To Serve The People

To Serve The People

Students From The States Study Medicine Free In Cuba

By Bro. Zayid Muhammad

Recent weeks have seen solidarity between our struggle and the Cuban Revolution take another solid, liberating turn, as several students of color arrived in Havana to begin their medical studies at Cuba’s most cherished commitment to international human solidarity, their new InterAmerican Medical School.

This recently opened medical school will train thousands from all over the Americas to become doctors who then will return to their home countries and serve as doctors where they are most needed.

When Cuba’s courageous and charismatic president and revolutionary hero Fidel Castro was last in the United States in September, he not only slammed the escalating oppressive impact of globalism on the world’s poor at the United Nations like no one else dared to, he also came uptown to Harlem’s Riverside Church and made a pledge to have Cuba train medical students from what he called “the Third World of the United States” free!

That scholarship program has since been made concrete. It is being administered between the Congressional Black Caucus and IFCO/Pastors For Peace. Pastors For Peace is a Harlem-based ecumenical project that has boldly challenged the U.S. government’s blockade of Cuba by delivering hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid to the proud island nation in defiance of the blockade’s travel restrictions.

Several of the students in the project are from this area like 20 year-old Khalil Marshall from the Bronx. When Khalil was 16, he hid a potentially serious injury from his mother when he got hit by a car while out skating because he knew that this mother did not have medical insurance at the time!

“That devastated me,” said his mother, Karen Coley, who works as a drug counselor to young mothers in Yonkers.

Even now, although she and her husband both work, health insurance and rent are such challenges that neither her husband, a taxi driver, nor do their youngest daughter, currently have medical insurance!

Khalil is among the first eight of what eventually will be the free training in Cuba of some 500 students to become doctors from poor Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian-American backgrounds.

The CBC’s recognition of Cuba’s genuine offer is one of the more important and courageous things that Black elected officials have done in the international arena in years.

This comes from a corrective context however. To be sure, this long overdue engagement with the Cuban Revolution is one of the fruits of the New Afrikan Liberation Front’s exposure of the CBC’s 1998 betrayal of our beloved freedom fighter Assata Shakur, who is exiled in Cuba. Remember, the CBC voted ‘for’ a racist right wing congressional resolution initiated by former governor Christine Whitman demanding Assata’s return to the United States in order to put her back in prison. Their embarrassment led them to take their first delegation to the proud revolutionary island nation shortly after that. Although the CBC has historically and correctly voted against any and all legislation seeking to reinforce the backwards and destructive blockade, this visit forced them to also realize that their could be more to their relationship than just voting against the blockade.

Serious students of struggle know, of course, that Cuba has been training doctors and other technical professionals free of charge for years! Moreover, through incredible programs like the Isle Of Youth, for example, Cuba has also provided free education and health care to thousands of children from violently oppressed areas in Africa and Latin America.

Cuba has been especially good to the people of African countries like Angola, Namibia, South Africa, not to mention of course their proud internationalist missions of doctors and soldiers there as well. She has been similarly supportive of the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti, as those countries faced enormous dislocations as a consequence of genocidal low-intensity warfare covertly set in motion, and at other times not so covertly set in motion by U.S. imperialism. This why we have always said “When Africa called, Cuba answered!”

Although the CBC is years late in their recognition of Cuba’s enormous concrete contributions to the idea of international human solidarity, it is important and it is correct. We must now jack them up on the domestic front as well on the question of freedom for our political prisoners like Assata’s co-defendant Sundiata Acoli, who is now in his 28^th year of wrongful imprisonment. If Cuba can clearly recognize how our people’s human rights are being violated, and how our freedom fighters, the bravest and the boldest among us who stood up against those violations, why can’t they?

‘Bro. Zayid’ is Chief of Staff for the New Black Panther Party. He is also the press officer for the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee…

’Bro. Zayid’ Kazi Angaza Kikongo Muhammad

7/26/01