What Cuba's prevalence of doctors says about its educational system and ours

A Cuban Doctor tending cholera patients in Haiti

Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other nation in the world, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Even though many countries don’t appear to have data on that chart, Cuba still comes in well above every major industrialized nation according to their data. Cuba has double the doctors per capita of the United Kingdom and France, and roughly triple the doctors per capita of the United States and Japan. These are nations that see themselves, and are commonly seen by others as well, as world leaders in many areas, including science and medicine. Yet Cuba, with its ailing economy and resultantly poor access to the high technology fruits of industrialization, has managed to educate more people to be doctors than any of them. Why is this? What could cause this disparity in the actuality of Cuba’s healthcare system with the common perception that richer countries have better access to doctors?

Cuba has long had a history of strong support of public education, even though in the 1950s Batista pushed back against educational institutions to try to suppress the opposition from academic areas of Cuban society. As discussed in this article about Cuba’s education system, the rise of Castro’s Revolution saw a major upswing in governmental funding and support for education, including expanding Cuba’s medical training system from a single school in Havana to at least one medical school in every province in Cuba. The results of this are clear from the statistics I discussed earlier; Cuba has produced more doctors than almost anywhere else in the world when considered in as a percentage of its total population.

The prevalence of doctors in Cuba is undoubtedly a good thing for the country as a whole, yet it has not only been a boon to the people of Cuba. As we discussed in class, Cuba has so many doctors that there simply aren’t enough jobs for them to go around, resulting in many Cuban doctors emigrating to other Spanish-speaking countries and causing a subsequent increase in the per-capita prevalence of doctors in those countries. In this way, the value of education in Cuba benefits all of Latin America.
But what does all this have to do with the Latino-American experience? The prevalence of doctors in Cuba is merely a symptom of Revolutionary Cuba’s dedication to education, a dedication that isn’t shared by the United States. Latinos and Latinas in the United States are less likely to attain a college education than other groups. Coming from a country where education is available for any who want it, the American education system must come as something of a shock to Cuban immigrants. Not only is education not subsidized to the same degree in the United States as in Cuba, but frequently racist bias within educational institutional structures in the United States reduces the opportunities for Latinos and Latinas to even reach the point where financial barriers come into play.