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News. Dec 26, 2002
Cruise ship visits projected to increase in 2003 as Cuba struggles to
regain lost tourism
Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press Writer. Wed Dec 25,
7:33 PM ET
HAVANA - Cruise ship visits to this communist-run island are projected to
double in 2003, good news as Cuba struggles to recover from its losses in the
tourism business.
Gianluca Suprani, managing director of Havana's sole cruise ship terminal,
said Wednesday that 45,000 cruise ship passengers arrived here on 60 stops in
2002 — less than half of the 100,000 passengers who arrived on 200 stops
the year before.
But at least 75,000 such passengers are expected on 120 visits in 2003, said
Suprani, who manages the terminal, a mixed enterprise between an Italian firm
and the Cuban government.
Suprani spoke shortly after the arrival of the Italian cruise ship "A'Rosa
Blu," described as the largest passenger ship of its kind to ever visit
Cuba. The ship can accommodate up to 900 passengers.
Cuba's tourism industry was battered in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks on the United States. Many would-be tourists, nervous about foreign
travel, canceled their trips to Cuba just as the high season began.
Because of the four-decade old U.S. trade embargo against the island, many
visitors come from Europe, flying across the Atlantic to board Cuba-bound cruise
ships in other parts of the Caribbean.
Suprani said that lifting those trade sanctions, along with an end to
current restrictions on travel by Americans to the island, would result in a
flood of cruise ship visitors to Cuba.
"The Caribbean is the center of cruise ship travel," he said.
Cubans Celebrate Christmas Quietly
By Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press Writer. Wed Dec 25,
6:30 PM ET
HAVANA - Six years after Christmas was declared an official holiday in this
communist country, many Cubans marked the day by relaxing. But there was little
evidence of the day's traditional Western trappings.
The big jolly figure of Santa Claus was erected outside the U.S. Interests
Section, the American mission here. And Christmas trees twinkled in the lobbies
of tourist hotels and office buildings housing foreign companies.
But the holiday was not mentioned in state media. And though there were some
secular observances, the celebration and commercialization of the event common
in many Western nations were not apparent here.
But religious believers attended midnight Masses and other services on
Christmas Eve and day.
"Christmas is the most important feast day" for Cuban Catholics,
said Arturo Hernandez, a worker, at Havana's downtown cathedral. "As a
Cuban, I always celebrated" on Christmas Eve, he said.
The government of Fidel Castro suspended official Christmas celebrations in
the early 1960s, citing the need for workers to continue laboring during the
annual sugar harvest.
While Christmas celebrations were never outrightly prohibited, they were
frowned on. In the early 1990s, Cuba began allowing religious believers for the
first time to join the ruling Communist Party.
The communist government declared Dec. 25, 1997, a one-time holiday as a
gesture of respect for Pope John Paul II, who visited the island the following
January.
Christmas was declared a permanent official holiday beginning in December
1998.
New Year's Eve, which also marks the anniversary of the 1959 Cuban
revolution, remains the island's most widely celebrated holiday.
Manuel Mendive Explains His World
By Alexandra Olson, Associated Press Writer. Wed Dec
25,12:54 PM ET
HAVANA - Even among the salsa musicians and Santeria practitioners roaming
around Havana's colonial Plaza de la Catedral, Manuel Mendive stands out.
Emerging from the 18th-century cathedral in his typical African boubou robe
of linen, his gray dreadlocks swept back in a ponytail, the 57-year-old sculptor
and painter is as recognizable here as is his work.
Many call him the island's foremost living artist. Art lovers in Cuba and
abroad are fascinated with his brightly colored sculptures and paintings, nearly
all dedicated to Santeria, the Afro-Cuban belief system blending Roman Catholic
saints and Yoruba deities.
Mendive smiles as he walks across the plaza toward a cafe, using the walking
stick he has used ever since a bus ran over his leg. Settling down for a glass
of juice, he wrinkles his nose at the photograph of a painting Cuban officials
chose for an Internet auction last month.
"Something is missing to integrate the golds. They stand out too much,
and the painting looks cold," he says. "In the real painting, the
blues are very blue, very violent. So are the pinks."
Mendive wants color to be the first thing people notice about his work. "I
want to capture people with the colors. Then gradually, they can discover my
message," he says.
Born in a Havana slum in a wooden house his grandfather built, Mendive
graduated from Cuba's prestigious San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 1963.
Over the last three decades, he has had more than 40 exhibits around the
world — in France, Britain, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and the United
States. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C., include his pieces in their collections.
Mendive won Cuba's National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2001.
The painting he's studying at the cafe is "Energias de la Naturaleza"
("Energies of Nature"), which he did earlier this year. In it, a
seated woman bows to receive a bowl of food from the Yoruba god of destiny,
Eleggua, whom Santeria practitioners associate with the Catholic St. Anthony.
Spirits emerge from a golden sky and dark green river to feed the fish and birds
in a scene of warmth and tranquility.
"It has a lot of mystery, but it transmits the peace and calm that
people so often feel in the hour of eating," Mendive says. "My
discourse is always the same: man with nature, man with his gods, man with good
and evil. Man in life and man in death; from life springs death and from death
springs life."
The harmonious world in Mendive's work is not the way the world is, "but
the way I believe it should be," he says. Certainly, it's the way he tries
to lead his life — with style, of course: he bought the linen for his
boubou in Paris and had it made in Cuba.
Santeria is his religion, inherited from his parents and grandparents before
them. At the cathedral, he was celebrating the Day of St. Christopher, Havana's
patron saint. In Santeria, St. Christopher is also Aggayu, the Yoruba god of
land and protector of travelers.
At his home in the town of Tapaste, just outside Havana, he surrounds
himself with a menagerie of the creatures he paints: tropical fish, goats,
peacocks. "And people," he adds. "People inspire me, too."
There is more tragedy and discordance in his older works.
In a 1984 piece on display at Havana's Museo de Bellas Artes, Christopher
Columbus spreads his arms and kneels in triumph while indigenous people, birds,
fish, and even trees look up at him in awe. The naive-style painting takes the
perspective of the creatures and people who greeted Columbus, celebrating the
virginity and beauty of a world about to be disrupted.
The 1967 piece "Oggun" depicts the Yoruban god of metal and
tragedy sowing evil in the world. People appear murdering each other in the
mixed-medium piece — wood painted in white, red and black to create a
nightmarish scene.
Mendive paints and sculpts what he knows. But for inspiration, he has
traveled outside Cuba, including to several African countries, where he learned
the art of body painting.
He used the skill in a festive opening of his sculpture exhibit in the
Bellas Artes museum on Dec. 10. Dancers painted blue and yellow picked up
sculptures from the Wilfredo Lam Gallery in Old Havana and danced their way down
Havana Bay to arrange the display in the museum.
Blue is the color of the Yoruba ocean goddess Yemaya, linked with Our Lady
of Regla, the patron saint of Havana Bay. Yellow is the color of Ochun, goddess
of love and rivers, associated with Cuba's patron saint, the Virgin of Charity.
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