HAVANA, Dec. 19th In Cuba’s largest public housing project a 94-year-old man has created a rusty fantasy world from cast-off furniture, office machines, children’s toys and the general detritus of life and transformed these found objects into an eye-popping sculpture garden.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 19th (Reuters) The commission in charge of writing communist-run Cuba’s new constitution has revised an original draft to remove the concept of marriage altogether after originally amending it to open the doorway to same-sex unions.

Read more

HAVANA, D ec. 19th (Reuters) Connectivity in Cuba, a tech laggard, has surged in recent years as the government opened cybercafes, Wi-Fi parks and this month launched mobile internet – although few homes are connected to the web.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 19th  (EFE) A survey conducted in Cuba through an application for mobile phones found that 47% of respondents do not agree with the single-party system and 45.1% do not accept the irrevocable nature of socialism as an economic system , social and political, said the authors today.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua)  Cuban mechanical engineer Rafael Torres is an expert in Go, or Wei Qi, the ancient Chinese board game played around the world and increasingly on this Caribbean island.

Torres, who is also a judo instructor, considers Go to be a kind of “martial art for the brain,” which may explain the global popularity of the game invented in China at least 2,500 years ago. Go is gaining a following in Cuba thanks to Torres, who is credited with promoting it nationwide.

The 53-year-old was working at a state-run transportation company when, in 1992, he met the representative of Japanese vehicle manufacturer Hino Motors, Yuichi Sato, who taught him the basic rules of the game.

Torres and a couple of mathematicians at the University of Havana who had learned the game on their own, soon organized Cuba’s first national Go tournament, and founded the Cuban Federation of Go, which is officially recognized by the National Sports Institute.

Torres’ enthusiasm, spurred by a visit from professional Japanese Go player Hajime Tokimoto, led to the creation of the Cuban Academy of Go in 1996, which has actively spread an appreciation for the game of strategy.

Headquartered inside a busy sports stadium in western Havana, the academy offers courses for beginners that have attracted numerous children from elementary and secondary schools in the area.

Similar academies exist in every province, offering courses and contests. Go is even part of the curriculum at the University of Physical Culture and Sports Sciences. “Today we have more than 2,000 players and about 50 professors throughout the country,” Torres told Xinhua, while refereeing an informal tournament at the academy’s headquarters.

Torres, who has participated in several world championships with relative success, believes Cuban players have a similar style to the Chinese, because “they combine deep analysis with aggressive play, with courage, with taking risks in the search for victory.”

He may be right. Orlando Mederos, a young Cuban doctor, finished third in the Pan-American Championship of Go, held in Mexico in November, only behind U.S. and Canadian players.

“In the Americas, perhaps excluding Canada and the United States, we are competitive. We can even be competitive against Canada and the United States, but we have to improve a little more to reach the level they have,” Mederos said.

Cuba’s national champion, Carlos Alberto Perez, is currently in Chile teaching for three months at the request of the Chilean federation.

Torres, meanwhile, has just returned from China, after winning a contest organized in Hangzhou by the local branch of Qiyuan, the state agency responsible for board games. There he presented a lecture titled “The Revolution of Wei Qi within the Cuban Revolution,” an anthropological study of the game in Cuba.

The academy now plans to work more closely with the Confucius Institute and the House of Chinese Arts and Traditions, two Havana institutions that seek to promote the Chinese language and culture in Cuba.

Torres is convinced of the mental and even physical benefits of the game, and continues to be its main proponent. He is certain that Go will gradually become a new favorite pastime among sports- and game-loving Cubans.

HAVANA, Dec. 17th  The largest religious pilgrimage of Cubans dedicated to San Lazaro has a common denominator in the requests of most of the pilgrims. This year the thousands of devotees who traveled the route to the National Shrine entrusted the saint with the miracle that does not come: prosperity and reconciliation.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 17th   On December 6th, Cuba’s self-employed workers woke up to news that could mark many of their personal and professional lives in the future: several of the 20 legal provisions that refined the Self-Employment Law, which came into effect on December 7th, had been modified by the Council of Ministers.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 17th  (Reuters) – Cuba’s economy will grow next year at about the same sluggish 1 percent pace it did in 2018 and an austerity program begun in 2016 will continue, the country’s economy minister said on Sunday, according to state-run media.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 16th (EFE) Un país rico en tradiciones culinarias y diverso en sabores, aún frente a la escasez y el desabastecimiento, es la sorpresa que revela estos días en La Habana Cuban Food Stories, un documental que traza el mapa de la isla a través del estómago y la nostalgia de un cineasta cubano.

Read more

HAVANA 16 (PL ) Mailén Díaz Almaguer, the only survivor of the plane crash in Cuba in May that cost the lives of more than a hundred people, sent his first message of thanks to those who continued his recovery.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec 16 (PL) Cuba will close 2018 with the arrival of four million 750 thousand tourists, a figure higher than 2017 but lower than the expected plan, Minister of Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil said in Parliament today.

Read more

HAVANA, Decd. 16th (AFP) The Colombian crime film “Pajaros de Verano” has won the prized Coral Award at the 40th edition of the popular Havana Film Festival.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 15th Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features the deep blue waters of the Florida Strait and the shallow, turquoise waters that cover the Cay Sal Bank and Bahama Banks.

The United States and Cuba may be divided economically, but the two countries are only physically separated by 90 miles of beautiful ocean.

According to a recent study based on Landsat imagery, around 53 percent of Cuba’s landscape is still covered with undeveloped ecosystems, including forests and wetlands. Around 40 percent of the land is used for agriculture.

The beautiful ocean boundary between the U.S. and Cuba

This image was captured on December 2, 2018 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

HAVANA, Dec. 15th Ten years ago, Cuban resident Pepe Casanas decided to do something very unorthodox in his fight against rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pain; he purposely got a scorpion to sting him.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 14th It’s a no-go for FedEx’s scheduled service to Cuba. The Memphis-based logistics and delivery giant received approval from the Department of Transportation (DOT) in July 2016 to be the first all-cargo airline to start service to Cuba.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 14th Havana today becomes the capital of integration, unity, and consensus, as high level representatives from ten member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Agreement meet in the city’s International Conference Center.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec 14th (EFE) The airline Cubana de Aviación restores its flights to Venezuela today, paralyzed since May, with the Caracas-Holguin-Havana triangular route, operated with a rented plane to the Italian firm Blue Panorama Airlines (BPA), official media reported. the island.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec 13th  (Reuters)   Cuba’s nickel plus cobalt sulfide production will top 50,000 tonnes this year and earnings are up over 2017, the head of the country’s state monopoly Cubaniquel was quoted by local media as stating on Wednesday.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec.13th  (Reuters) – For Carlos Acosta, the son of a black truck driver in Cuba, overcoming poverty, prejudice and politics to become a global ballet legend, write a best-selling memoir and create his own dance company was not enough.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 12th (AP) Cuban entrepreneurs and artists are welcoming a series of government decisions to soften laws that they said would have sharply limited private enterprise and artistic expression.

Read more

HAVANA, 12 Dec. Dozens of Cubans are arriving weekly to buy in Haiti. They look for what in the Island is scarce in the poorest country of Latin America.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 11th (EFE) The Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, met Monday in Havana with the former president and leader of the ruling Communist Party, Raul Castro, and the president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, reported this Tuesday the agency.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec 10 (P L ) The Havana Riviera Hotel is now 61 years old from its opening in an attractive site of this capital, a space of time that has filled its salons and its history with singular meaning.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 9th Prince Charles of England could become the first member of the British Royal Family to visit Cuba during a historic official tour in 2019.

Read more

HAVANA, 9 Dec. (EFE) .- Carlos Acosta, the “black god of Cuban ballet”, returns to his native country as the prodigal son “who never left” with his biographical film Yuli, a story of success and “hope”, directed by the Spanish Icíar Bollaín and now exhibited in Havana as a gift “for Cuba and the Cubans”.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 9th The tailor-made trip includes roundtrip charter airfare, a guided walking tour of Old Havana, and more. With waterfront views and the biggest pool in all of Key West, Havana Cabana is one of the best new hotels to have popped up on Roosevelt Boulevard in the last few years. Read more

HAVANA, Dic. 8th (Reuters)  Cuba’s government defended on Friday a controversial new decree tightening control on the cultural sector but said it would seek artists’ backing for how it will be implemented, a move those who had protested against the decree hailed as a victory.

Read more

HAVANA, Dec. 7 (Reuters) Cuba said on Thursday it will import hundreds of buses to strengthen its weakened public transport system amid a reduction in private sector taxis, whose drivers have shown discomfort following new state regulations to circulate on the island.

Read more

 Cuba’s government has modified a series of measures unpopular with the country’s private sector, including lifting restrictions on the number of business permits a person can have and the number of chairs there can be in restaurants, a top official said Wednesday.
Read more

 (AP)  Cuba is softening the impact of a heavily criticized new law that would have given government inspectors power to shut down any exhibition or performance deemed to violate the country’s socialist revolutionary values, the country’s vice minister of culture told The Associated Press.

Read more