Tag Archives: Cuba

Surinamese film premiere in Cuba

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This video is the first part of the film Wan Pipel.

From Prensa Latina news agency:

Tribute to Surinamese Filmmaker in Cuba

Paramaribo, May 14 – Surinamese filmmaker Pim de la Parra will be honored during the 4th annual Dutch Film Week, scheduled from May 17 to 25 in Havana, where he will travel on Thursday, according to reports in this capital.

On this occasion, the Cuban audience will appreciate the film Wan Pipel (One People, 1976), the first film shot in Suriname after its independence, restored and digitized in 2010.

The film, considered an absolute classic film of that Caribbean nation, will be shown by its director Pim de la Parra in what will be its Cuban premiere.

De la Parra told the local newspaper Ware Tijd that he is excited about screening Wan Pipel in the Spanish speaking region, 37 years after it was made.

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Ernest Hemingway in Cuba and the USA

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This video from the USA is the film For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) – Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

From Prensa Latina news agency:

Hemingway Writings Preserved in Cuba Sent to US

Havana, May 10 – A total of 2,000 unpublished documents written by US author Ernest Hemingway were preserved by Cuban and US specialists as part of a bilateral agreement signed in 2002.

The lot of documents by Hemingway was sent to the US and will be exhibited soon at the Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts, being the second sending from Cuba to the US cultural institution.

Ada Rosa Alfonso, director of the museum, told Prensa Latina that it is an extension of the working agreement for more than 10 years, with the objective that both nations possess a digital copy of the documents.

Specialists from the Andover, Massachusetts North Eastern Center for Document Preservation are working together with Cuban colleagues, she said.

Among the documents there is a letter written to Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman talking about Hemingway’s wish she were the starring actress in the famous film “For Whom the Bell Tolls” inspired by the novel with the same name written by Hemingway.

Another significant document is the group of letters addressed to his wife Mary Welsh, shopping lists, travelling itineraries and several of his weather considerations about the hurricanes going through the island between 1939 and 1960.

In the first part of the project, among the preserved documents there were manuscripts on his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and a sample of the script for the film “The Old Man and the Sea”, also based on a novel written by the famous US writer.

Recently restored and with more than 9.88 acres, the house and farm in which Hemingway lived in Cuba, called Finca Vigia, in San Francisco de Paula, near the Cuban capital, was bought by Hemingway in December 1940.

His yacht, called “Pilar”, was restored with its original colors, registration information and other elements, to recreate the environment that surrounded Hemingway in Cuba.

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Cuban painter Adigio Benitez dies

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Adigio Benitez at work in his studio

From Prensa Latina news agency:

Cuba Mourns Death of Painter Adigio Benitez

Havana, May 9. Local media are mourning today the passing of Cuban painter, engraver and academic Adigio Benitez, who died in this capital at the age of 89.

The … designer, illustrator and artist died yesterday, and according to his wishes, his body was cremated and the urn containing his ashes will remain on temporary display at a funeral parlor located in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood.

Born in 1924, Benitez felt an interest in the arts starting in his childhood, joining the renowned San Alejandro Academy in 1949.

At that time he already worked with the press on a Socialist Youth magazine of the period.

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Rumba dancing in Cuba

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This music video is called Havana Rumba at Callejón de Hamel, Cuba.

By Elaine Correa:

Rumba beats stereotypes

Wednesday 06 March 2013

Spontaneous dance sessions on the streets of Havana which defy facile interpretation

The worlds of holiday dreamland and raw reality collide in the Callejon de Hamel in Havana on Sunday afternoons.

This is no ordinary alley. On those afternoons the whole place breathes rumba as the weekly Afro-Cuban cultural pena – social gathering – takes place and anyone can wander in and take part.

It’s a tight fit – musicians and their percussion instruments, singers throwing their hands up in the air and dancers moving fast as they flick their skirts and handkerchiefs with their pint-sized offspring trying to follow.

The audience is sandwiched around the invisible lines and spread out in all directions, especially where there’s a bit of shade. In the co-ordinated mayhem nobody shoves their elbow in their neighbour’s ribs. A young couple are dancing to an impossibly fast-paced piece. She’s wearing flip-flops and a pair of denim hotpants that don’t leave much to the imagination. He has a beer can in his hand, with which he gestures toward her crotch every once in a while as they dance, sweat dripping, tongues out and gold teeth gleaming.

Both are full of sexual energy. “That’s a bit vulgar, isn’t it?” says a foreign voice. Like many of the 2.5 million tourists that come to Cuba every year, the speaker is perhaps taken aback by the reality of some aspects of Cuban culture compared to what is often packaged and sold to tourists.

In the port city of Matanzas, one of Cuba’s main trade hubs in times of slavery, rumba was born from the secularisation of a whole range of rhythms taken from African and African-derived religions.

Imagine the sheer complexity of it. Men who worked in the docks began dancing to rumba competitively, as a display of their skills and attitude. This style became known as rumba columbia. Today there is also yambu – a slow dance for couples intended for the older generation – and guaguanco, a fast-paced dance full of sexual connotation and competitive tension between man and woman.

Cuba has changed since the 19th century, and spontaneous rumba sessions are becoming scarce as its official recognition increases. There’s a rumba module in the dance department of the University of the Arts, where it is dissected and choreographed, and going to a rumba often involves more watching a show than dancing. This may be the price to pay for rumba to shake off its “marginal” status in the eyes of many white Cubans.

Since the guidebooks began trumpeting the existence of this free Sunday rumba, it has almost been taken over by tourism. Almost. There is a bar that sells overpriced mojitos and a seating space under the shade of a canopy only for those ready to fork out hard currency. There’s a core of handsome young men fishing for foreign amigas and also a slightly pushy pass-the-hat policy. But there is no unintimidating and smiley presenter who takes the microphone before the show to explain the programme in three languages – “What you’re about to see, ladies and gentlemen…”

Plenty of Cubans from the neighbourhood go to the pena simply to enjoy the music and the vibe, graciously ignoring the tourist presence.

Anecdotes, love stories, confrontations, criticisms and much more are the many themes of rumba. But the one point in common is dignity and respect. Don’t talk behind people’s backs. Don’t even think of hitting a woman. Rumba teaches people values. Its rhythms are so complex they drive non-Cuban musicians up the walls. You won’t learn rumba at your local pub’s weekly salsa class, not to mention by watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Either you grow up in the right marinade or you can’t claim it. Unless you know what you’re watching, all you will see is the sweaty skin, tongues out, hips thrusting and gyrating.

Unless you know what you’re watching, remember not to judge.

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Guantanamo Bay’s butterflies and moths

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Along with the sad news from dictatorially ruled Bahrain, there is sometimes good news. Eg, about birds.

Likewise, in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, there is often torture or other sad news.

This specimen of the lime swallowtail, an invasive species that is a threat to citrus plants, was collected at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in January 2012. CREDIT: Florida Museum of Natural History

This time, somewhat better news. From the University of Florida in the USA:

UF Guantanamo Bay Lepidoptera study sets baseline for future research

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida scientists publishing the first study on butterflies and moths of Guantanamo Bay Naval Station have discovered vast biodiversity in an area previously unknown to researchers.

Appearing in the Bulletin of the Allyn Museum Sept. 5, the study creates a baseline for understanding how different plant and animal species have spread throughout the Caribbean.

“Biodiversity studies are extremely important because they give us clues about where things were and how they evolved over time so we can better understand what may happen in the future,” said study co-author Jacqueline Y. Miller, curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity on the UF campus. “We’re also looking at climate change over time, and butterflies are biological indicator species since they are associated with particular plants as caterpillars and often found in particular habitats.”

During a seven-day trip to the site in January, researchers collected 1,100 specimens representing 192 moth and 41 butterfly species, including the invasive lime swallowtail whose proximity to the U.S. poses a threat to citrus plants. Researchers are freezing tissue samples from many of the collected specimens for future DNA analysis and expect to later describe new species, said lead author Deborah Matthews Lott, a biological scientist at the museum.

“Guantanamo is a special area because it’s a desert-type habitat due to the rain shadow effect from the mountains,” Lott said. “There’s fewer species there, but there’s going to be a tendency for more specialized endemic species.”

Leased to the United States in 1903, the land has unintentionally become a wildlife refuge, offering researchers the opportunity to better understand the island’s natural habitats. Located in the southeast corner of Cuba, its unique and complex geological history of volcanic activity, erosion and shifting sea levels resulted in geological deposits closely associated with marine environments.

“We are comparing the moths and butterflies collected at GTMO to those recorded from the U.S., Bahamas, other nearby islands and Central America,” Miller said. “With the historical geology of the area, there are some potentially new species and such surveys enable us to better understand the evolutionary history of butterflies and moths.”

Cuba is the largest island in the West Indies and researchers’ knowledge of its geological and paleontological history is mainly based on published articles, said co-author Roger Portell, the Florida Museum’s invertebrate paleontology collections manager. Portell has led fieldwork on the naval station since 2007.

“Because it is a military base — and this is true for many military bases, which typically have large areas of land — people are not trampling, bulldozing or developing the land,” Portell said. “So there is a large area of land in the southeast corner of the island that has basically been untouched for 100 years.”

See also here.

A federal judge has ordered the US government to stop trying to restrict lawyers’ access to detainees at Guantanamo Bay: here.

John Knefel, AlterNet in the USA: “Adnan Latif was found dead in his cell on September 10th, 2012, just a day before the eleventh anniversary of 9/11…. He suffered at the hands of the US government in ways that most people can’t begin to comprehend, and his death should be a reminder that the national shame that is Guantanamo Bay lives on and now enjoys bipartisan support”: here.

French citizen Ahmed Hadjarab has filed a criminal complaint with his government over his nephew Nabil’s continuing imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo Bay: here.