Dr. Bita Amani Discusses the CDU MPH students’ trip to Cuba( Part 1 of 2)
This trip to Cuba is really epic. Could you describe the visit and why are you going?
Every single time we’ ve gone, we’ ve had a historian who’ s documented through pictures. We’ ve had programs and we’ ve also done reports to the larger CDU-wide community. We plan on doing those exact things again this year. The only report back that was ever online was the one with the March 2020 visit. Normally we go in March and then we do the report back in May. We have a lot of infographics, PowerPoints, and a lot of educational materials that have been made.
In 2017, we decided we wanted to really leverage and take advantage of the teaching and education that is done through the Cuban health system. For some of the more local problems that we have in South Los Angeles, historically there’ s been a sense of solidarity or connection between different communities in the United States and Cuba. Shared political histories, but also just a shared sense of what does it mean to be short on resources, to put it mildly. Over the years, for me as a health professional doing work both locally and globally, it’ s hard not to know the story of the history of the Cuban health system, specifically with regards to their internationalism; and also the ways that they have been training US students at their national university ELAM, The Latin American School of Medicine, to become physicians and then practice here in the United States.
We have been thinking about the importance of the training, what does it mean specifically as a set of ideas and practices that can be implemented for resource strained environments? What does it mean to think through a system that is built with the idea that community health is the entire population’ s health. There really isn’ t such a clear distinction in Cuba, as it is structured here in the US. We started to really take a look globally at models that focus on community health, on public health that do a very good job of resource allocation and prioritization of issues and problems. The Cuban Health Model stood out in that way.
We decided we wanted to take the students to study the public health part of the Cuban health system. The CDU program specifically started in the University’ s Public Health Department, thinking about how to address some of the more systemic and structure-related factors that we have here and make it challenging when our students go to Cuba and they learn, come back, and often talk about how we may have learned a type of medicine that’ s very local, that’ s very community based, that’ s very public health minded, very social medicine focused. It’ s really challenging to implement that here because the system and the structure is very different than the one that we learned about, and where we practice as students in Cuba.
We started to think about what would it mean to grow a generation of the workforce that has this
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 22