Dr. Luther Castillo first entered the public consciousness with the release of “¡Salud!,” a 2006 documentary about the Cuban health care system. 

“There is no path but the one you trace with your own feet,” says Castillo in the film.

At the time he was a recent graduate of Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine. Six years after his appearance in the documentary, Castillo is tracing his own path as a doctor in his native Honduras. With a number of his fellow medical students, he co-founded in 2007 the First Garifuna Hospital, which strives to meet the needs of Honduras’ poverty-stricken Garifuna population by providing free health care and implementing a number of alternative and community-based approaches.

At the request of Susan Angus, the director of the non-profit Commission on Voluntary Service & Action, Castillo came to New York last April for a number of speaking engagements, including one at Columbia University, about his alternative approach to health care. He returned to the city earlier this month and visited The New School’s 66 West 12th Street building on September 7 to talk about his work to an audience of several dozen New School and CUNY students as well as members of the Garifuna community living in New York.

Castillo, who is Garifuna, described how patients would often die on their way to the nearest hospital in some parts of his homeland, in search of treatment that they could not afford. Inspired by the suffering he witnessed, Castillo received a scholarship to the Latin American School of Medicine in 1999, and graduated in 2005 as a member of the school’s first graduating class. After receiving his degree, he returned to his community in Honduras and worked on creating a hospital in the Garifuna village of Ciriboya, in the department of Colón.

Castillo began formulating his own proposal for an alternative health care model – one devoted to the idea that the Garifuna people could work together to improve the lives of their community as a whole. At first, the people of Ciriboya built a tent-like structure in the location where the future hospital would stand.

“We operated out of this for over eight months,” Castillo recalled. But the tent served as a beginning step towards building the actual hospital, a process that relied heavily on the people in the community to build the structure itself.

Five years later, the hospital is still growing. The First Garifuna Hospital operates on donations that Castillo secured through promotion and awareness campaigns, and provides free care on the premise that “health is a fundamental human right,” according to its website. The staff is not paid for their work, and the patients do not pay for their treatments.

“How can we charge the very people who helped us build this?” Castillo said.

Castillo explained that home visits and detailed medical history reports helped establish strong relationships between the doctors of First Garifuna and their patients. Though Castillo and his team apply their modern medical knowledge in the treatment of patients, they often use herbal and traditional Garifuna remedies. The hospital also trained local women to be auxiliary nurses, which improved the hospital’s outreach efforts within the community.

“This could become a model for other developing countries to follow,” said Celso Castro, who is the head of the New York Support Committee of the First Garifuna Hospital.

The hospital will soon expand its building and programs to include a learning center and an operating room for surgeries.