Fidel Castro Gives Away a Hospital to Holguín

By Amauris Betancourt

“…as a reward and a motivation to the people from Holguín…” said Fidel Castro Ruz ten years ago when the Lucía Iñiguez Landín Clinic and Surgical Hospital started off with medical services. The health care was a field to improve in the Revolution to come according to the program advanced in The History will absolve me in 1953.

The health center gives also medical aids to the provinces of Granma and Las Tunas, stated Dr. Teresa Guillén, director of the hospital, when expressing her satisfaction at the head of a team where human and moral values prevail.
Holguín's Surgical Hospital has been successful in renal transplants, in general surgery, in the introduction of new surgical techniques – videoendoscopics, for example –, and the only institution in Cuba in the practice of 24-hour-a-day minimum access surgery, said doctor second grade specialist surgeon Rosell Batista Feria, hospital founder.
Imagenology, privileged area, includes technologies such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, mono and multi-cut computerized Axial Scanners, Densitometers, Doopler and conventional Ultrasound, X-Rays among others. The provincial Ophthalmology Unit, inaugurated recently and updated with the most modern technology like the Excimer Laser introduced today, has assisted and intervened surgically about three thousand patients in less than a year.

People from Holguín thank and congratulate the Lucía Iñiguez hospital's working people.

Rene Pérez Massola, Art in the Lens

By Amauris Betancourt.

Today’s Cuban press photography profits from creative times, alongside high aesthetic values. It prevails in art galleries all over the island, in competitive or non-competitive events, devoted to the lens's image. Press photography aesthetic level stands out and outdoes, in numbers, the purely artistic proposals on exhibit these days. Rene Pérez Massola, photoreporter for the Trabajadores Weekly, makes justice to this assumption.

And art is by no means excluded when it comes to photojournalism. The difference lies only upon intention and function. Art photography focuses on the purely aesthetic matter and leans on codes and a language appealing to intellectual sensibility while press photography calls upon objectivity from an unmasked reality. The former, more subjective resulting from human worries, abstracted to praise, to embellish or to criticize, in order to express the soul; the latter, objective to inform and to show with its tools a comprehensible message the best possible way.

However the frontier between these photographic genders fades away sometimes. It seems to come about with this young Cuban photographer who, aided by his web blog where he shows his best pictures – a real fortune and delight for photo-loving people –, that ironically, for one reason or another, do not get published in Cuban papers.

When visiting his blog recently, part of my daily habits, I found a very well interwoven photo-story that served as encouragement and leitmotiv to share it with the net users.

The first assessment dwells on the graphic strength of the photo-report and on the topic – a very common topic were it not for its importance after the disasters brought about
by the hurricane hits – focused on a very common place activity in the island these days: farming recovery, the potato harvest specifically, in honor of the 49th anniversary of the first voluntary work summoned by Che. And speaking of his hurricane images the ones after Paloma in the province of Camagüey are worth looking at.

Convincing photo composition stands out, as well as the right use of planes, the timely change of shooting angles and the use of symbolism to provide a context to his pictures where he avoids commonly shots. It is also worth adding his relevant use of light, contrasts, tones and shades.

And to top it all his photo editing, or rather self-editing, work adds up to it when choosing the right pictures to get across better the message of the story.

Rene Massola’s photography wins over followers continuously. The hits and comments to his work in the blog show it, supported by the appropriate use of new technologies and its associated potentialities. Art and profession get along harmoniously in Massola's lens.

Havana, 489 Years Later

By Amauris Betancourt.

Named St. Christopher from Havana after Christopher Columbus, Havana looks definitely different nowadays.

Old Havana houses the famous Ceiba tree, place where the first mass was given in the seventh founded Cuban village turned into the capital of the country since late 16th century. Havana’s charisma spreads over beyond the seas for its architecture and peculiar human culture.

Havana charms foreigners in search of the Island’s way of life and he draw nationals to settle in seduced by the capital life bringing about over-population's problems.

Full of museums – formerly majestic palaces -, parks, monuments, plazas, fortresses, cultural activities, libraries, churches, hotels, bars and restaurants, Havana has been a source of inspiration to poets, musicians and intellectuals.

Fernando Gil’s Chidren’s Tutorship

Text and photos: Amauris Betancourt.

The Harlequin I Have Inside, new cultural meeting from the Provincial Center of the Performing Arts in Holguín, has two appointments monthly. It aims at paying homage to artists and fostering the interest for the puppet theater world.

“Gil”–as people prefer to call Fernando Gil Arias- “deserves the attention of all of my city’s cultural institutions,” says Ignacio Figueredo Parra, producer and director of the gathering, and adds “I believe the way a man honors his name as an artist is creating. There are many people who consider him an ACTOR”.

Gil graduates from his native Manzanillo’s teacher’s art school, in the province of Granma. He arrives in Holguin in 1979 to work as an art teacher for the local puppet theater. He founds later the Julio Antonio Mella theater group from the Cuban National Worker’s Union and the children Gil-Aya theater project. Gil, his surname; Aya, the word in Spanish for the one who takes care and teaches children.

Gil treasures the 2005 Holguin City Award. Although he currently works for and directs Holguín's Dramatic Theater since 2001, he has left footprints in television, the puppet theater and the attrezzo world.

Gil evokes his experiences, among good and bad memories, of over 30 years devoted to the stage with an aura of nostalgia. His character as the goat has marked him. Many call him so nowadays. He must interpret once two characters: first the goat and then the cock, but he forgets to change over the mask. His artistic experience and professionalism let him off the hook by taking advantage of the situation for the sake of the spectacle, but the anecdote is still remembered.

Performing arts people utter affection and admiration for Gil: The Puppet Theater from Holguin performs for him, the work The little Martina Cockroach; and he talks about the skills of puppeteers in comparison with theater player: the former must insufflate energy and credibility to the puppet; the latter, must do it directly with his body.
He recalls the Gil-Aya project as one of his most wonderful experiences. Children, according to the project, have an appointment with him and his collaborators in the Alba's ruins, the current homonymous Academy of Plastic Arts. Hundred of children meet there, but only a hundred of them could come in. The entrance of parents or adults is forbidden: children should be picked up four hours later.

The project proves to be quite polemic. Doctors suggest it to parents, but colleagues in art question it. Even so parents and doctors trust the meeting and the gathering earns besides followers, a good reputation from the artistic point of view.

Year Zero and Gods Listen from Codanza Ballet Co. are some of his contributions to the attrezzo world, that’s why Codanza plays for him too with Ode to the Devil; and so does also the Holguín's Chamber Ballet.

Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, José Antonio Rodríguez, Michaelis Cué and Ana María Paredes are included among his masters and friends, among the professionals who he looks up to.

Gil longs for a better future than the present for the puppet theater and for the performing arts in the city. There is a lamentable worn-out in some cultural institutions, he states; and they are no longer up to the aim they were created for as for the technological and artistic state.

The Harlequin I Have inside has had a happy beginning. The following gathering is already looked forward. The city has another cultural space to admire artists and to recreate the Cuban art.

Pope John Paul II in Holguin

By Leandro Estupiñan.
Photos: amauris Betancourt.

In January 1998, for the first time in the nation's history, the Pope from Rome reached Cuba.

John Paul II had been invited to the Island by the government and, the pontiff, in his enthusiasm to take the church's legacy to every world’s corner, came once and for all.

Ten years are already gone since then and a photograph exhibition tours the country to recall the event. The photos belong to Arturo Mari, personal photographer from the Polish that, before taking over his duty in the Vatican, was named Karol Wojtyla.

Saint Isidoro Cathedral housed for a week the exhibit at the public’s disposal. Mari was born a few meters away from the Vatican, and was marked since his childhood by the closeness to the heads of the Catholic church.

He stayed by John Paul II for a good part of his life. He kept him company so from the early morning to late evening hours.

He followed him to Cuba during his journey in 1998. He witnessed and recorded the trip in 51 photographs out of which 31 were shown in the first Cuban city where this Pope's effigy was erected. A representative of the Order from Malta in Cuba and Luigi Bonazzi, papal nuncio, attended the inauguration.

The photographic exhibition brought back to mind the trip to Cuba of a man who practiced sports, devoted himself to art and seemed to have, like none of his ancestors in front of the church, a memorable sense of humor.He was also such a fair and human man that almost six hours before he passed away he had his old photographer Mari called, not to ask him for a portrait, but to simply say: “Thank you very much for every thing”.