Kingston, Jamaica, 13 November 2020. Doctor José Armando Arronte, Head of the Cuban Medical Mission in Jamaica, was one of the main speakers at the virtual panel “The other side of Global Health”, organized this Friday by students and professors of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, New York.
Some of the objectives of the panel were highlighting the South-South international medical cooperation, historically ignored and poorly recognized by first world countries; discussing the effects of colonial systems of oppression on medicine; exploring concepts like critical awareness, cultural humility and professional competence in "Global Health", and encouraging future generations of healthcare professionals to embrace the principles of internationalism, solidarity, humanism and the vocation of service to the most needed communities and to reimagine more horizontal, sustainable programs in global health systems, marked by regional leadership and free of vestiges of colonialism.
According to Dr. Luis Antonio González Corro, an ELAM graduate who is currently a third-year resident at the abovementioned college in New York and one of the organizers of the event, inviting Dr. Arronte is a way of praising Cuba's contribution to global health, especially in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, from a South-South perspective.
By the organizers’ decision, the panel was developed in Spanish (with simultaneous interpretation into English), with the purpose of upraising the hierarchy in the United States of the language spoken by most of the patients that the Bronx residents attend daily.