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Fidel’s ideas
(Taken from the inaugural speech of November 15,
1999)
In the Latin America and Caribbean areas with the
severest lack of doctors, more than one million
people are dying every year, 500,000 of them
children, due to preventable and curable diseases.
Tens of thousands of Latin Americans have no access
at all to health services. This is even happening in
a country as immensely rich as the United States.
Those who are going to die cannot wait.
(At the first graduation of 1,610 doctors from ELAM,
on August 20, 2005)
 This
graduation was a dream just seven years ago. Today
it is proof of the capacity of human beings to reach
their highest goals, and a prize, really, for those
of us who believe that a better world is within our
reach.
Training a doctor in the United States, as everybody
knows, costs no less than $300,000. In fact, Cuba is
at this moment training more than 12,000 doctors for
the Third World, with which it is making a
contribution to the well-being of those countries to
the value of more than $3 billion. If it trains or
helps to train 100,000 doctors from other countries,
in 10 years, its contribution would be the
equivalent of $30 billion, despite the fact that
Cuba is a small, Third World country economically
blockaded by the United States.
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