Havana-guide : The education system in Cuba

Immediately following the revolution in 1959, a literacy program was launched. Cuba has gone on to build a strong educational system from that beginning. A 1998 UNESCO study of primary education in Latin America found that “Cuba far and away led the region in third- and fourth-grade mathematics and language achievement.” Today Cuba boasts one primary school teacher per twenty students and one junior high school teacher per fifteen students, making possible a very individualized pedagogy. One area in which Cuba is highly developed is medicine. And now through its Latin American School of Medicine, the country gives free medical educations to thousands of poor youth from elsewhere in Latin America, Africa and even the US, with the sole stipulation that graduates return to those poor areas to practice medicine for the people. Cuba’s medical education teaches not only the science and art of medicine, but also the social values of service to community.

By removing a major economic barrier to education, access is now based on merit. As a result, women are now heavily represented in all professions in Cuba. Well over half the country’s doctors, technicians, and other professionals are women.

Cuba says that its only requirement for these future doctors is that they come from families unable to pay for this kind of education and they must make the commitment to serve their poor, mainly rural communities when they return home. And there is another side of Cuba’s medical diplomacy: the thousands of its own doctors positioned in disadvantaged areas all over the planet.

Cuba justifies its global deployment of doctors and the free medical education it offers by saying its communist system is dedicated to international unity.