viernes, 27 de marzo de 2009

Havana Historian to Give Keynote Lecture in Guatemala

HAVANA, Cuba, March 27 (acn) Havana Historian Eusebio Leal will participate in an international seminar on restoration and will offer a keynote lecture at the National Museum of Ethnology in Guatemala City.

According to the website of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Leal has received honorary doctorates from eight universities from all over the world and has received numerous awards in recognition of his restoration work in Old Havana, declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

These awards include the International Architecture Award from Belgium; the ‘Queen Sofia’ Award for Restoration and Preservation of the Cultural Heritage from Spain; and the Medal of the World Decade of Development, granted by UNESCO.

Leal’s work of restoration in Old Havana has been characterized by a combination of the preservation of old buildings with new projects of social development, the improvement of housing conditions and the creation of sources of employment.


(Dictará Eusebio Leal conferencia magistral en Guatemala)

Cuban Painter Manuel Mendive and the 10th Havana Biennial

HAVANA, Cuba, March 27 (acn) My purpose as an artist is to make life and spirit grow more beautiful, stressed maestro Manuel Mendive, one of the greatest artists of Cuban contemporary painting, a participant in the 10th Havana Biennial, scheduled for March 27th through April 30th.

During a press conference prior to the event, the artist focused on his exhibition at the important arts meeting which, he said, will be a chant to love, peace, and human spirituality.

On the expression of the Cuban nature in his works and what it means for him to represent culture from the archipelago in international events, he commented: “I’m Cuban, I’m black, and I’m proud of it. I have a lot of energy and the poetry of my ancestors, with which I can tell the world beautiful things from my country, my identity.”

Entitled “Spirit, Nature and Heads” Mendive’s exhibition is made up of paintings using acrylics on canvas, and other pieces worked in iron and wood. For the first time, he has included a pianist in the project, Pura Ortiz, who will play baroque music.

The artist conceptualized this work explaining that he conceives spirit as an invigorating energy; Nature as the big house; and heads, as something divine - the perfect things to create a great world of love and peace.

Colors, gestures, music, and sensuality will merge in the exhibition that Mendive will inaugurate on March 29th, as part of the Biennial, as well as the special performances he has also conceived.

The performances will begin with a tour beginning near the Saratoga Hotel, to the Prado Promenade and will end at the Orígenes Gallery, in Havana’s Grand Theater. Participating in this artistic action will be some 50 artists; among them some from Cuba’s Contemporary Dance Ensemble, the National Folkloric Group, and the Caribbean Dance Company, from eastern Santiago de Cuba province.

That building will be the venue of the exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the outstanding creator, which will be open to the public throughout the Biennial.

The work of Manuel Mendive, 2001 National Fine Arts Prize winner, is outstanding for the presence of a conceptual world where he inter- relates the environment, tradition, religiousness and syncretism of African antecedents.

The inauguration of the Biennial is scheduled for. Friday afternoon at La Cabaña Fortress and Los Tres Reyes del Morro Castle.

Old Havana’s San Francisco de Assisi Convent is the venue of the “Point of Encounter” project coordinated by painter Alexis Leyva (Kcho) bringing together prominent artists from various parts of the world to create, inspired by the most acute challenges humanity is living through.

Besides the Morro-Cabaña Cultural Complex and Old Havana, the municipalities of Vedado and La Lisa, and other public places in the Cuban capital will also be venues for the event.

Under the slogan “Integration and resistance in the global era”, this 10th edition of the Biennial, a fiesta of contemporary art from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa brings together over 300 artists from 54 countries, among them Cuba, with 120 artists from different generations and creative tendencies. Brazilians Flaminio Jallageas and Patricia Gerber, and South African Jane Alexandre are among foreign participants.

On Thursday four excellent collateral exhibitions of were inaugurated at Havana’s Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Biennial: Supervivencia, by Roberto Fabelo, Equipaje perdido, by Esterio Segura, La Enmienda que hay en mí, by Carlos Garaicoa and Resistencia y libertad, by Cuban maestros Wifredo Lam, Raúl Martínez and José Bedia. Attending the opening were Culture Minister Abel Prieto, the Biennial’s president, Rubén del Valle, and numerous national and foreign artists, art gallery representatives, curators, art critics, and art lovers.

During the ceremony, it was announced that on March 28th, the exhibition ‘Chelsea visits Havana’, which includes works by 32 US artists, will be opened, also at the Museum of Fine Arts.

A look at unknown artists from nations of the South was what germinated the essence of the Havana Biennials, which began in 1984 and that, since 1989, include theoretical events on contemporary art and on other no less important issues.

Tradition and modern times; Challenging decolonization; Art, society and reflection; Individuals and their memories; Communication; Art and Life; Dynamics of Urban Culture; and Integration and Resistance have been, in that order, the themes or principles of previous Biennials.

In this globalized world, Cuba, also hit by the world crisis, once again opens its doors to contemporary art and to the artists, with their own identities.

(Comienza programa de la X Bienal de La Habana)

New Peru-Cuba Flight Route Inaugurated

Cuban Deputy Tourism Minister Admi Valhuerdi highlighted on Thursday the importance of a new flight route between Lima, the Peruvian capital, and Havana that has been inaugurated with direct flights by TACA airline.

Valhuerdi noted that this new route – with three flights per week –will contribute to a more dynamic exchange between the South American nation and the Caribbean archipelago that will help both countries develop common actions to face the current international crisis.

She added that one of the priorities of the Cuban Tourism Ministry
(MINTUR) is to bring Latin American nations closer together, particularly those that have direct flights to Cuba.

The official recalled that, in spite of the current world economic difficulties, more than 2.3 million tourists visited the country in 2008 and, up to February 2009, there has been a 5.2% growth in the arrival of visitors compared to the same period last year.

Meanwhile, the Peruvian Ambassador in Cuba, Raul Patiño, stressed that this new flight route is a contribution to the integration of Latin American countries such as Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador, and that it will help in the development of trade, tourism and cooperation in the sectors of health and education.

For his part, the TACA sales manager for Argentina and Uruguay, Danilo Garcia, regarded as very positive the inauguration of this new flight route and added that they expect to increase the number of passengers to Cuba to over 50,000 annually.

(Inauguran nueva ruta de vuelos directos entre Perú y Cuba)

50 years with the Revolution

By: Yuldys Márquez Díaz

Lieutenant Colonel José Ramón Guerra (Founder of the Organs of the Security of the Cuban State):

"These fifty years means for us Revolution, at the begining we were practically some children, when we enter gave us this mission of protecting the Commandant in Boss and to our country, and good imagines a whole life, we feel very satisfied of the work that we carry out and we feel very satisfied of the security of the state that we still have with the new combatants of the security that have been capable and they will be able to continue protecting to our country and our Commandant in Boss."

Engineer Ángel Pérez Pérez (Founder of the Organs of the Security of the Cuban State):

"This precise moment is of continuity. We don't think that the fight has ended but rather it is necessary to follow it, until our last days. We begin this work being young as all the other youths that exist now, but we are in a different stage, in that time we face from the first moment to the enemy that was internal and external. Right now a partner told us, how us that almost we knew ourselves neither to read neither to write could put an end to those organizations that had those forces, that money, those means and however us with the heart and with the since mind we destroy them, we finish them."

Bigger Elio Expósito Rodríguez (Founder of the Organs of the Security of the Cuban State):

"I in what is fundamentally the Security of the State was in what is the fight against bandits, and that it was a fight quite hard, because good in fact the bandits were characterized to make murders, violations to the peasants and us practically the whole time were in what was that stage in the county of Camagüey; for that reason we were in the trial The Demand of the Town from Cuba to the government from United States to inform to the tribunal on all the murders that had made the armed bands. We could point out for example: the band of Manolito López that murdered two militiamen in the exit of Chambas that burned a bus there in the north circuit, could mention the murder of The Picks and the administrator of the farm here in Sierra de Cubitas, for the band of Beraldo Díaz Brunet, good known for cold, and those are the most difficult moments that we had us in the security. And the most satisfactory went when we capture the last bandit in the county of Camagüey that when that Camagüey and Ciego de Ávila, because Ciego de ávila belonged to Camagüey, and we fundamentally operated in the area of Moron, Chamba, Florence, Tamarind, San Felipe, Stream Blanco, Hatibonico, always in the limits of Camagüey and The Villages in that time"

When the excellence is looked for, it grows

By:Ernesto Pantaleón Medina |Camagüey Television

The Cuban system of health is so far from the perfection or the excellence, as everybody know, and lamentable examples exist of how much it is necessary to fight to improve the conditions of numerous facilities in difficult constructive state, or to replace with efficiency and dedication the potholes that it leaves an expensive supply of medications, in occasions from remote corners of the planet, to a very superior price to the original, and everything for blame of the blockade.

And also why not? The inconveniences of subjective order are, those that go by the man's conscience and the woman that could make more as for sensibility and love, in the execution of that settled down by the norms of labor discipline and organization.

But there are merits and achievements that cannot hide neither to ignore, still for the critic more become obstinate in finding the dark side of the things, even there where the stain is only a minimum shade, and the light is plentiful.

An example was given to know recently, when a company of Camagüey, the Comercializer DIVEP, received the diploma that credits it like center promoter of the health, and in fact surrendered this condition when two important anniversary was completed: the hard-working Metallurgist's Day (branch to which belongs) and the day of world fight against the tuberculosis.

They were years of systematic work that included the personnel's training on the topic, the clinical checkups to squares and workers and the corresponding medical pursuit, the cleaning and embellishment of the areas, the fight against vectors of illnesses and the creation of better labor conditions.

It was not easy, amid lacks and with a without number of tasks that to assist for the physicians and the support personnel who had in first line to the doctors and nurses of the family in the area in that the company is located.

But the important thing is that it was achieved, and it was created in leaders, officials, workers, technicians and specialist, a new way to think, a bigger sensibility with the measures that spread to avoid illnesses perfectly prophilactis, or to minimize the damage in those that have been detected when they have already begun their noxious action.

That is quality of life, work conditions that although are not the ideals, they constitute an advance, a model that well could follow other systems of health, without seeking that ours is at the end of the road.

It is not an isolated fact, but of a strategy that takes the Ministry of Public Health in the country in all the levels, under the foreign currency that to prevent is better than curing.

For that reason, still when some that another day becomes difficult to consent to a medication, when the hospital service is not the good , it is necessary to analyze the reason, and if it is the simple human behavior, to demand solutions, but if it goes further on, to appeal to the understanding and to remember examples like that of these lines.