14ymedio, Mexico, January 18, 2024 — Mexico pays Cuba 27,914 dollars in foreign currency (484,041 Mexican pesos) annually for each of the 428 students studying medical specialties on the Island. The figures reveal, according to a report published this Thursday in El Universal, that the education of these scholarship recipients on the Island is more expensive for the Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador than, for example, in the United Kingdom, where it pays just over $21,000 for each student.
Scholarships are, in fact, one of the mechanisms for injecting money into the Cuban regime, according to data collected in the same newspaper. While the number of places for medical studies on the island increased, the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies of Mexico (Conahcyt) drastically reduced the aid in other countries. Without going any further, scholarships granted for master’s degrees went from 1,793 in 2015 to 148 in 2022, while those for doctorates suffered a plummet from 813 to 103, in the same period.
The Mexican newspaper also denounces that due to excessive payment for these studies “master’s or doctoral degrees are not obtained.” The information obtained from the database of postgraduate scholarship recipients reveals that it is cheaper for Mexico to have a scholarship student in the United States (currently there are 285), for whom it pays 20,970 dollars annually, 7,000 less than in Cuba. In other countries, the cost is lower, if possible: in the Netherlands (71 scholarship recipients), $20,389; in Spain (149), $18,666; in Canada (316), $18,415; in Germany