Les Payne
Newsday

Since her days as a young girl, Arabia Mollette dreamed of becoming a doctor. The streets of the South Bronx pulled in another direction.

In June 2005, while participating in a biomedical research program at SUNY Binghamton, a friend told Mollette about the medical program she was attending. "I said, 'What medical school are you going to?'"

It was the Latin American School of Medical Sciences that Cuba created in 1999 to train doctors from the region. When Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) inquired about the school during a U.S. Congressional Black Caucus visit in 2000, Fidel Castro, not one to pass up a propaganda pitch, offered free medical training to low-income Americans to return home and serve their medically underserved communities.

Some 111 such U.S. students, mainly blacks and Latinos, have joined the 4,000 physicians Cuba has recruited from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. According to a recent Johns Hopkins newsletter, Cuba's highly rated, free medical system maintains the "highest doctor-to-patient ratio, about one physician per 170 patients, of all countries in the world." The U.S. ratio is one doctor to 400 patients; at HMOs, where most Americans receive care, it's one to 600 patients.

READ MORE: http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-oppay5747011jun30,0,5747587.column

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