Hotel Villa Don Lino: Beach, Sun and Quietness

By Amauris Betancourt
amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

Villa Don Lino hotel stands out among the most attractive options to spend vacations in Holguín's beach resorts. The environment tinges the coastal north's blue beaches where this seaside resort lies.
Its architecture bears a resemblance to the houses Cuban Indians lived in when Admiral Christopher Columbus arrived in this archipelago over 500 years ago. These frame-houses can still be seen in Cuba’s today countryside. Its 36 rooms have sea sight and there is direct and close access to the beach from the hotel located in the municipality of Rafael Freyre, some 47 km. away from Holguín city and approximately 57 from Frank País international airport.The three star Villa Don Lino is a property of Cuban Islazul hotel group and has competent and attentive staff at the service of clients. It includes swimming pool, bar, restaurant and the sale of organized tours to visit the nearby Holguin city and the distant city of Santiago of Cuba, as well as the tour to Bahía Naranjo's aquarium for the famous dolphin-swimming, a unique attraction in this area of the country.
The entertainment service offers shows where Cuba's idiosyncrasy stands out, mainly in the field of music and dancing.
Don Lino, as it is better known in Holguín, has the ingredients for a leisure destination appropriate to tourists from Canada and Europe flying away from snowfalls and low temperatures during this time of the year.

The Skins Discovering us

By Aracelys Avilés
araa@ahora.cu
The body scars take us almost always down to some point in our own existence. They drive us down to a history that marked us, much or little, but they its existence serves as an evocation to an anecdote or a memory. “The skin of the children of Gaia” makes reference to precisely that force of the human body to express an identity, a way of being and feeling.The Spanish curator Amador Griño is this project’s ideologist in which two fellow countrywomen's discourses get together: photographer Isabel Muñoz, with a series of photos and Sculpture Maribel Doménech.
“The used material conditions me because it can hurt”, said Maribel to describe her daily work. She uses electric wires to weave clothing to the middle age style. The one shown at Holguin Art Center weighs some 250 kilos. “It is kind of a body discourse where it can be seen in its emptiness”, Griño added.Isabel shows, in her large-sized photos, the naked body, painted, marked, according to two Ethiopian tribe’s member’s idiosyncrasy, for whom the skin stands as an idol.
The opening of the exhibit took place at the Holguín Art Center has already been filed as a great event of cultural integration. It has been possible thanks to a joint work of Holguín Council of Visual Arts and its national homologue as well as the Spanish Embassy in Cuba and the CEASEX.
This travelling exhibit has toured the entire South America and the Caribbean and lands in Cuban through Holguín, where it will remain till March 5th when it will be taken to Santiago de Cuba and Havana.

Photography Fosters Compliments to Personal Merit

By Jose Antonio ChapmanPérez

chapman@radioangulo.icrt.cu

I admit –in almost 25 years of work in the exciting world of chronicles, comments and news reports- not having paid enough conscious attention to the photoreporter’s work.

Photoreporters are artist who perceive, fix and illustrate daily life with objectivity for the sake of the world tangible picture. We should agree then to echo the legacy of José Martí, our national hero, when he stated: “The opportune compliment fosters recognition”.

Acknowledgement stirs up imagination when checking firsthand the surpassed lyricism in the vital support of the image to a news report, an interview, or a chronicle; and in a photographic exposition.

Without fostering Chauvinism, in Holguín there are excellent press photographers. I would include Elder Leyva, Yusleidis Socorro, both of the weekly paper Ahora!; Juan Pablo Carreras from the Cuban News Agency; Amauris Betancourt, from Radio Angulo Digital; Juan Miguel Cruz, from the national weekly sports Jit. Of course not leaving out the TV cameramen from the local Tele Cristal broadcasting station.

Amauris, with a highlighted work despite his youth, is able to deliver a truly photographic gift where life is turned into news stories. His originality towers itself over criticism and undue diatribe. He is only small physically.

These arguments backs up the objective praise in the full-of-life photo exhibit “Holguín: 50 Years of Revolution” at the CMKO Radio Broadcasting Station's gallery, where it can be appreciated.

Juan Miguel is another lens talent maker of wonders, and is currently making sports photography; but he goes in too for nature photography besides daily photojournalism. The approach to this assessment comes true at Radio Angulo's Web site, where both professionals add pictures to different news genders in the published works.

It is written and spoken of professions frequently and at times conventionaly, but very little is said about photoreporters. I just want to pay humble homage to this beautiful memory-perpetuating work.

Cuban Freedom Motorcade Remade

By Amauris Betancourt.

The Motorcade of Freedom, 50 years after driving through the present-day province of Holguín, is back in the news.

Commander In Chief Fidel Castro Ruz headed then on January 1959 amid the popular happiness after the victory against Fulgencio Batista's tyranny; Major general Antonio Enrique Luzón Batle, hero of the Republic of Cuba, heads it now. He was then chief of the Column 17 that surrounded the Holguín’s dictatorship Seventh Regiment.

50 representatives of many Cuban social branches arrived downtown to meet in front of the national monument La Periquera History Museum in the Calixto García central park, from whose balcony the leader of the Cuban Revolution addressed Holguín people the first time 50 years now next February.