For five days, members of the circles in Lombardy of the National Association of Italy-Cuba Friendship (ANAIC) visited Las Tunas, in another chapter of the twinning between the “Eastern Cuban Balcony” and that Italian region, which on March 27 will celebrate its twenty-seventh anniversary.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- Coming from various Lombard cities, the 13 members of the group met with representatives of civil society, the economy, and government authorities to learn first-hand the reality of this eastern Cuban province. The Enrique Casals Tobacco Factory, one of the homes for children without family protection, the Majibacoa agro-industrial sugar company, the El Cucalambé Professional Art School, the new headquarters of Periódico 26, and Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna General Teaching Hospital were some of the places visited by the friends from the transalpine nation, at the request of the Provincial Delegation of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP).
In statements to the press, Franco Tonon, head of the ANAIC Lombardy Coordination, reaffirmed the commitment of the activists in condemning the U.S. economic blockade and demanding that Cuba be removed from the spurious list of countries sponsoring terrorism. This year, he anticipated, they plan to continue expanding their actions to make known the effects that Washington's siege has on the daily lives of Cubans. Tonon highlighted the positive impact that the presence of Cuban medical collaborators had in his country. “It was the demonstration of what it means to be an internationalist, which refutes the campaigns against Cuba that are carried out in Europe,” he said.
Throughout more than two decades, the Lombardy-Las Tunas twinning has directly benefited more than 200 social institutions here. After the stage of fighting against COVID-19, the ANAIC circles in that Italian region concentrated their efforts on collecting medical supplies and other materials for the Las Tunas Health System, to alleviate the difficult conditions in which medical care is developed in the Cuban Archipelago, first of all, due to the obstacles that the United States places on the import of raw materials and technologies.
