News

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, is in Havana for the final days of the Havana Film Festival, an annual event that he rarely misses. “Gabo”, as he is known in Latin America, will give a three-day workshop on “how to tell a story” for scriptwriters and movie makers at the International Cinema and TV School located in San Antonio de los Baños on the outskirts of the capital. It is not known whether he will meet with his close friend Fidel Castro.

Cuba and the 14-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) continued to strengthen ties at a summit held in Santiago de Cuba on Monday. Rotating CARICOM president, Antigua’s Prime Minister Baldwin Spence said he hopes the US blockade on Cuba will soon be “relegated to history.”

The Caribbean leaders warned of the “devastating” impact of the US economic and financial crisis that unleashed a snowball effect which threatens to erase any progress made in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals to combat poverty.

While Cuba is not a member of CARICOM it provides assistance to several of its nations especially in the fields of health care and education. Many Caribbean island nations are seeing regional cooperation as a vital way to cope with the global financial, energy, environmental and food crises that seriously affect them.

There will not be another postponement to implement the labor reform that will eliminate the wage ceiling and pay people according to work productivity, said Carlos Mateu, a deputy minister of Labor and Social Security. The measure aims to do away with “egalitarianism”, considered one of the brakes on the development of the country’s productive forces, reports IPS.

A delegation made up by 40 specialists from the Japan Federation of Democratic Medical Institutions will travel to Cuba in January to get acquainted with the island’s healthcare system, announced Jose Fernandez de Cossio, Cuban ambassador to Tokyo. A total of 60,000 health workers from 1,457 institutions, including 155 hospitals, belong to the Japanese Federation.

The Cuban government announced lower fuel prices on Monday, taking into account the drop in the international price of oil products. Regular gasoline will now cost US $1.08 a liter down from $1.45 (from around $5.50 to $4.00 a gallon). The high-octane gasoline went from $1.62 to $1.18 per liter. Fuel is sold in Cuba at state-owned and operated service stations. While the island produces a large percentage of the oil used to generate electricity, the lighter oil needed to produce gasoline is imported from Venezuela.

The 2008-2009 sugar harvest began in Cuba over the weekend with milling beginning in two sugar factories to the east of the island. A total of 54 mills will have joined the harvest by January, noted Ministry of Sugar authorities.

We have a new page as of today titled “Fun” on our main menu. Yandy Fragela takes two seemingly identical photographs and then invites you to find the eight differences. The first photo centers on the intersection of 23rd and L Streets in the Vedado district of Havana, taken back in the 1950s.

If U.S. President-elect Barack Obama eases the blockade against Cuba it would be “a positive first step” on the road to the normalization of relations between our nations, said Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque on Friday. During his electoral campaign Obama promised to lift the travel restrictions on the Cuban-American community and on the sending of remittances to the island. Earlier in the week 12 US business associations asked Obama to end all travel restrictions and normalize trade with the island.

HAVANA TIMES, Dec 5.— Steven Soderbergh’s film with Benicio del Toro playing Ernesto “Che” Guevara gets a special showing at the Havana Film Festival on Saturday December 6th at the Yara theater. The Oscar winning actor will be on hand to present the two-part, four-hour production which won him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Che is revered in Cuba by government leaders, much of the general citizenry, as well as by people who see in him ideals they think have been sidetracked over 50 years of the ups and downs of revolution.

A group of 12 U.S. business associations asked president-elect Barack Obama to lift the blockade against Cuba or at least ease the restrictions on trade and travel. Among the groups requesting a policy change are the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business organization of the country, The National Retail Federation, the Grocery Manufactures Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, Business Roundtable and the National Foreign Trade Council.