Cuba 23 Years Later | The EQ Issue 5
Dr. Kameron Matthews headed to Cuba along with Busboys and Poets to celebrate the legacy of American poet Langston Hughes. She chronicles her experiences traveling around Havana and offers a unique perspective on US-Cuba relations.
In January of 2024, I had the pleasure of returning to the island of Cuba, accompanying my husband on a special celebration in honor of the American poet Langston Hughes. With Busboys and Poets of Washington, D.C., we were led by the poet Alice Walker on a journey around Havana that focused on history, culture and the arts. It was in every way enriching to recognize the important dynamics between the American and Cuban people, and how politics remains a thorn in the side of what is otherwise a beautiful partnership. The music, the food, the dance, the art — the United States and Cuba have leaned in and grown together over the decades, and there is such a great appreciation between our peoples of each other’s unique expressions. However, the questions about governance and freedom then unfortunately bolster the blockade between our physical borders.
This blockade impacts the livelihood and health of the Cuban people, and within healthcare and medicine we see a detrimental impact. In 2001, I visited the island as a young medical student, with big eyes and big ideas about how the U.S. health-care system could be transformed and how lessons learned from other nations could eventually be applied to our own communities. As a guest of the government, we toured clinics, maternity hospitals, the school of public health and medical schools. We mingled and learned from medical students similar to ourselves. We had a minor language barrier between us, but we had mutual interest to bridge the divide between our nations — for the sake of our peoples. It became clear to me, even having only just started my journey into medicine, that the Cubans had figured out a great deal about public and population health that the U.S. continued to not only miss but also to resist.
Moving forward 23 years, in 2024, our larger group visited with leadership and students at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) outside of Havana. The students were Americans who had purposefully chosen to study in Cuba because of the country’s approach to health equity, primary care and public health — areas that continue to plague the U.S. With the 23-year difference in visits, it was impactful to recognize how ELAM had progressed as an institution — how the Cuban commitment to global medicine has helped not only the U.S. but also many other marginalized nations that need a path forward for training their healthcare work- force. The school maintains a larger commitment to provi- de training in community-based settings, ensuring that its graduates understand the importance of taking care of the whole patient and not just the disease, and providing a safe space for its students, representing more than 100 countries, to learn from each other. Cuba has developed this capability to look beyond politics and even religion to ensure it is prioritizing health and well-being, which speaks to a broader commitment that the U.S. can actually adopt these same capabilities, rather than just observing. The American healthcare system continues to allow people with fewer resources to be denied care, and the country is comfortable with the inertia that results when it is challenged to transform how it pays for and approves care delivery. Even when considering Cuba’s approach to immediate masking and innovative vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic, I am frustrated at our American system and how we allowed the disease and death of that global threat to thrive in the face of great and sometimes more advanced resources.
The pride that the Cuban people have in their country, their work, their community, and their culture is palpable. Whether it be the creative economy or the healthcare system, the Cuban people and government have made at times scrappy decisions on how to remain at the forefront of global innovation. With the changes in Cuba’s leadership as well as the U.S., this trip 23 years ago revealed to me later the necessity of the partnership between our two nations and how we are overdue to remove the blockade that only promotes a political divide. If the students of ELAM can move beyond their beliefs and differences to study the human body under one roof, our governments have plenty of capacity to work together as well. I look forward to taking another group of primary care physicians back to Cuba in the coming year to learn more about how to integrate primary care and public health in a community-based setting, and I hope my colleagues will translate their observations, as I have done, to a better understanding of how best to serve their patients.
Written by Dr. Kameron Matthews
