Getting to Cuba

Graham Sowa

Getting to Cuba for a US citizen involves many questions and few answers.  It is an illegal adventure for most Americans, an utterly bureaucratic one for those with family in Cuba, and, so exceedingly complicated for those of us with special licenses that someone with professional knowledge must do it for us.

As a medical student at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) I am in the latter group.  The organization that facilitated my matriculation was the decades old, New York based, Pastors for Peace.

The process which ended with our arrival in March of this year began two years prior.  I submitted an application to ELAM, made available at the Pastors for Peace website, and then waited.  The good news came when I was invited for an interview a few months later, which took place in New York in June of 2009.

I use the word interview only to make headway with those readers familiar with a general medical school application process.  In reality our “interview” was a two day retreat in upstate New York with all of the other applicants invited that year.  Questions were answered; however many of us left the retreat realizing that getting answers meant getting to Cuba.  We were told to pencil in a tentative departure date of “sometime in late spring.”

Lifestyle changes coming

The plane ride to Havana on Cubana Airlines from Cancun, Mexico, where the soon to be US medical students all met up, lasted just over an hour. This was barely enough time to enjoy my first taste of actual Cuban products (Tú Cola and a piece of hard candy), but long enough to be grateful that our old Soviet workhorse of an airliner got us to our destination.

The amount of luggage that my fellow students and I brought probably reflected a genuine attempt to hold on to American materialism for as long as the Power Bars and Peter Pan peanut butter would last in our new home.  Perhaps the stuffed duffle bags signaled that we were coming to Cuba on assumptions, not solid answers, about the lifestyle changes we would face.

In the nine months that have passed since we unpacked and tried to figure out where to put all of our stuff we have had the opportunity to find out why questions about the experiences we were going to face in Cuba were so difficult to answer.  Neither Cuba nor ELAM can be explained from the United States.  Questions are answered by word of mouth, announcements made in class, and notices posted a week before exams.  If you are not living here you are not going to be in the know.

If some American students grumble about collecting information on numerous programs and application procedures of medical schools then I highly encourage them to put down that latest version of the American Medical Schools Admissions Guide and join me in Cuba.

We don’t come here with the security of the printed word to compare to the reality we encounter.  Our search for information and answers is daily; involving multiple human interactions, a bit of effort, and the fortune of good luck.