Durham Miners’ Association chair STEPHEN GUY speaks to Ben Chacko about the Reform threat, what’s needed from Labour and why the Big Meeting will never lose its politics
AT the start of the corona crisis, Italy was overwhelmed by the virus. Everyone remembers the terrible images of overcrowded hospitals with dying patients. Cuba sent a medical brigade to help deal with the worst of the suffering. Once the pandemic was under control, Cuban doctors and nurses returned home.
About two years later, a brigade of medical personnel from Cuba went to Italy again, more specifically to Calabria, the southernmost part of Italy. The brigade is still active. This time there is no urgent emergency, but the problem is one of a serious and chronic shortage of Italian doctors in the region.
One example: almost half of all vacancies for emergency physicians went unfilled in Italy in 2020.
PAOLO SANTALUCIA reports on how an Italian region defies US pressure to end a Cuban doctors programme
The future does not have to be climate chaos and social breakdown. MARC VANDEPITTE looks at the alternatives offered by the Global Justice Report, co-authored by Thomas Piketty
Once a source of national pride, Cuba’s healthcare system declines as energy shortages deepen crisis, writes ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
While ordinary Americans were suffering in the wake of 2005’s deadly hurricane, the Bush administration was more concerned with maintaining its anti-Cuba stance than with saving lives, writes MANOLO DE LOS SANTOS


