Appeals to successive administrations have largely been ignored until this week when the island's parliament approved a bill allowing them to be "provisionally registered."

Currently, 2,927 Caribbean students are at Cuban universities, with nearly half of them studying medicine. All scholarships are free. The Cubans have been rolling out the red carpet to their English-speaking Caribbean neighbors largely because Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados broke their hemispheric diplomatic isolation back in 1972 by establishing relations. Forever grateful, Cuba threw open its schools, but many of the smaller island nations that sided with the Ronald Reagan administration during the Cold War in the '80s and the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, have largely ignored the scholarship offers.

Antigua clears way for doctors Since the 1970s, Fidel Castro's Cuba has been offering free scholarships to thousands of students from neighboring Caribbean countries, but more than 30 years into the grant aid scheme, a few standout countries are still preventing returning doctors from practicing after graduating from the island's world-class health care system.

Scholarships & fellowships