HARRISON – Nancy Wood describes the Cuban people she met as “proud, warm and generous, well-educated. And they don’t hate Americans.”

Wood, of Harrison, recently returned from her first visit to Cuba as part of the 14th Partners for Peace Friendshipment, joining activists from 20 states. Tom Whitney of South Paris, a representative of Let Cuba Live, helped organize the trip.

The group spent three days in McAllen, Texas, Wood said, inspecting, relabeling and repacking the donated supplies for Cuban schools, medical centers and homes for the elderly.

It was especially important that those 100 people form a cohesive working group because of the risk involved, she said.

They would be crossing borders into Mexico and then into Cuba since Pastors for Peace believes people should be free to travel to those countries.

They would be traveling to Cuba in defiance of U.S. embargo laws and restrictions on travel. “It was made clear to us at the outset that we could be fined or even jailed for participating,” she said.

Once in Cuba, Wood stayed at the Martin Luther King Center on the outskirts of Havana, “an upper-crust hostel,” she described it, with two people to a room. She and her roommate became fast friends. “People on the trip and in Cuba were so inspiring,” she said.

Wood said because of her background as a psychiatric nurse, retired now, she was interested in learning about the health care system in Cuba. That small country supports 26 medical schools and six nursing schools, and it uses a combination of modern medicine and folk medicine, what Americans would call alternative medicine, she said.

Some of Cuba’s medical supplies come from Europe and Canada, and some are produced in Cuba, she said. The focus of this shipment from the United States was the elderly population: there were wheel chairs and walkers, things made from metal, which is scarce in Cuba because of the blockade, she said.

She learned that all medical schools are free to Cuban citizens and to people from other countries, even the United States, if they qualify, and that there’s a higher doctor/patient ratio than in the United States.

Every neighborhood has a fully staffed “polyclinic,” which serves in an emergency, and consultations with psychiatrists and psychologists are available. Doctors have offices in the neighborhoods, she said, and home visits are made, if necessary.

Doctors get paid a lot less than in the United States but are well paid by Cuban standards.

“They’re not an elite class,” she said. “They’re looked up to as healers, not as deities.”

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