Havana ? 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 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 countrymen to celebrate New Year’s with “parties all over the country. But without rum!”

“It’s not that there is going to be a dry law. No. Those who want to buy will pay a lot,” Castro added. “If there is one thing I can assure you, it’s that neither cigarettes nor rum will ever be sold cheaply in this country.”

The 76-year-old Castro was once the world’s most famous cigar-smoker, but he gave up the habit in 1985 to set an example for his countrymen. Most observers say he drinks only moderately.

Rum is a big part of celebrations for many Cubans, however, even if the government recently hiked prices. A bottle of rum that once cost 35 cents now costs about $2.20, and bottom-quality unlabeled rum costs about 90 cents.

“I feel greatly for those sympathizers of the revolution who like to bend the elbow from time to time,” Castro said Tuesday night, to a ripple of laughter.

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-struck 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 important thing is that you are ready to head out there far from the cities to treat so many children, so many women, so many people who suffer some illness,” he said.

Castro 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.”

But the Cuban leader warned that some had fallen into temptation closer to home, lured by rum and association with “idlers” and “parasites.”

He said some hustlers had offered students money “to commit an illegality” involving automobiles ” apparently a reference to people who buy the permits foreign students can get to purchase cars.

Car ownership is denied most Cubans and Castro suggested it may be denied the students, too.

“If we begin to see students with motorcycles, automobiles, etc., we are risking accidents,” Castro warned. “The saddest thing that could happen is a case of death in an accident. We have the duty to protect you as much as possible.”

“Except for needs of a physical sort, or something similar…. I don’t see any benefit to being a scholarship student with an automobile here.”