The construction sector and housing in Cuba needs a boost. It is a need that results not only in inversions and insertions of new technologies, but in the adoption of strategies to resolve the problems, especially quality, currently present in the works. To this add that we live in a country with a worrying deterioration in the housing stock. Therefore, and with the incentive of the new Foreign Investment Law, between April 8 and the 12 takes place PABEXPO the tenth edition of the International Construction Fair 2014 Fecons in the exhibition area of the capital. Companies from 23 countries will exhibit from Tuesday technologies, construction methods, materials and accessories, with the objective to realize negotiations with each other; and Cuba as the host, of course, also seek to boost the constructive development of the Island After the official opening, Minister of Construction , René Mesa Villafane toured the stands , along with his counterparts from Venezuela and the Republic of Guinea. The Cuban minister said that this year the quality of the exhibitors is even greater than in previous editions of the fair and said to have expectations about the benefits of the new law for the sector. The...

Nobody imagined that the preparations for the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the founding of the town of Sancti Spiritus were to be interrupted by the discovery of archaeological remains in the middle of the city. The demolition of the Serafin Sanchez Park, for the sake of its subsequent reconstruction revealed the existence in that place of debris from the Convent of San Francisco, built there in 1716, and possibly of its inhabitants. The findings consist of a piece of slab 40 by 40 inches, part of the wooden columns and a column of brick and mortar. They also found horseshoes, nails, blacksmith tools, and so on, suggesting the possible existence of a stable or barn. More recently, around the park, experts found what appears to be a niche with human remains, possible sign of a cemetery, common during the time in the vicinity of the monasteries. As the city historian, Maria Antonieta Jiménez , said, the Convent of San Francisco is considered one of the first educational institution in the Villa of the Holy Spirit and an architectural gem of the eighteenth century in Cuba . They say that the building was demolished, at the request of the...

The Danza Contemporanea de Cuba Company will present this Thursday February 13 through the 16, the show Art of movement by British choreographer Billy Cowie, in the Tito Junco room of the Bertolt Brecht Cultural Complex. The show consists of a series of small pieces with a total duration of 45 minutes. According to a press release from the British Council of Cuba, Art of movement was commissioned by the Japanese performing arts festival in Kyoto Experiment 2013. During the performance, the dancers combined with 3D art in a generally slow atmosphere, with no essential lights. Viewers use 3D glasses to complete the virtual atmosphere of the show. Simone Schmidt, from the United Kingdom, and Flavia Hernandez and Denis Martinez, from Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, dance pieces with virtual dancers. The choreographer Billy Cowie will also give a video dance workshop to a group of dancers , choreographers and Cuban filmmakers from February 13 to 15 in that Havana theater, with the aim of showing in a theoretical and practical way the combinatorial techniques of dance and audiovisual work. “Cuba is famous worldwide for its excellence in dance, so it is a great honor for me this opportunity to bring...

A nomination of Cuban music to the Grammy's always a story. This time it's jazz. This time is Roberto Fonseca, who received ovations in Europe and Asia and North America to be placed next to Biuka, Omar Sosa, Wayne Wallace and Paquito D'Rivera in the category of Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year. And if that were not enough, the Washington Post has included Yo (Jazz Village / HarmoniaMundi, 2012) within the top ten musical productions of 2013. An album that the report said "detonates the walls surrounding the Afro-Cuban jazz and rearranges fragments that make up an exciting self-portrait". Somehow, Roberto Fonseca knows that these awards will open portals to Cuban jazz genre worldwide. At 38, these things are known. Especially with the career of Temperament, founded in 1997, with saxophonist Javier Zalba. For the Cuban musician, fusion has become central core of his work, even when the bolero and filin marked the early years of his career. Like Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo. Like hip-hop. Maybe all the influences of his music thrives on, Roberto Fonseca wanted his album to be a place where all cultures are welcomed, respected and heard equally, and Yo, particularly, was conceived...

A magazine can become more than a periodical. A magazine can, if you like, become a manager of culture, art, discussion or regular timely review space. Even achieving to become a specialized publisher and publish one hundred titles in just over ten years. That's why on Thursday, December 19th at the Café Brecht they present the multimedia Tablas. 30 years. 100 volumes (1982-2012) comprising all the issues of the Cuban magazine on performing arts. The compilation also ranks as the number one hundred published under the label of the Editorial Alarcos, with the overall coordination of Omar Valiño, director of Tablas-Alarcos and playwright Alessandra Santiesteban . The design by Idania del Rio with programming by Dashiell Martínez and Beny Cabrera, allows exploring all contents of the 30 years of the Tablas magazine, the editors of the publication explained. As part of the activities to mark the end of the year, there will be the collective photography exhibition Transgressions, gathering snapshots of theatrical performances presented in our stage in recent years, from December 20th at the Tablas-Alarcos headquarters. Finally, on December 21 at 4:00 pm there will be a special play of Chamaco, the work of playwright Abel González Melo, to...

These days, theaters in Miami and New York will host two plays by actor and theater director Alejandro Milian. The first, Crystal Women, could be classified as a scenic or dramatic poem that arises from the collection of some poems later published under the title, Poems and a Crystal Woman, the author told OnCuba. Coming to the stage his life has become -or she-has invented to survive, completely abandon the character she plays, has become his obsession. The fact is that it gets under the skin and sometimes suffocates her. Like her past. She can not deny it, but could not leave it behind. And Alejandro has dared to play this woman, but wanted to make it with three actresses who finally could not travel to New York. It has been difficult, he admits, “when interpreting what I had written I realized the poetic magnitude enclosed in this character full of anxieties and frustrated joys. It is true that directing is difficult, but writing the play, act and direct you yourself is too much already " Alejandro Milian confessed. The premiere will be the next day and on the seventh in New York and then will be presented on fourth...

I doubt that in Cuban painting there is a more sensual blue than Servando blue. The bodies unite and disunite and mix and complement and one tends to look the other way, as ashamed in front of so much nudity disguised as blue and so exposed simultaneously. Titled “The source of life”, The Kingdom of this World gallery at the José Martí National Library exhibits these days and until December 14 a sample of erotic paintings by Servando Cabrera Moreno, many never before exhibited and belonging to the museum that bears his name. The selected pieces, among which are “Who cares” "Dawn” or “unknown and young Love” offer a tour of the artist's work between 1970 and 1981. The exhibition is also a tribute by the Servando Cabrera Moreno Museum Library and the House of the Festival of New Latin American Cinema to the Cuban painter in the 90th anniversary of his birth and Alfredo Guevara, who inaugurated it in 1998 with an exhibition by the same name. Servando graduate of San Alejandro art school in 1942 just in time for his painting to star in a nomadic stage through different styles, always with strong, clear drawings. Captivated by a...

I met Alejandro Milian playing a woman in Escandala en la Trapa. An impressive character, wearing cardboard . And then we met again in Chicago, where he returned to acting and singing and dancing as a transvestite and (he told me later, when the degree of friendship let him), had a couple of beers at intermission. One day I showed up in his house to get photos for a media project about the decline of the Cuban musical theater. I was between the confessions of his life, exciting stories of his grandmother and a lot of bad words that unfortunately do not fit in this story. It's been awhile. Alejandro became a poet, playwright and director of theater for children, I'm not sure in what order. He starred in other productions, published a book in Brazil and got even more infatuated with musical theater. But he never ceased to intrigue me. Perhaps his yellow eyes or his extremely loud shouts while directing, which contrasted with the Ale poet I who also met. I showed up at a rehearsal, an hour before the function he was directing and I challenged him. You have to give me an interview right now. He...

In the beginning was the confession: Peter does not love Mary, or Judith. He married for what they say sometimes rich people marry for: to maintain bourgeois status. A man comes from Argentina to tell us that he doesn’t need to be loved. That he, Peter, married his wife precisely because he didn’t know she loved him so much. And he wonders if one is certain to be a crucial time for our lives at the moment it occurs. And this way he says everything , undeterred , to which one believes it without question a line, while his first wife bitterly suffers heartbreak and death of her only son, and the second robs him and feels nauseated by the smell of cleanness. Pretty trite and (especially by Hollywood pink little movies), the issue of whether or not there is a person "waiting" for another in some universe and if one who suddenly enters the room is the one, is the theme of the La mujer justa (The right woman), an Argentina staging by the Compañía Cooperativa La Mujer Justa, directed by Hugo Urquijo , on a text by Graciela Dufau and Urquijo , based on the novel by Sandor...

My grandfather was a stubborn peasant fond of baseball, not to baseball; he was fond of the Sancti Spiritus Roosters. Since the first team of this province appeared in the 17th National Series, in 1977, my grandfather never failed to hear a single game of them. Even when he decided to leave the land and go to the city and buy a TV, I'm sure my grandfather would rather listen to the games on the radio. Even before losing almost totally the sight. But he only followed the matches of the National Series. He never cared about the World Series, or Olympics, or Pan-American Games. His Cuba team was the Sancti Spiritus Roosters. A season after its debut, the team led by Antonio Muñoz, Osvaldo Oliva and a young Lourdes Gourriel, won the National Series. Then it did not mean anything to my grandfather, who had spent many years following the Azucareros team. That was not still his squad. Maybe he celebrated a home run, but did not suffer defeats too much. The fanaticism came with cravings, which were increasing for more than twenty years, to see the Roosters crowned again, his first time as a team follower. They were very close in 2002, when they faced Holguin in the final, but from that I just remember the strikeout of Cepeda with bases loaded, errors in defense and the continuous blows of my parents toa Soviet stuffed dog, hanged of the stairs, which I inherited from my sister, and the unchanging attitude of my grandfather. It was when I started seeing baseball and to study him. I was then twelve. The...