not all may become doctors and here I agree with you that lives are at stake when a dunce of a medical doctor is treating patients, but who are you talking about?
If this comment is directed to the 29 new Cuban-trained doctors then I ask of you to review our qualifications before you speak, for I can assure you that the majority of us excelled on all levels so much locally as internationally, including me.
So do get your facts then challenge me or my delegation.
You are saying: “In Cuba, the situation is terribly worse than at UG. The Cuban medical scholarship programme for Third World governments is a political game. It is sheer propaganda. Cuba takes thousands of students from around the Third World and puts them through what it calls its degree programmes at university level. These students never fail. They always pass and are sent back to their respective countries as medical doctors. But they are not properly trained, comparatively speaking. The whole thing is a propaganda scheme for Cuba.
“Less than one percent of these enormous numbers attend the main university, Havana University. Most of them are sent to the lesser endowed institutions where facilities are nightmarish. Cuba does not allow these Third World students to do intern work at any Cuban hospital. Never are specialist post-graduate degrees offered.”
Well after the above comments that I made I hope that you will reconsider this comment on UG being better than Cuba. In fact thanks to those Cuban-trained medical lecturers at UG, their knowledge acquired in Cuba is now being fed to the UG medical students to help in their molding. You doubt?
You do realize that most of the best doctors in Guyana presently are direct and indirect products of the Cuban Medical Programme. This includes Maxilofacial Surgeon , Orthopedic Surgeons, Surgeons and Internist etc. Now I can remember while in Cuba there was this famous painting at the National Art Gallery in Havana where the map of Cuba was drawn all over the world and this of course I analyzed and understood that the painting is portraying that Cuba is doing a giant job to help make the world a better place, be it in lending health services, or scholarships for studies.
In Cuba there are students from all over the world, including USA, Canada, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, almost the entire Caribbean, almost the entire South America including Brazil, Suriname, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela , Colombia etc.
It is not today that the Cuban medical programme exists. It has existed for decades and as such for decades it has been offering services to the world.
The other point I wish to comment on is where you say that most of us are sent to lesser endowed institutions. Let it be clear that Cuba’s medical programme splits into three divisions, Havana, Santa Clara and Santiago. All the other medical schools fall under these and are directly supervised by the provincial Health Ministry, Provincial Party and the mother medical school.
So now you know. Let it be clear that all medical students in their sixth year do internship in Cuba of a far higher standard compared to many countries in the world including Guyana. Now only countries like Guyana and South Africa take the medical student home to do Internship on local soil.
Also let it be known that post-graduate degree programmes are offered free of cost to all medical graduates of Cuba. I guess it is only a matter of time before the Guyana government permits us the possibility of returning to Cuba to do our post graduate training.
Let’s see what you write next, talk how much you want about other topics but be careful with what you say about Cuba and Cuban trained professionals!
Dr. Bridgemohan

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