This thread annoys me. The word Caribbean is spelled with one r, two b's, and is a proper noun. If one takes the time to spell it correctly, and judiciously combine it with other words like "medical", "debt", "fail", or others along this line in any search engine, one will be provided with hours of depressing reading material. The internets are awash with such. Beyond getting a glimpse of the perils of taking out loans to feed the for profit education industry, the stories usually play out in a number of of similar ways, and there isn't much to be learned by reading endless iterations.
What can be taken from such a sad foray into financially ruined lives is an awareness that offshore medical schools (along with a host of onshore for profit certificate schools) are private enterprises that take advantage of public funds, with questionable benefit to either the individual consumer or the taxpayer, and that this practice should be heavily scrutinized, and in many cases, severely limited.
As an American who intends to at some time return to the USA, attending medical school in another country makes sense iff (if and only if) you a) don't pay nearly as much as you would at a US med school, and b) you have a reasonably good chance of making back in the system to train and practice. There are a few people who have done this at little Caribbean schools with a low COA and other schools in the Americas, come to the US, and matched into FM, Psych, etc. and done pretty well for themselves. I salute these people. They are winners.
Some of the more prominent horror stories, like the "Southern Doc" guy, demonstrate a lot of hubris. At many times during his narrative, he writes about the lack of availability of funding, even from private lenders. This could be taken as a sign of a poor investment, both for them and for him. Although people such as this bear responsibility for their decision making, it is doubtful that the schools they attended presented the outcome of attendance as a 2/3 chance of graduating, 1 out of 4 chance of matching into a specialty of choice, and 50/50 chance of obtaining a residency at all in their promotional materials. *To the people who will want to dispute these figures: Yes, I made them up. They are a rough estimate I have compiled from googling "caribean failure stories", but I don't feel like they are that far off the mark.* The point is, the practice is very much on the borderline of being predatory.
Most of the really sad stories I have read seem to have come from the perspective of people who don't have much personal or inherited familiarity with higher education and are not well equipped to distinguish quality between different programs. In a larger sense it relates to the inequality of opportunity that Robert Putnam describes in his book "Our Kids", where he describes the situation where better life decisions are made by young people whose parents are able to remove a large proportion of the bad ones through their own experience with personal success.
In any case, the information is out there. Hopefully people will be able to take time to investigate the risks of pursuing a medical degree, and be able to make a realistic assessment of their relative chance of succeeding in all progressive stages of a very long process.
