Calabria Cubans to the rescue of ailing hospitals

In the operating theatre at a hospital in Calabria, Asbel Díaz Fonseca and his team are preparing to perform abdominal surgery on a man in his 60s. They deliberate over which technique to use.

- Angela Giuffrida

But their main topic of pre-op conversation is food, namely which pizza is best: Neapolitan or Calabrian. There are subtle differences between the two, they say, but with a Neapolitan medic in the room, diplomacy prevails.

This may not sound out of the ordinary for Italian chitchat, but Fonseca is not a local man. He has worked at the Santa Maria degli Ungheresi hospital in Polistena, in the southern Italian region, for a year. But he is originally from Cuba.

The 38-year-old surgeon is among the hundreds of health workers from the island brought in to fill a drastic shortage of doctors across Calabria, one of the poorest regions in western Europe.