News

Cuba reached two million tourists for 2008 on Friday and expects to surpass the record of 2.3 million visitors set in 2005. First Deputy Minister of Tourism Alexis Trujillo headed the welcoming party at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport for the group of visitors that completed the milestone. While the US blockade prohibits its citizens from traveling to Cuba, the island receives large numbers of Canadians and Europeans.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected in Havana on Monday to begin an important two-day visit after attending the G-20 Summit on the global financial crisis in Washington. China is Cuba’s second leading trade partner after Venezuela.

The film “Che”, by US filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, will be shown in a special presentation during the upcoming 30th Havana Film Festival to be held in the Cuban capital from December 2-12, affirmed Ivan Giroud, the event’s director.

Russian President Dimitri Medvedev will visit Cuba on November 27, announced the Kremlin’s press service. The trip to Cuba forms part of a Latin American tour that will also include Venezuela and Brazil.

The Cuban government accepted this week the offer to become a full member of the Rio Group. This regional body emerged in 1986 and is made up by 22 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Unlike the Organization of American States (OAS), traditionally dominated by the United States, the Rio Group came out of the Contadora Group and support nations involved in bringing peace to Central America back in the 1980s.

In an interview with Italy’s La Republica daily, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva repeated his call to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to lift its nearly half century economic blockade against Cuba. In his second statement on the subject in eight days, Lula said, “Obama has the power and the political authority to change relations between Cuba and the United States.”

A new German technology is being used in the repair of a 150-meter stretch of Havana’s Malecon seaside drive, one of the city’s most popular sites that skirts a part of the coastline, IPS reported today. The transparent FG waterproof material, produced by the German Bordstein-Ries Company, penetrates deeply in the cracked structures and protects them from erosion.

The Cuban government announced Thursday that it has decided to replace the Minister for Foreign Investment and Economic Collaboration, Marta Lomas, with Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz, former Cuban permanent ambassador to the UN. The official note published in Granma newspaper gave no reason for the change.

The Cuban tourist authorities announced packages of social tourism for December designed for visitors from Latin America to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on January 1 in the city of Santiago de Cuba, according to sources from the Ecotur S.A., one of Cuba’s largest travel agencies.

Cuba will show the first results of its pharmacological arsenal to respond to bird flu during the Havana 2008 Biotechnology Congress, to be held in the island’s capital from November 30-December 5, announced Mario Pablo Estrada, head of the animal biotechnology division of the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center.