The Foreign Service Journal, December 2008

For several decades now, the Cuban government has been providing seven-year, all-expenses-paid scholar- ships to its so-called “Latin American Medical School,” reportedly the largest such facility in the world, with 10,000 students from 27 countries — many of them poor people from racial or ethnic groups that have suf- fered from centuries of discrimination. The goal is to build up a cadre of graduates who believe in Castro’s system (they are given extensive education in Marxist ideology), even as we have been curtailing scholarships with disastrous effect. We are already witnessing the political conse- quences of the Cuban program in Bolivia and Venezuela, where it has skillfully played on the serious disparities of wealth, power and economic develop- ment. In August 2005, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro signed an agreement to build a similar medical school in Venezuela, which would train 100,000 doctors over 10 years to be deployed over the continent. One way for the U.S. government to address income inequality over time is through a large-scale USAID scholarship program targeted at these indigenous pop- ulations and integrated into our larger development program. Such an initiative would also have favorable public diplomacy consequences. Foreign aid may be the most salient instrument of soft power available to U.S. government policymakers, but its force and effectiveness have been compromised by the current institutional and programmatic prob- lems. Funding has increased greatly over the past eight years, but we must still address the challenges of devel- opment in failed and fragile states, which affect our national security in a much more profound way than in the past. Playing a more effective leadership role in development, fixing the organizational chaos in the cur- rent system and introducing some new ideas with old roots — e.g., a return to institution-building, scholar- ship programs and broad contact with civil society in developing countries — must be a priority for President-elect Obama. F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 8