Italy’s southern Calabria region is the rare place in Europe where Cuba sends medical professionals under a long-running programme that the United States wants to stamp out.
Cuba has more doctors per person than almost any country on Earth — around 9.5 physicians per 1,000 people according to WHO data, nearly three times the OECD average — and its community-based prevention model is studied by health systems worldwide.
The country has sent its doctors to developing nations such as Gambia and Venezuela for decades, particularly due to their skills in providing care with scarce resources.
Over 200 are working in remote hospitals across Calabria, Italy’s poorest region, where shortages of homegrown healthcare workers had forced some hospital departments to close.
“It was a disaster. I was keeping the emergency room open all by myself,” the chief physician of Polistena hospital, Francesco Moschella, told The Associated Press, recalling the days before the Cubans arrived in January 2023.
