Doctors in Cuba Start Over in the U.S.
Published: Wednesday, August 5, 2009 7:00 am By: MIRTA OJITO Source: New York TimesMIAMI — In 1991, Carlos Domínguez, a family doctor in one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods, bought a boat for 12,000 pesos — the equivalent of saving his entire paycheck for three years — to escape the government that had trained him to be an international doctor.
The boat was old and needed to be outfitted with the transmission from a 1952 Ford, one of the many American cars that still cruise the streets of Havana. The mechanic warned him there was no reverse gear. The boat could only go forward.
“Perfect,” Dr. Domínguez, now 46, said he replied. “I don’t plan on coming back. From now on, I’m just going forward.”
And so, armed with his grandfather’s World War II compass, he left Cuba and made his way to Miami, rowing the last seven hours after the gasoline ran out. He was 28 years old and ready to resume his life as a doctor.
But first he needed to pass four exams given only in English, and then put in several years of training as a hospital resident.
Dr. Domínguez, who had been taught Russian in his military school in Cuba, knew no English. Still, he passed one exam before failing the second by a few points. Already married and saddled with family responsibilities, he put away his medical school books, and signed up for a program to become a nurse in one year. Since 2001 he has worked as a hospice admissions nurse, a job that allows him to work with patients while avoiding the hurdles that doctors have to overcome to practice medicine in the United States.
While the rest of the country is suffering from a shortage of primary care physicians, Miami is awash with Cuban doctors who have defected in recent years. By some estimates, 6,000 medical professionals, many of them physicians, have left Cuba in the last six years.
Cuban doctors have been fleeing to South Florida since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, but the pace intensified after 2006, when the
