Di Battista returns to TV: “They’ve removed a tumour, now I have to undergo treatment”

“Every day I regain a little more freedom.” Alessandro Di Battista returns to DiMartedì, speaking via video link with Giovanni Floris on La7, and explains for the first time what happened to him in late August in Havana. He was in Cuba working on a report for Il Fatto Quotidiano and TvLoft when he began to feel unwell due to “cerebral oedema caused by a tumour that was diagnosed”. The Cuban doctors “immediately prescribed the right treatment, which reduced the oedema and made it possible for me to have surgery; they removed almost the entire tumour. Now I will undergo treatment, hoping that it works”. 

Di Battista, aged 48, had undergone surgery at a hospital in the Cuban capital and returned to Italy by air ambulance between 11 and 12 September; on 18 September, he announced that he had been discharged. He says he does not identify with the ‘sick warrior’ rhetoric: “I’m not one of those people who say ‘I’ll pull through’; I have to undergo treatment and maintain a positive attitude. It’s the doctors who mustn’t give up.” He adds: “I’m part of that group of Italian citizens who ask, ‘Why me?’”

The article also touches on politics. At the Gemelli Hospital, he reports, he was told that in Cuba the operation had been carried out with great precision, despite using technology from thirty years ago, in a hospital with no running water. And on Giorgia Meloni: she behaved well towards him, as did the whole government, and rang him to urge him to ignore the controversy over the state flight, which – he points out – was never really a possibility.