The Cuban Solution

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The Cuban Solution
Melissa Mitchell wants to be a doctor to tend to the poor. But the Howard University undergrad was too poor herself to attend medical school. That's when Cuba's maximum leader offered a helping hand.

At her high school in Houston, Melissa loaded up on as many science courses as possible. She won a full scholarship to Howard, where she graduated as a premed student with a 3.2 grade-point average. She'd saved $1,600 from a part-time job at Howard to pay for the Medical College Admission Test and a prep course. The prep course turned out to be a study in disillusionment.

"They recommended we apply to no less than 14 schools, and each school application costs at least $200. I'd just spent two years saving the $1,600, and now I need another $2,800 just to apply to schools? Then, if you're lucky and a school calls you, you have to fly there and stay in a hotel. They even had the finite details about what to wear, and you'd have to buy a business suit, and everything was more money and more money and more money, and even then maybe you wouldn't get in."

Somehow, she figured, she would find the money, even if she had to delay going. But she worried that she'd be left with huge loans, which would make it difficult for her to afford to practice in a poor neighborhood, as she'd always planned. Besides, the prep class was "a reality check about the whole medical school thing." She hated the feeling of exclusivity, the fact that most of the other students had at least one parent who was already a doctor, and the chatter about which specialties paid the best. "One thing sticks in my head," Melissa says. "A student mentioned she worked in a cancer clinic, and someone asked what she did. She said, 'Oh, I just check them in. I give people hope.' She said it in this joking, dismissive way. But giving people hope is a beautiful thing."

After graduation from Howard, Melissa took a job at the nonprofit Youth Law Center in the District. Occasionally she'd look up medical schools on the Web, but everything she saw just discouraged her.

Then, one Sunday morning at Rev. Willie Wilson's Union Temple Church in Southeast Washington, she saw a blurb in the church bulletin about scholarships to study medicine in Cuba. She wrote to the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, and months later a packet of information arrived. Her mind was made up the moment she opened it.

"The brochure wasn't fancy," Melissa recalls, "but it had a lot of feeling to it. You could tell the resources were really basic, but even that appealed to me. It had a picture of an entire class of students gathered around a microscope. There were pictures of doctors giving physical exams in houses with dirt floors, with chickens around them. The imagery called out to me."

There weren't any tests or expensive prep courses required, just a $100 application fee. Melissa simply contacted the program administrators in the United States. A committee of physicians screens the students. Those who have the drive and education to succeed are encouraged to apply, and those who apply are usually accepted by the Cubans.

Melissa says only two things gave her pause: There was no hot water in the dorms, and there were no toilet seats. "I knew I'd get used to not having hot water. But no toilet seats? How does that work?"

MELISSA AND THE STUDENTS WITH WHOM SHE'D BE SPENDING THE NEXT SIX YEARS BOARDED A PLANE IN NEW YORK FOR CANCUN, where they stayed the night before flying, without U.S. permission, into Havana. The weeks before the flight were crazy with packing and shopping and saying goodbye. It wasn't until they finally landed in Cuba and were greeted by officials with mojitos that Melissa felt herself relaxing.

"Transitioning out was harder than transitioning in," she says. "I felt I was moving from a complicated, high-tech life into something very simple."

She'd seen a video about the Latin American School of Medicine. The main campus, where she would spend her first 2 1/2 years, is about a 45-minute drive from downtown Havana and sits along a sandy white beach pounded by the Atlantic. A series of two-story buildings ramble around the property lush with flowers and trees, but life inside is military style. The walled compound was a naval base that Castro turned into a medical school to train students from all over Latin America. There is a separate medical school for French-speaking Africans and Haitians.

During the week, Melissa and the other students were confined to the walled compound, with freedom to leave between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening only if they'd followed the rules and done well in their studies. As an adult, Melissa found it hard to "have people telling you what you could and couldn't do." But she didn't mind the confinement during the week: She needed every moment she had to study. That first semester, she says, she sometimes spent an hour stumbling through a single page of Spanish.