
In 2000 Castro announced that Cuba would provide free medical training to hundreds of low-income Americans. The late Rev. Lucius Walker, former executive director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, the New York-based group that facilitates the program stateside, said Castro’s scholarship offer wouldn’t be necessary if American medical schools opened their doors wider to disadvantaged minorities.
“Cuba didn’t create the discrimination against Black people [by] U.S. medical schools,” Walker said. “That’s a U.S. phenomenon.”