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We have all heard of the notorious Guantanamo Bay, we have seen some of the images of the barbed wire fences, the steel cages and the prisoners in their distinctive and dehumanising orange jump suits.

The documentary film ‘In Guantanamo’ provides unprecedented access to the Guantanamo prison camps is the first documentary film about Guantanamo which has been filmed inside the base with the co-operation of the military and more importantly ‘In Guantanamo’ is sympathetic to the plight of the detainees. (more…)

Cuba is facing the challenge of boosting agricultural output under difficult climate conditions and on soils badly deteriorated by erosion, salinity and other problems. And scientists have a strategic role to play, provided they do not sit in their laboratories but get out into the fields where the action is.

“To do real science you have to be out there where the crops are growing,” said Sergio Ramírez, the son of a farmer who for the past 18 years has directed a research centre that is vital to meeting the challenge of securing Cuba’s food supplies, however adverse the climate conditions. In his view, the main thing is to be prepared for climate change, look for solutions, and bring together the experience and know-how of small farmers with the theoretical knowledge of researchers, in order to be forearmed to face the coming difficulties.

To respond to this challenge, “Cuba possesses a potential range of species and varieties that allow cultivation of specific foods under particular climate conditions,” said Rodríguez, the head of the National Research Institute of Tropical Root Vegetables (INIVIT) in the central province of Villa Clara. The expert told IPS over the telephone that many tropical countries like Cuba must plan food production around two completely opposite sets of probable conditions: severe drought and hurricanes. Three hurricanes devastated the island’s crops in 2008. (more…)

The concept of nation emerged from the combination of common elements such as history, language, culture, costumes, laws, institutions and others related to the material and spiritual life of human communities.

Bolivar, who worked the great heroic deeds that turned him into ‘The Liberator of peoples’ during his struggle for the freedom of the peoples of the Americas, urged them to create what he called “the greatest nation in the world: less for its extension and riches than for its liberty and glory.”

In Ayacucho, Antonio Jose de Sucre waged the last battle against the empire that for more than 300 years had transformed much of this continent into a royal property of the Spanish Crown.

That was the same America that tens of years later, after being divided in part by the rising Yankee imperialism, was called by Marti ‘Our America.’

We should remember once again that on May 19, 1895, a few hours before dying in combat for the independence of Cuba, the last bastion of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, Jose Marti prophetically wrote that everything he had done and would was to “to timely prevent, with the independence of Cuba, that the United States could expand over the Antilles and fall with that additional force over our American lands.” (more…)