Farrakhan travels to Cuba

HAVANA
Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan arrived in Cuba Monday for a weeklong trip to learn about the island and its highly organized disaster preparedness programs.

“We feel that we should make our people as prepared as we can be for any natural disaster that may afflict our communities,’’ Farrakhan said during a meeting with the dozens of American students at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine.

“We are here to try to get as much knowledge as we can and spread it throughout the black and Hispanic, Native American and the poor communities of America who suffer the most,’’ the minister said.

There are 82 Americans studying with full scholarships at the medical school, which the communist government built to provide free medical training to young people from modest means from throughout the Western Hemisphere.

During the gathering, Farrakahn thanked Cuban officials for offering to send a group of doctors to New Orleans to help provide medical care to the victims of Hurricane Katrina last year.

U.S. officials never formally rejected the offer, but said that more doctors were not needed and the Cuban doctors never went.

Farrakahn was met at the airport by parliament speaker Ricardo Alarcon, a senior official in Fidel Castro’s government, and is to meet with Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque on Tuesday afternoon.

The United Nations and other international organizations have praised Cuba’s hurricane preparedness programs for helping limit the number of deaths and injuries during natural disasters on the island.