News

The regular 90-game Cuban baseball season comes to an end this week and the eight teams to compete in the quarterfinal playoffs are already determined. Industriales, last year’s league champions were eliminated as well as their perennial rival Santiago de Cuba.

Cuba’s Odlanier Solis took a couple Round One shots from WBC boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, on Saturday night, dropped to the floor, and said no more before a booing crowd of 19,000 in Cologne, Germany.

Former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide thanked Cuba for its medical aid to his country, which has saved more than 70,000 persons since the start of the cholera epidemic last October. Aristide returned to Port-au-Prince on Friday after seven years in exile in South Africa.

The prosecutor’s office presented a fax allegedly signed by Luis Posada Carriles that relates him to the terrorist attacks on Cuban tourist installations in 1997. The document had been objected to by the defense, but Judge Kathleen Cardone finally accepted its presentation. Posada is accused of lying to the U.S. immigration authorities after he illegally entered the US in 2005. His trial is taking place in El Paso, Texas.

The clocks in Cuba will move forward an hour at midnight Saturday as Daylight Savings Time 2011 begins on the island. As of Sunday March 20th the island will be -4 hours GMT instead of -5.

Cuba registers a marked increase in infant obesity, according to studies on children less than 11 years old at the National Centre for Medical Genetics and the Montané Museum of Anthropology of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Havana, it was reported at the Anthropos 2011 International Convention of Anthropology, which concludes today on the island.

The impact of cinema in Cuban rural communities will be the center of discussion of the 10th Jorge Villazón Cinema Meeting, to be held Mar. 24-31 in the town of San Fernando de Camarones, in the central province of Cienfuegos.

Cuba has today the largest number of specialists in first and second degree medicine in its history, Minister of Public Health Roberto Morales Ojeda affirmed. Morales recognized that there are still discipline problems in that sector, which lead to complaints from the population.

The 2004 Olympic Gold Medalist Odlanier Solis of Cuba puts his perfect record in professional boxing on the line Saturday in Cologne, Germany in a bout against World Heavyweight Champion Vitali Kliotschko, 39, of the Ukraine.

Cuba should “be prepared for that (US government) project that is so sinister and alien to an authentic cultural exchange” against Cuba, Minister of Culture Abel Prieto affirmed in a ceremony to pay tribute to a State Security agent who revealed alleged US plans to promote anti-government actions among intellectuals and artists.