Cuba to Graduate 22,000 Foreign Physicians in 2011

Saturday, 08 October 2011

Havana, Cuba, Oct 8.- Cuba expects to close 2011 with almost 22,000 physicians from 65 countries graduated with similar study plans to those applied in the Caribbean nation that emphasizes health prevention, press reported on Saturday.
The figure also includes the first graduation of physicians in Venezuela in December with Cuban professors and methods, Granma newspaper stated after reporting the graduation so far of about 13,600 physicians from other countries. About 10,000 students have studied at the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), founded in 1999 to train youth from Central America, devastated by Hurricane Mitch the year before. Then, the initiative by the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, was expanded to other Latin American, Asian and African countries, and even to poor U.S. communities.
About 21,000 scholarships from 113 nations have been enrolled in Cuban medical universities, more than 1,700 study in their countries the last year of the career. Also on the list are other 134,000 youth trained by Cuban teachers in Guinea Bissau, Timor Leste, Gambia, Tanzania, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Bolivia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Guyana and Venezuela. (Prensa Latina).