KEY REMARKS BY DR. FIDEL CASTO RUZ, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF CUBA, AT THE GRADUATION CEREMONY FOR ALL OF THE COUNTRY’S MEDICAL SCHOOLS HELD AT THE JOSÉ MARTÍ ANTI-IMPERIALIST SQUARE. AUGUST 13, 2000
Graduates of Medical Schools from all over the country;
Fellow countrymen:
A few days ago I met with a group of 70 Cuban health care workers heading back to Gambia, after a short holiday here, to continue their noble and selfless work in that western African country. When they recalled that my birthday was coming up a few days later and affectionately advanced their best wishes I said to them: my birthday is today, after this meeting with you.
I was genuinely and deeply moved that day after my three-hour conversation with those fellow countrymen. They were all highly qualified university-educated professionals, some of them very young, from the eastern, central and western provinces of Cuba. Most of them were community doctors and specialists, although there were also a few dentists and nurses. They were all men and women of humble origin; and of all races and mixtures of races, like all Cubans. However, there was something that stood out above all else: the legitimate pride, optimism, courage, self-confidence, creativity, sharp minds and animated voices and gestures that unmistakably and incomparably characterize Cuban internationalists. They were anxious to return to the dozens of settlements they attend to, on both sides of a wide river that stretches hundreds of kilometers through a small, elongated country where they provide the most humane of services: relieving pain, preserving or restoring the priceless gift of good health, and above all, saving lives.
What was once a completely different world is now as much a home to them as Cuba. And it is truly amazing how their love has grown for both all of humankind and their own homeland! What giants and heroes human beings can be! What astonishing heights their hearts and minds can reach!
What were these men and women yesterday? What would their fate have been in pre-Revolutionary Cuba? What are they today? "We could never have even imagined the things we have experienced," they said to me describing the suffering and poverty of those nations that for centuries were slaves suppliers and exploited colonies of the West. How these doctors now love and admire the peoples of those nations! "We shall be better people when we return!" they kept saying over and over. On the same morning they were leaving, 64 Cuban doctors and health care workers headed for Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, to join up with 28 others awaiting them there.
Our health care workers first began to fulfill such missions 40 years ago. At that time Cuba had only 3000 doctors; the United States had robbed us of 3000, as well as over half of the professors from our only medical school. Today, we have 22 medical schools and over 67,000 doctors, including tens of thousands of graduates in one or more of the 51 areas of medical specialization in our country. In the field of health care, the most highly valued on Earth, Cuba has become a moral giant, the source of a profoundly revolutionary and humane new concept of what medical services should be in the world. This concept is now an inextinguishable light. In the future, both in Cuba and in most Third World nations, people will talk about two stages in the history of this crucial service: before and after the Cuban Revolution.
These Cuban health bearers will leave an imperishable imprint as they travel around the world providing their services and sowing medical schools in other lands. At the same time, thousands of young people from the most humble sectors of dozens of other countries will graduate every year from medical schools here in Cuba, and go on to be apostles of a much more humane form of medical care delivery. The consumer societies, unable to create similar values or make similar contributions, shall be left speechless by the example set by Cuba.
Today, it gives us immense satisfaction to take part in the graduation of 4000 new members of the glorious contingent of professionals who bring such honor to the homeland.
In a desperate effort to sabotage our comprehensive health care programs, imperialism offers money and makes all kinds of promises to our doctors, hoping to bribe them into defection and treason, heedless of the lives that would be lost as a result. Yet, imperialism can only manage to harvest a few paltry and worthless scraps of the dregs that inevitably remain in the bottom of the furnaces where the finest human steel is forged, that is, Cuba’s internationalist doctors.
Let me give you an example of the excellence and temper of this steel: we have just honored this year’s 104 top graduates from all the medical schools across the country who will begin their professional careers as community doctors in the most distant corners of the country’s eastern region. At the same time, we have also honored last year 96 top graduates who have carried out a similar task this past year in the same region of eastern Cuba and will soon move on to yet another honorable feat. They will be fulfilling their first internationalist mission in the sister republic of Haiti, where Cuban doctors care for millions of worthy descendants of those heroic slaves who led the first social revolution on this continent. All of this we do with a minimum of economic resources because what is needed for such a heroic deed is human capital, that is, the people with the necessary ethics and willingness to make sacrifices. This human capital is sorely lacking in the empire but our revolutionary people have created and accumulated an enormous stock, and that is why nothing and no one will ever be able to defeat them.
To all of you, the newly honored by the homeland, heralds of health and life, winners over death, Olympic champions of genuine humanism who will show the way to the world of tomorrow, a world without exploitation, without plunder, without the genocide caused by an unfair world economic and political order that kills tens of millions of children and adults every year through hunger and disease, to all of you I say, Onward! Let the world see what Cuba is today! This Cuba whose people have succeeded in withstanding the blockade, the hostility and the aggression of the mightiest empire that has ever existed; this Cuba whose people have proclaimed and reiterated here in the Jose Martí Anti-Imperialist Square that it is better to lose one’s life than to lose the homeland, the justice and the freedom that only socialism can embody and defend today. This people have promised to win, and it will win!
We swear to it!