Rhon­dor Dowlat-Ros­tant

A group of Trinidad and To­ba­go med­ical stu­dents in Cu­ba are sched­uled to re­turn home to­day on a Caribbean Air­lines repa­tri­a­tion flight.

The green light for the stu­dents to re­turn home was giv­en by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young in an email on Ju­ly 1. The stu­dents then re­ceived con­fir­ma­tion from CAL. Ini­tial­ly, the repa­tri­a­tion flight was sched­uled for Ju­ly 4 but was resched­uled for to­day.

Speak­ing to the Guardian Me­dia on Sun­day, one of the stu­dents, now elat­ed at the prospect of fi­nal­ly com­ing home, said: “Most of us who can go home at this time, we are ac­tu­al­ly re­lieved that we can go home, that we can get the stuff that we need and most im­por­tant­ly spend time with our fam­i­ly be­fore us leav­ing to come back (to Cu­ba) in Sep­tem­ber for the start of the new se­mes­ter.”

How­ev­er, the stu­dent, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, said of the 21 of them, nine may not re­turn home—two for “per­son­al rea­sons” and sev­en be­cause there are still wait­ing to sit ex­ams at their uni­ver­si­ty.

“It is the on­ly uni­ver­si­ty in Cu­ba that is still in op­er­a­tion and all oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have been closed since in March and they have been mov­ing ex­ams fur­ther and fur­ther away from the date. Most of the stu­dents would have end­ed their ex­ams this week but that uni­ver­si­ty came and changed their dates and pushed it fur­ther away and there­fore when the stu­dents went to that uni­ver­si­ty to ask them if they could pos­si­bly move up their dates, they al­leged­ly re­fused to make any ad­just­ments to the ex­am date to al­low the stu­dents to come home,” the stu­dent said.

“So those who can leave, we are re­al­ly hap­py and thank the T&T Gov­ern­ment for fi­nal­ly re­mem­ber­ing us and giv­ing us the ap­proval to re­turn home be­cause all of our hope here had end­ed.”

The stu­dent said they were told they would be giv­en in­struc­tions about the manda­to­ry quar­an­tine when they land at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

“We were told that we would have to un­der­go some med­ical ex­am­i­na­tions but noth­ing spe­cif­ic has been giv­en. We re­al­ly don’t know what to ex­pect but we know that we have to do quar­an­tine and we are will­ing to do all that is re­quired not to just en­sure the safe­ty of our­selves but our fam­i­ly and the peo­ple of T&T. 

“We have no is­sues with go­ing in­to quar­an­tine but we do not know where we are go­ing yet, I guess when we land on Mon­day we will be giv­en specifics,” the stu­dent said.

On June 20, emo­tions ran high among the stu­dents af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley in­di­cat­ed there were is­sues with a repa­tri­a­tion flight out of Cu­ba be­cause there were no di­rect flights be­tween T&T and Cu­ba.

But the stu­dents and their par­ents act­ed emo­tion­al­ly and an­gri­ly to this, as many of them were run­ning out of sup­plies and fund­ing dur­ing the COVID-19 lock­down in Cu­ba. The stu­dents had been send­ing repa­tri­a­tion re­quests to the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty since March and Guardian Me­dia high­light­ed their plight on June 17.