BOWIE, Maryland—Yenaivis Fuentes and Aníbal Ramos (fourth and fifth from right) visited the Department of Nursing at Bowie State University April 8, a historically Black college in Bowie, Maryland. Both nursing students and instructors were pleased to meet the young Cubans and showed them around a training hospital ward.

They stopped at a birthing lab, where students can practice on computerized models that simulate childbirth. When one student had a little trouble delivering a “baby,” Ramos stepped in and showed her how Cuban doctors have been trained to do this, much to the delight of the Bowie students.

Students and faculty listened attentively as Fuentes and Ramos described the changes made possible by the socialist revolution in Cuba: giant strides in overcoming the legacy of racist discrimination, thoroughgoing land reform, advances in the status of women, creation of a public health and education system that is a right of the Cuban people, and the internationalism of the revolution starting with the first brigade of Cuban doctors arriving in Algeria in 1963 and continuing today in Haiti and dozens of other countries.

The nursing students appreciated the Cubans’ description of how the work of nurses is valued in the Cuban medical system, including the extensive training Cuban doctors undergo in nursing protocol. “In Cuba, it takes five years to become a nurse,” Ramos said, adding that there is one nurse for every doctor in Cuba.

Ramos described the impact of the 50-year embargo on the Cubans’ ability to keep complex medical equipment running. “Equipment that patients need has to be taken out of circulation because we can’t buy replacement parts.”

“We don’t have the technology you have,” Ramos said.

“No, but you have medical care!” exclaimed one student.

“We have medical care not because of technology,” Fuentes said, “but because we made a socialist revolution. That’s what it took to provide systematic health care for everyone.”

—SUSAN LAMONT