News

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov heads for Cuba next week to hold talks with Cuban leaders and attend the 19th Havana International Book Fair to which his country is this year’s special guest.

BBC Mundo blogger in Havana, Fernando Ravsberg, reported Thursday on an unpleasant encounter with the police “for having drank a coffee and conversed with a [Cuban] journalism student who I had helped with his graduating thesis.”

Seven young US doctors who studied medicine on scholarships in Havana arrived at the Cuban field hospital in Croaix des Buquet, Haiti yesterday to lend a hand in the treating of Haiti’s earthquake victims.

Members of Denmark’s Moto-Mundo Bike agency, which coordinates motorcyclists’ trips to world tourist destinations, will tour Cuba for two weeks starting next February 7, announced Adolfo Prieto, president of the Latin American Motorcycles Association Club (LAMA), a group whose members are classic motorbike aficionados.

The risk of forest fires occurring in Cuba will increase starting this month due to the drought of the last quarter of 2009 and the southern winds, announced the National Headquarters of the Forest Rangers Corps. Up to now, in 2010, there have been 20 fires that have affected 211 hectares.

Cuban authorities are carrying out a study in coastal communities to determine the possible effects of the rise in sea level, as well as investigating the varieties resistant to water and thermal stress on agriculture, consequences of climate change, announced Orlando Rey, head of the Environment Department of the Ministry of Science.

The large Cuban medical brigade working in Haiti will open its fifth tent hospital this week in Les Cayes, a port city fifteen miles southwest of the capital Port au Prince. The other four hospitals are in Croix des Buquet, Carrefour, Leogane and Jacmel.

Cuba’s Yargelis Savigne won the women’s triple jump of the PSD Bank Meet taking place in Dusseldorf Germany. In the same meet a recuperated Dayron Robles of Cuba won the 60-meter hurdles with a time of 7.50 seconds.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva plans to visit Cuba on February 24-25 to meet with Raul and Fidel Castro, announced the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. Lula’s last visit to Cuba was in October 2008, shortly after Cuba was hit by powerful hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

The central-eastern city of Camaguey, Cuba is celebrating the 496th anniversary of its founding. To salute the date the city is showing what it claims to be the largest rag doll in the world. The 22-meter doll was the work of the Carsueños socio-cultural project.