Cuba is sending its medical personnel to Lombardy to help Italian doctors fight the coronavirus outbreak.
This is the first time Cuba has sent an emergency contingent to Italy, as reported in Reuters.
Italy has impacted the most by the coronavirus with the northern region of Lombardy bearing the brunt of the virus.
Nearly 800 Italians died from the new coronavirus over the weekend alone bringing the total to more than 3,000.
“We are all afraid but we have a revolutionary duty to fulfill, so we take out fear and put it to one side,” Leonardo Fernandez, 68, an intensive care specialist, told the outlet.
Cuba has one of the highest ratios worldwide of physicians per capita even when excluding those doctors abroad. Its doctors were on the front lines in the fight against cholera in Haiti and against Ebola in West Africa in the 2010s.
This is the sixth medical brigade Cuba has sent in recent days to combat the spread of the new disease abroad.
“In a time of crisis, the Cuban government, the Cuban people […] have risen to the occasion, they have heard our appeal and they have responded,” Jamaican Health Minister Christopher Tufton said upon greeting 140 Cuban medical professionals at Kingston International Airport.
Meanwhile, Cuba is stepping up measures at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus where there are at least 25 cases confirmed so far. Thousands of doctors and medical students are also going door-to-door monitoring their local communities.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel recently announced the country would be closing its borders to foreign non-residents.