More than 100 young people from seven of South Africa’s nine provinces graduated from medical school in Cuba on Friday.
At the ceremony, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, they received their professional degree from Dr. Heidi Soca of the Cuban Universities of Medical Sciences, who was accompanied at the ceremony by Dr. Fidela Reyes of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health.
According to the representatives of the South African Ministry of Health, the graduates, received a unique perspective based on preventive care during their training in Cuba.
n their words, they thanked Cuba for training “compassionate and resilient doctors” who will now help ensure that every South African has access to medical services.
The newly graduated doctors affirmed that they are proof of the vision of two extraordinary leaders, Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, and an example of what can be achieved in collaboration in human development.
The 103 new specialists thus join the more than 3,100 young South Africans who have studied medicine in Cuban universities as part of the Fidel Castro-Nelson Mandela Program, conceived in 1996.
This agreement was established by the then presidents after the disappearance of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
The first students were sent to Cuba to become doctors by the South African Ministry of Health in 1998.Along with the South Africans, tens of thousands of young people from more than 120 nations have studied medicine on the island as a result of Cuba’s commitment to the protection, anywhere in the world, of the main human right, the right to life.
