New Delhi, July 9 -- Italy's southern Calabria region is the rare place in Europe where Cuba sends medical professionals under a long-running program that the United States wants to stamp out.

Cuba's doctors for decades have worked in developing nations such as Gambia and Venezuela, skilled in providing care with scarce resources. Over 200 now staff remote hospitals across Calabria, Italy's poorest region in the tip of the country's boot. A shortage 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 ...