Cuba may mean cigars, rum and Fidel Castro to many outside the island, but now Castro -- who famously quit cigars nearly two decades ago -- is admonishing Cubans that they might be better off without smoking and drinking.
    "How much damage has rum caused any society?" the Cuban president asked during a speech before thousands of medical students. "How many deaths from the irresponsibility of accidents and alcoholic drinks?"
    Castro urged his fellow nationals to celebrate New Year's with "parties all over the country. But without rum!"

Castro's speech on Cuba's Day of the Doctor combined an attack on capitalist morality with an appeal to Cubans to live up to socialist ideals. It came before one of his favorite audiences: thousands of students from throughout the Americas, most from poor families, who attend Havana's Latin American Medical School on full government scholarships.
    For years, Cuba has sent thousands of its doctors to remote, often disaster- stricken areas to help millions of the poorest people in the hemisphere, and Castro encouraged the Cuban-trained foreign doctors to serve the poor, rural areas in their own nations.
    The Cuban leader said most U.S. doctors, "educated with a mercantilist concept," were unwilling to give up their high salaries and comforts to experience "the horrible conditions of the Third World."
    He said the students were being educated "in truly humanitarian principles and not corrupted by consumer societies."

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