The AZT-6000 machine, designed and built in Cuba and currently being used in the preparation of the country’s sugarcane fields, guarantees a fast sowing, with greater efficiency and less use of human resources. This sugarcane sowing machine is the crown of the Sugar Industry Exporting Enterprise (Azutecnia) – under the umbrella of the AzCuba Sugar Business Group -, a young and vigorous entity comprising workers with high professionalism and specialization in the Cuban traditional productive sector. AZT 6000 humanizes cultivation, boosting sugarcane production on the island and transforming its methods in order to increase the presence of sugar in the domestic market and guarantee its standing in the world. Azutecnia provides services in workshops, foundering, engineering works, irrigation and soil preparation, communications workshops and assistance to the new technologies and air conditioning. Its machines, located across all of Cuba, are irreplaceable in the cultivation and processing of sugarcane. It manufactures and repairs machinery and provides technical assistance to ensure a quality service in the production and cutting of sugarcane, specified Danais Sandoval Nodarse, director of research and development. The institution has a competent movement of innovators and rationalizers who, concentrated in the modernization of the cultivation of the crop, saves...

In two years the Habana Estampa design workshop has transformed diverse spaces of the Cuban capital. The design workshop has worked with dissimilar clients, from renowned artists like Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto to diverse installations in the rooms of the Museum of Fine Arts. “We work to create what the client likes, to create what doesn’t exist. When we are asked for something new, even if it is difficult, we say ‘yes, we can do it,’” affirms Alfredo Rosales Díaz, founder and leader of Habana Estampa. Giving the client the most exact representation as possible of his/her idea – from a pencil case to a light box – is the premise of this workshop, located in Havana’s El Vedado, very close to the centric 23rd Street. While the big industry produces en mass, in the Havana workshops the clients can create – with the help of the specialists -, a product just as he/she thought of. “We are competitive in small amounts and the industries in large amounts. Here we work at the level of specific clients with a more personalized treatment. You can come to make any prototype and create things your way, with the measures and colors you dreamed...

Yunairy Estrada Carpio (Yuyú) every day makes 60 sheets of paper. When she started to making them by hand, in her Old Havana workshop she just had the baby tub of her daughter Alejandra, which she still uses three years later. From a clothesline in the patio of her home hang color pieces that will become diaries, folders…which she will sell to the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Nature and Man Foundation, her principal buyer. Alejandra constantly moves around Yuyú, wanting to explain on her own the process she knows so well. “At the beginning they were full of holes, thick or thin. They didn’t come out well. That’s how I started to dominate the process a year ago, but I never wanted to quit doing it because I’ve always liked it a lot,” says the entrepreneur about her Ciclo Ecopapel project. Yuyú is 34 years old and is a graduate in Accounting and Finances. She was an auditor, but since her daughter was born she learned to make accessories for birthdays and parties. The Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation proposed to her making paper by hand and in that way Yunairy started learning on her own. Not many in Cuba do that...

An inexpensive, effective procedure valid for more than 150 pathologies and 19 specialties, capable of saving millions of dollars with the substitution of traditional surgical procedures, could be the result for Cuba of a Cryosurgery and Cryotherapy Project that is expected to start in 2017. However, its startup will depend on obtaining the necessary financing to produce on a large scale the CRIOEVA equipment, created and perfected by Engineer Elio Villarreal Acevedo, a specialist with more than 30 years of experience. Liquid nitrogen is applied with this equipment at temperatures of -195 degrees for the treatment of different diseases. According to a documented study with statistics from the Hermanos Ameijeiras Clinical Surgical Hospital – where the equipment created by Elio has been used for more than two decades – the results in the economic sphere would be extraordinary. The planned saving with its generalization in 84 of the island’s general and clinical surgical hospitals and in just three pathologies of the otolaryngology specialty would be more than 14 million CUC a year. These figures increase with the expansion of specialties and hospital institutions where it could be used. “There is no nation in the world with a thought-out application at...

The Tabacco Trail could begin from this September in Pinar del Río, Cuba’s westernmost province and birthplace of, according to many, the world’s best habanos (Cuban cigars). “It’s a day tour and although similar offers already exist, this is the first one in Cuba which encompasses the whole process, from the cultivation stage to the final product,” explained Débora Henríquez, Ministry of Tourism representative in Pinar del Río, to the press. The tour would begin at the Information Center, known as the Parador Las Barrigoas, located on kilometer 120 of the Central Highway to Pinar del Río, where visitors will receive the tour itinerary. The route will include stops at tobacco preparation centers, barns, museums and farms where tourists will learn about and participate in the cultivation process, working with campesinos, cigar rollers and other industry professionals. An important feature of the tour will be participants’ chance to meet the “habano man,” Héctor Luis Prieto, as well as visit the farms of some of the top tobacco producers in the world, such as those belonging to Gerardo Medina, Pancho Cuba and the late Alejandro Robaina. “We have spent a long time developing this cultural offer, which celebrates the iconic agrarian...

Since winning the Alejo Carpentier Prize for Fiction for his novel La Dama del Lunar, the life of Cuban writer Rodolfo Duarte changed. It was a trigger for the native of a countryside village of Puerta de Golpe, in the province of Pinar del Río, to begin receiving other awards (Internacional de Novelas Las Américas 2013) and began to be viewed differently in the world of letters. In The Lady, according to what the author told a colleague, "she subdues with her charms great historical figures with whom coincide, as William the Conqueror, the legendary Mio Cid, a Seville Muslim leader called Motamid and fundamentalist Muslim leader Yusuf Iben Taxsin among others, "referring to the protagonist. The novel is set in the European Middle Ages. There are 400 pages of play and retrospective reconstruction arising from his vocation for that period of humanity. Rodolfo has become a successful narrator of, a doer of the historical novel about the world but from his country. He is also a drama actor for local Radio Guama. In the lobby of this radio station we talked hastily, under pressure from other tasks and finally after two weeks of failed contacts. Duarte greets me at...

If materialized as expected, the Cuban franchise, reigning champion of the World Series of Boxing, might have opposite for the next edition of the tournament Cuban bpxers who will act as reinforcing of other teams like Venezuela. The quality of Cuban School, tested with the win in his first appearance in these tournaments, causes some countries to request boxers which to improve their chances of victory, so the figures in second line will get their chance with other squads. One of the national powers, the monarch of the first National Series of Boxing and third in the last Playa Giron tournament, Pinar del Rio, could send two of its members to the Venezuelan team, such as 75 kg Yasiel Despaigne and the representative of the 81 kg division, Yasmany Hernández Rodríguez. "I'm doing a good preparation thanks to the collective of coaches supporting me and hope to be in good shape for the tournament, give a good show and support the franchise. Right now I do strength exercises to improve hitting and speed. "The event is strong and prepare well but I have no knowledge of the rivals. It is the most important competition of my career and so I...