This will be the sixth Cuban party congress since the first in 1975, and it could be the most important. The 1,000 delegates gathering in Havana plan to ratify almost 300 reforms Raúl proposed last year – the boldest of which, including broadened private enterprise, have Cuba-watchers asking if he’s moving the island to a China-style system of communist capitalism, or perhaps even a more liberal, less centralized political structure. In his December speech to the National Assembly, Raúl insisted, “I wasn’t elected President to restore capitalism in Cuba” but to “perfect” Cuba’s socialism.

Works by Cuban artist Martha Jimenez, from the province of Camaguey, will be exhibited at the Emerson College in Boston, US, at the invitation of the institution.

This is the first exhibition of Jimenez’s work in the US, where she recently concluded a tour of six states.

The Cuban artist was also invited to give lectures at the university devoted to the study of communication and performing arts.

The exhibition consists of nine paintings and the same number of ceramics and it will be unveiled in October. The pieces selected for the display show a few changes in the artist’s creation like a greater use of allegories to mark the intentionality of her messages, more colorful patinas on the ceramics and sober shades in the pictorial work.

However, the artists maintains one of the hallmarks of her career, that is scenes alluding to costumbrismo, with mostly pompous and sensual female characters and elements that make reference to the daily life in the island.

Jimenez told ACN she is currently devoting more time to painting than to pottery, contrary to what she has done throughout her career so far.

Member of the Cuban contemporary vanguard, Jimenez has been awarded several prizes including the Distinction for the National Culture in 1997 by UNESCO. She was more recently acknowledged by the Contemporary Art Biennial of China, this year.

By Nick Miroff

Cuba has some the most extensive coral reefs in the hemisphere, but political strains between Washington and Havana largely have kept American scientists away.

A new partnership for marine research is trying to change that at one of Cuba’s most remote places, far from people and pollution.

Off central Cuba’s southern coast, hundreds of tiny islands stretch into the Caribbean. They are ringed with narrow beaches and thick stands of red mangrove.

When Christopher Columbus arrived here, he named the area Los Jardines de la Reina — The Queen’s Gardens. Five centuries later, there isn’t a single town or road or permanent human presence.

The underwater gardens of pristine coral are still here. The Cuban government banned fishing over a 386-square-mile section of the islands in 1997, creating what scientists say is the Caribbean’s largest marine reserve.

Only a few hundred divers visit each year. Dropping below the surface into underwater canyons of black coral and giant sea fans, U.S. scientist David Guggenheim of The Ocean Foundation encountered species he had only seen in photographs, like the nearly extinct Nassau grouper.

He looked stunned after he came up from his first dive in the islands and took off his mask.

“It’s amazing. It’s sort of like ‘Jurassic Park.’ Scientists are seeing these species they never expected to see in their life, because they’re extinct. Well, these fish aren’t extinct, but they might as well be for most of us. So I feel very lucky to see them,” he says.

Guggenheim came to the area on a converted lobster boat with a Cuban marine biologist and two U.S. colleagues.

For him and other scientists, the area is like a large-scale experiment — a look back in time at a marine environment largely unaffected by fishermen, pollution and coral-killing fertilizer runoff. The waters are plentiful with huge fish, sharks, sea turtles and saltwater crocodiles.

As these species flourish, some will leave the reserve, helping repopulate other areas where their numbers are depleted.

“Fish are not just crops that grow in the sea for us to harvest — it doesn’t work that way. Fish have important jobs to do, and when we remove them in numbers, they can’t do those jobs. And we’ve seen time and time again that ecosystems collapse, especially coral reef ecosystems, when we upset that balance,” he says.

One obvious sign of a healthy balance in Los Jardines is the sharks. Elsewhere in the region, their numbers have declined 90 percent or more. But in these royal blue waters, they’re everywhere.

“To even see a shark in some places is a big deal these days, and to come to this area and dive with dozens of sharks is truly something special,” says nature photographer Kip Evans.

A U.S. judge Tuesday reduced the prison terms of two convicted Cuban spies in the latest twist of a high-profile espionage case that has strained already hostile ties between Havana and Washington.

U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard cut the sentence of Ramon Labanino, also known as Luis Medina, from a life term to 30 years, an assistant to the judge told Reuters.

In a separate later ruling, Lenard reduced the sentence of a second convicted spy, Fernando Gonzalez, also known as Ruben Campa, from 19 years to 17 years and nine months.

Cuba said the sentence reductions did not go far enough.

U.S. prosecutors said they were part of a Cuban espionage ring that had spied on the Cuban exile community in Florida and sought to penetrate U.S. military facilities there.

The original sentences imposed by Lenard against Labanino and Gonzalez were thrown out as excessively harsh last year by a U.S. appeals court, which argued the Cuban agents had not succeeded in actually sending back top secret information, despite their conspiracy to do so.

Labanino and Gonzalez were arrested in 1998 along with three other Cuban agents. Prosecutors said they formed the so-called “Wasp Network” sent to the United States to infiltrate exile groups opposed to Cuba’s communist government, then led by Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro, now 83, handed over the Cuban presidency last year to his younger brother, Raul Castro, 78. U.S. President Barack Obama has said he wants to try to improve U.S.-Cuban ties after a half century of hostility.

The case of the five spies has long been a point of contention between the United States and Cuba, which demands their release, hails them as heroes and says they were trying to prevent “terrorist” attacks by exile extremists.

In Havana, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, said the decision to reduce the sentences did not go far enough and criticized the U.S. justice system.

“Any sentence imposed on these comrades is unjust, but that doesn’t mean that the reduction of the sentences is insignificant,” Alarcon told a Cuban television talk show.

“This is an important day, a victorious day, but it isn’t cause for satisfaction, nowhere near. This must serve as an additional argument, not only to continue the fight but to intensify it,” said Alarcon, Cuba’s long-time pointman on relations with Washington.

In October, one of the five, Antonio Guerrero, had his sentence reduced from life to about 22 years.

The five Cuban espionage agents were convicted in a Miami court in 2001 of 26 counts of spying and received sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison.

U.S. prosecutors had linked the activities of the Cuban spy ring to the 1996 shooting down by Cuban fighter jets of two planes belonging to an exile group, Brothers to the Rescue, which flew near Cuba. Four men in the planes were killed.

Cuba has staged national and international campaigns calling for the release of the five, arguing they did not receive a fair trial in Miami, center of the exile community that fled after Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 revolution.

An exhibiton of the Cuban art is underway in Wisconsin. It is about an exhibition of 25 pieces made by the Cuban artists Orestes Larios Zaak and Gregorio Perez, is exhibited until next 24 of November in Madison, capital city of the US state of Wisconsin.

The exhibition, made by these creators from the Cuban province of Camaguey, is held at the D´Ricci gallery, and includes oil paintings and wood sculptures about ecological topics.

Finally, here’s some change we can believe in. The U.S. blockade on Cuba is alive and well, but Obama’s given us wiggle room. For the first time since the start of W’s second term, Cuban artists can get visas to visit the States. Thanks to impressive efforts by the Madison-Camagüey Sister City Association, with support from Edgewood College, the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission, and the Overture and Pleasant T. Rowland Foundations, painter Orestes Larios Zaak and sculptor Gregorio Pérez Escobar will be our guests. It’s part of the Madison-Camagüey association’s 15th anniversary celebration.

An exhibit of their works, “Cuban Artists in Madison: Celebrating Friendship,” curated by Larios’ wife, María Ofelia Granela, graces Edgewood’s DiRicci Gallery Nov. 4-24. The opening’s on Friday, Nov. 6, at 5 p.m. Larios and Pérez also give a public lecture on contemporary Cuban art at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Edgewood’s Predolin Humanities Center.

f you haven’t kept up with Cuba, you may be surprised by these events. Long gone are the revolutionary posters of Fidel’s heyday. The island faces technological challenges largely linked to the blockade, but Internet access is growing, and person-to-person cultural exchanges like this create vital new connections. Larios and Pérez, widely known in Cuba, are represented in private collections in Europe, South America and Canada. “When our messages reach everyone, we can say we’ve left being local artists behind; today we’re universal artists,” Larios says.

This weekend the Cardinal Bar, with Gonzalez back at the helm, is reborn. Ochun, orisha of love, rejoices, dancing voluptuously. You can, too. The Cardinal’s gala opening lasts all weekend long, from Oct. 8 through 11.

…

Gonzalez is picking up right where he left off. Before the sale he’d been planning the snazzy new wooden dance floor you’ll find this weekend. It’s larger than you’ll remember. The old DJ booth was built when it took crates of LPs to do a night. Now all that’s needed is a laptop, so the booth’s been shrunk. The room’s ready for the 21st century with Dantech Systems’ state-of-the-art sound system and improved acoustics. The bar’s arts and crafts details have been lovingly restored.

But it’s not just physical attributes that make the Cardinal sexy. Generations of Madisonians have been lured by the bar’s glammy history, not to mention its punchy drinks.

The week-long tour is a massive undertaking, with a 150-strong crew of ballet teachers, stage crews, costumers and wiggers, conductors, pianists, physiotherapists and, of course, dancers, 80 of them. Battling heat, antiquated theatres and even an outbreak of swine flu, the company is performing several excerpts, a couple of short ballets, and a full three-act staging of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 classic Manon, the vast majority deliberately taken from its modern repertoire.

It is Manon that Acosta and Rojo are now rehearsing – the tale of a young girl who chooses money over love and suffers for it. Practising the finale, they slip to the floor, Rojo down Acosta’s shoulder to end up lying still, exhausted, like love defeated. And then he laughs, leaps up and shouts, “She whispered: ‘Carlos, we must get up for the bows.’” Unlike those around about, I suspect Rojo’s suffered enough of Acosta’s sweat over the years.

With the rehearsal over, I join Acosta in the truck given to him by the Cuban government. He has the stereo playing salsa and is singing along, while on the dashboard a statue of a white-clad figure looks on. “The patron saint of Havana,” he shouts. In his 2007 autobiography No Way Home, between sex scenes, he suggests the gods have made him lucky, imbuing him with talent and the opportunity to rise from a childhood in Havana’s slums to the point where his name can sell out the world’s great theatres. Now they may be going further, making him the man to give Havana back its artistic edge.

The night before, Acosta and Rojo’s performance of Le Corsaire had been projected on to an outdoor screen so that Habaneros could watch for free. Thousands turned up, packing on to the steps of the Capitolio, and I was amazed to see urchins sitting transfixed at my feet. I tell Acosta this, and he grows ever more animated: “Can you imagine? People are concentrating. And it’s ballet… ballet! It’s not a world cup, it’s ballet.”

He sees this tour as one of the highlights of his life. “One of my biggest accomplishments. You cannot dream of having the Royal Ballet in Havana.” Lack of resources and the suspicion of those in authority could have killed the dream, but it did happen, and the story of how is, in the words of one of those involved, astonishing: “Nothing ever happens in this country – but this did.”

There is a belief in Cuba that high art can exist at the heart of any nation’s life. It’s a belief that we in Britain seem to have lost and yet which, by asking the Royal Ballet to visit, Cuba appears to be attempting to regain. “Dance is the true religion,” Acosta says. “You put your health at risk, and the money’s no good.”

Alicia Alonso is the prima ballerina assoluta of the National Ballet of Cuba and, at almost 90, plays the part. She is guided into the British ambassador’s residence in Havana by her younger husband, her head swathed in a scarf, her lipstick bright red, her sightless eyes covered by large sunglasses. (Blind from an early age, she used to – as she once told me – throw herself across the stage not knowing if someone would be there to catch her.)

The Royal Ballet has spent much of the week paying tribute to this woman. On the second evening of performances, Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s director, met her on stage, bowed deeply and proffered up flowers. It was noticed. “It was a very good thing to give homage to Alicia,” says Miguel Barnet, a novelist who heads up the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists and is one of the most powerful men on the island. “I was impressed to see Dame Monica bow to Alicia as if she were the queen of England. Of course, she’s not – she’s the queen of Cuba.”