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.

Most weekends, she took a break from studying by finding a quiet spot on the beach, her only real escape from the cramped, overcrowded dorms. Before arriving in Cuba, Melissa had talked to people who'd visited Cuba, "but no one had experienced dorm life, which is extreme even for Cubans."

Melissa shared a room with 20 other American students: 10 bunk beds less than an arm's length from one another. A small locker held all her belongings, plus the belongings of the person in another bunk. She shared a bathroom -- 10 sinks, 10 showers and 10 toilets, san seats -- with 120 other students. Water was turned off from 8 or 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. When the Americans first arrived, there were rumors that their rooms were better, that they had televisions and even refrigerators. Then a hurricane hit. Students from other countries around the world were moved into the American dorm, and everyone realized there were no differences.

Every month each student was allotted two rolls of toilet paper, two bars of soap and, for the women, a pack of sanitary napkins. "Even when you had money, sometimes the school store didn't have toilet paper to sell," Melissa says. "If they didn't have it, you didn't have it." She and Revery laugh when repeating a running joke in the dorm. Anytime a classmate asked where some missing item might be, someone invariably replied, "I used it for toilet paper."

Melissa says food represented the hardest adjustment that first year -- harder even than the struggle with Spanish. "When I first got there, it was rice and beans every day. Then after a while they didn't have beans, and had soup instead, and I'd be like, I'd just die for some beans. I'd be hungry before lunch, and walk out of lunch hungry. But after a while your body gets used to eating less, and you don't want as much." Even now, though she sometimes dreams about Einstein bagels. After finishing her second year of medical school, Melissa moved to the dorms at Salvador Allende Hospital, where the food is better. "Every Monday is chicken Monday. You get a piece of chicken, so that's always fun."

She and Revery have helped each other through all the challenges of going to medical school in Cuba. They hit it off from the moment they met, Melissa says: "Our visions and goals and personalities are very similar."

Revery is one of the few white Americans in the program. She says she grew up in a tough neighborhood in San Francisco, with an absent father and a mother who, at the time, was too ill to work. Revery dropped out of school when she was 13, but eventually earned a GED and got a job with a nonprofit as a street outreach worker. Often her clients, who included crack addicts and gang members, needed medical care, but it wasn't available. So Revery decided she'd offer the care, and started attending a junior college for the science courses she'd need to apply to a premed program. She heard about the medical program in Cuba from one of her teachers. Like Melissa, she didn't hesitate.

Last summer, Revery and Melissa scraped together the $678 airfare and $695 to take Step 1 of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam. Revery's money came from activist friends in San Francisco, who took up a collection on her behalf. Melissa's money came from an aunt, who later lost her home and everything she owned in Hurricane Katrina. Neither young woman could afford the usual prep course. But Revery's sister gave her $300 to sign up for an online drill program. Revery offered to share the program with Melissa. They spent the six-week summer break studying together in Birmingham, Ala., where they lived with Melissa's 84-year-old grandmother, Rosetta.

Being back in the States was weird, Melissa says. She found herself amazed by how upset people got in the airport when a flight was delayed -- the sort of thing that might have upset her in the past, but now seemed petty, even funny, in the face of everyday realities in Havana. Most Americans have no idea how the rest of the world lives, she says.

Medical school administrators had told Melissa and Revery they should wait another year to take the test, arguing that the order of information they were learning was much different from in the United States. But the two had worried all year about the test and were determined to get it under their belts. Neither passed; Melissa missing by a few points, Revery by a wider margin.

When Melissa found out she'd failed, she began to cry. For the first time, she felt despair.

"I just crashed," she says. "I barely wanted to get out of bed in the morning. I started thinking, 'Why am I torturing myself? I'm 25 years old. I want to get married; I want to have kids. I have a degree. Anytime, I could go home and get a job and live comfortably.'"

After a few weeks, she pulled herself together, she says, "by reminding myself what needs to change in the American health care system and why I need to play a role in that process." While she's reluctant to talk much about Castro or communism, she does admire Cuba's stated goal of providing medical care to all of its citizens. Health care, she says, should be a right, not a privilege. "If you're not going to give a break to someone when they're sick, when are you ever going to give them a break?"