HAVANA, March 24th After being welcomed at the airport, the prince and his wife started their visit by laying a wreath at the memorial for Cuba’s national hero, the revolutionary essayist and poet, Jose Marti.
HAVANA, March 22th Cuba would have to spend nearly $2 billion a year to meet its domestic oil needs if Venezuela’s National Assembly and interim president Juan Guaidó manage to stop deliveries to the Caribbean island.
HAVANA, March 21th (IPS) The binational “Ponte Alerta Caribe” (Get ready Caribbean) project, completed its plan of action last Friday in the Cuban capital after over a year of hard work, set out to strengthen collaborative efforts and to draw up more effective regional strategies to reduce risks in the event of natural disasters in the Caribbean.
HAVANA, March 21th (AFP) Cuba’s love affair with 1950s-era American cars is still intact, but the communist-run island also has a lingering attachment to a stalwart of Soviet-era leftovers, the motorcycle sidecar.
HAVANA, Mar 20 (PL) The only survivor of May 18 plane crash in Havana last Year, Mailen Diaz Almaguer, left the hospital, her sister Mailin posted Wednesday on Facebook.
HAVANA, march 21th (Reuters) – Prince Charles and his wife Camilla arrive in Cuba on Sunday as part of a Caribbean tour, the first British royals to visit Cuba even as ally the United States seeks to isolate the country.
HAVANA, March 21th The Fresh Pineapple boat led this Wednesday the nautical regatta between the US city St. Petersburg and Havana 2019, being the first to dock at the docks of the Marina Internacional Hemingway resort, west of the Cuban capital.
HAVANA, March 20th (ACN) — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has stressed the need for the local banking system to play a more prominent role in the development of the country.
HAVANA, March 20th Is it safe to travel solo as a female in Cuba? It’s a question that crops up a lot, and we’re not really sure why! Away from the headline grabbing war of words between the government in Cuba and the United States – which has lasted since the presidency of John F Kennedy – there is a truly welcoming Caribbean nation.
HAVANA, March 20th Internet-enabled mobile phone cards are selling out in Havana, according to 14ymedio, independent Cuban news site. Telecom operator Etecsa started offering 4G SIM cards this month to around 10,000 customers in Havana, after the island’s new 3G network became quickly saturated, according to Mexican newspaper La Jornada.
HAVANA, March 19th (AFP) – Cubans are using new found social media muscle to challenge their leaders in ways hitherto unseen on the island.
HAVANA , March 19th (Reuters) The Trump administration’s move to end five-year visitor visas for Cubans has left residents of the island angry and frustrated that it will be even harder to see their relatives, shop, or undertake cultural and academic exchanges in the United States.
The endless job saving dogs and cats on the streets of Havana
HAVANA, March 18th It’s 9 pm and I am on the street, pacing up and down, holding a dog. His name will be Percy but neither of us know it yet. He’s gravely sick with distemper virus and in a comatose state, mucous dripping from his eyes and nose.
HAVANA, March 18th (AFP) You wouldn’t think the poorest country in the Americas would be anyone’s shopping dream. Yet Haiti has become just that for Cuban merchants.
HAVANA, March 18th Dance on film can have many functions. It might act as a showstopping decoration to the drama (most movie musicals), a shorthand for its protagonist’s obsession or madness (Black Swan, The Red Shoes) or a blunt tool for illustrating cultural difference (Step Up, Save the Last Dance and every other ballet-girl-meets-hip-hop-boy movie).
HAVANA, March 16 (Xinhua) — Visitors to Havana’s Old Quarter would have some fun memorabilia of their “travel back in time” as they pose before a vintage box camera manufactured more than 100 years ago.
While the rise of cellphones and selfies has made street photography fairly obsolete, Cuban brothers Jose and Yomar Del Toro are keeping the tradition alive in Havana’s Central Park with a couple of the last such cameras still functioning.
Surrounded by impressive colonial-era buildings, almost all of which declared heritage sites, the park is the perfect backdrop for a portrait, which makes it popular with passersby.
“Everyone wants to have their picture taken with that old gadget,” Jose, 54, told Xinhua.
Jose has been earning a living through photography since 1980, when he inherited his grandfather’s camera, a 1912 Eastman Kodak Speed Graphic.
Yomar, who is 14 years younger than Jose, works at the opposite corner of the park, using another antique Kodak camera he inherited from their father, who is also a street photographer.
“This has its charm,” he says with a laugh, as he prepares to photograph a young couple.
Getting your picture at the park has long come to be a tradition. For many years, Cubans arriving in the capital from the countryside would pose for a photograph in front of the city’s top monuments, such as the nearby Capitol building or the statue of national hero Jose Marti, erected at the center of the park.
That’s why the park once bustled with street photographers lugging their large box cameras which can deliver fast black and white images.
The cameras use photographic paper that is developed inside the box with the necessary chemicals, providing a negative that is then turned into a positive image.
In a matter of minutes, customers have their photo in hand. Many want “Havana” or “Cuba” to appear on the photo, a detail that is done manually, by placing letters on the negative copy before copying it.
Cuba’s photographic tradition can be seen at the Historical Photo Library at the City Historian’s Office. Several antique cameras are also on display, including a bellows Kodak manufactured in 1880.
Thanks to the Del Toro brothers, the tradition continues, though it is dying out because it is getting harder and harder to find the paper and chemicals needed for the developing and printing.
“Today it is very difficult to get paper, developer and fixer,” Jose said.
Photos:Joaquín Hernández/Xinhua
Havana, March 16th (PL) We will do our best show and give Cubans a warm greeting, said Deborah Harry, vocalist of the band Blondie, which has offert this Friday a concert at the Mella Theater in Havana.
HAVANA, March 16th (AFP) The United States announced on Friday it would replace a five-year, multiple-entry tourist visa offered to Cubans with a single-entry visa valid for just three months, to match the island nation’s own visa rules for US visitors.
HAVANA, March 16th (CGTN) Cuba expects to surpass five million tourists this year including about 50,000 visitors from China. While the number is small compared to other countries, officials say they are pushing for more Chinese vacationers to the Caribbean island.
HAVANA, March 15th After two months of the passage of the tornado that devastated several municipalities of Havana, the United Nations (UN) made a donation of nearly three thousand mattresses for the victims.
HAVANA, March 15th Blondie is a band that revolutionized the world of punk rock with their bizarre performances, but above all by the unmatched charisma of the vocalist, Deborah Harry since the late 70’s with hits like Heart of Glass or Call Me. On March 14 and 18, this iconic band will perform at the Mella theater in Havana.
HAVANA, Mar 14 (PL) The investigation to determine the causes of the plane crash of May 18, 2018 in Havana is entering its final phase, Armando Daniel Lopez, President of the Cuban Institute of Civil Aeronautics, said Thursday.
HAVANA, March 13th The bases for the installation of wind turbines of the most powerful wind farm complex in Cuba, began to be built in La Herradura, in the north of Las Tunas, where some components of the wind energy generation technology are already close to the site.
HAVANA, March 12th There isn’t a time in the day here in Cuba when we don’t have to look at our wallets with sadness or up at the heavens.
HAVANA, March 11th Cuba used to depend on aid from its oil-rich ally Venezuela. But with Venezuela in turmoil, opening luxury hotels is “a new stage,” but also “a necessity,” Cuba’s Tourism Minister says as his country scrambles for other revenue sources.
HAVANA, March 9th Diego Maradona’s lawyer revealed that his client had three children, adolescents, in Cuba. The Argentine star will visit Havana in the year to perform DNA tests and recognize them.
HAVANA Mar 7th The First Symposium of the Max Planck Society of Germany and Cuba, Frontiers of Science, will contribute to promoting reciprocal scientific knowledge, said Aurora Fernández González, Deputy Minister of Higher Education, at the opening of the meeting on Wednesday.
HAVANA, March 7 This Thursday, ETECSA announced that it will begin offering services on the 4G mobile network to “relieve” the overload in the 3G network, which began operations in December.
HABANA, March 6th (HT) The Havana World Music Festival in its sixth edition is set be held in Havana on March 21-23. For this year the festival program includes 20 new bands from a dozen nations under the Primera Base category. Groups of the most diverse musical genres with excellent quality but mostly little known.
HAVANA, March 6 (PL ) Producer Miguel Mendoza, the director of photography Livio Delgado, and the sound engineer Jeronimo Labrada, will receive here the National Cinema Prize 2019, announced the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Icaic).