News

Cuban writer Leonardo Padura said he feels obliged to be optimistic about the reforms begun by the island’s government, in statements to the press in the capital. The novelist, who presented at the International Book Fair of Cuba his most recent novel “El hombre que amaba a los perros” (The Man Who Loved Dogs), said what’s needed are transformations in the mentality of the population, but also that of the bureaucrats “who still don’t understand the dimensions of the change.”

Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo paid a private visit to President Raul Castro and his senior advisor Fidel Castro this Friday in Havana. In a brief note, the official press said the threesome discussed relations between their countries and current international issues.

The prospects of closing down (the prison camp) at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba in the best of cases are very small due to the extensive opposition in the US Congress. Another obstacle is the difficulty to establish agreements with other countries willing to receive the prisoners, Robert Gates, U.S. secretary of defence, admitted. President Barack Obama had promised to close down that installation in January 2010.

“Cuba’s hour is not for revolutions…rather for gradual and peaceful reforms,” Arturo López-Levy, a Cuban academic resident in the United States, affirmed in response to an opinion panel organized by the Cubaencuentro digital magazine.

The coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), Juan José Rabilero, was dismissed from his post in a Plenum of the National Leadership. The CDRs, the island’s largest mass organization, are made up by all virtually all persons older than 14 who contribute to sanitation, vigilance, health promotion and ideological preparation activities in the barrios, reported IPS. The new coordinator is 46-year-old Carlos Rafael Miranda Martínez.

We will be able to enjoy good weather with little chance of rain this whole week. This is due to the presence of high pressures, which will remain over this period.