Speaking of a great effort, of these months of intense work that have been taking place from the National Defense Council down to the Zone Defense Councils, the President of the National Defense Council, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, spoke on Friday morning by way of recognition during his visit to the "Arroyo Arenas" Defense Zone, located in the capital municipality of La Lisa.

The dignitary assessed that this stage, also marked by sacrifice, has "allowed confronting the enemy's maneuvers" and has "allowed addressing in a more direct way, with wartime structures functioning in peacetime, the severe problems that our entire people experience day by day."

In the exchange that took place in the context of the National Day of Defense, Díaz-Canel Bermúdez emphasized that "plans must continue to be refined, work perfected," and stressed the importance of continuing with "direct attention to problems related to food; medicines; water supply; the energy issue; solid waste collection; the fight against corruption; issues of illegality and crime; and above all the application of the Transformations."

Regarding the changes that must occur in the economic and social spheres, the head of state highlighted the importance of the Transformations, in their implementation and application, "providing a response to the population."

The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba stated: "We are going to hold our ground." Explaining that idea, he said: "We continue maintaining this work system: the structure of the Defense Zones, the municipal and provincial Defense Councils, and the National Defense Council activated full-time; and this is also providing us, in our view, with a group of experiences and important updates to the plans for high defense readiness, which have been adapted to the real conditions we are living."

Regarding the results these months of work are leaving, the President of the National Defense Council noted: "I believe that today you yourselves, as a Defense structure, are better prepared, based on the fact that this has been a training in real time and under real conditions; and that gives the country more invulnerability from the military point of view and from the defense point of view."

Díaz-Canel Bermúdez spoke of linking that strength with ideological invulnerability, and referred to the efforts being deployed, in the context of the Economic and Social Transformations, "to advance toward economic sovereignty."

The spheres of military defense, ideology, and the economy—the president reflected—"will be three elements that will lead us again to a situation of victory in the face of the empire's threats." The head of state asserted: "We remain in combat."

During his intervention, the president insisted that "the threat of aggression against Cuba" is latent and that "it is set out in all that aggressive discourse and elevated rhetoric on the part of the United States Government administration."

Because of that "escalation of sanctions," made "to increasingly besiege our economy," in an act "totally genocidal and totally criminal," the Cuban president spoke about the need to maintain high levels of defense readiness in the interest of the War of the Entire People, "of all the components of the territorial defense system; and that is concretized," he said, "above all in the Defense Zone."

The president's reflections took place after the President of the "Arroyo Arenas" Defense Zone, Rolando Vega Tabares, offered a detailed explanation about a scenario that has more than 15,600 inhabitants and where the activated structures work on tasks that seek to positively impact community life—such as attention to the most vulnerable, the development of health, culture, and food, citizen discipline, and the order and sanitation of each place.

It was a morning that also included the presence of Esteban Lazo Hernández, member of the Political Bureau and President of the National Assembly of People's Power and of the Council of State; the Organization Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Roberto Morales Ojeda; the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Army Corps General Álvaro López Miera; Army Corps General and Minister of the Interior Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas; and Major General and Secretary of the Council of Ministers José Amado Ricardo Guerra.

Also present were Major General Ernest Feijóo Eiró, chief of the Western Army; the Attorney General of the Republic, Yamila Peña Ojeda; as well as the president of the Havana Provincial Defense Council, Liván Izquierdo Alonso; among other authorities.

The priority attention that the country's top leadership gives to preventive work and support for the social sector was evident today during the meeting of the National Commission on Social Policies.

At the opening of the meeting, Eduardo Martínez Díaz, Vice Prime Minister of the Republic, insisted on the efforts that must be established from the grassroots so that the community itself identifies vulnerabilities and how to respond to them.

He noted that this work takes on special relevance at a time when, as of the end of August, more than 883,000 people are counted in vulnerable situations, a slight increase compared to April, and how in each place they are capable of providing individualized attention to the cases they have identified.

In this way, Martínez Díaz indicated keeping the lists updated, a task that demands the greatest sensitivity and humanism since these are people and not numbers, as well as the action plans to proceed in the face of different social problems such as child exploitation, drug consumption, and violence, among other scourges that erode the community.

The representative of the Cuban Government also emphasized the social involvement that enterprises and new economic actors must have, and the use of new initiatives such as the Community Youth Network and other social projects to articulate a coordinated system that allows responding to the situations that arise in each place with its endogenous capacities.

He stressed that all this effort deployed to follow up on Social Policies in the country will be possible only through control and monitoring of each of the tasks, with specific officials who must answer for their compliance and the efforts they make or fail to make for their solution.

In one of the agenda items, Inés María Chapman Waugh, Vice Prime Minister of the Republic, presented the progress and challenges the country faces in implementing a program of Services for Comprehensive and Integrated Attention to Victims of Gender-Based Violence in the country.

She explained that this program is being promoted in 20 municipalities nationwide, at different phases in terms of conditions and capacities to undertake the task, and aims to provide a direct, free, and confidential channel for the protection of women in these situations.

Likewise, she specified, conditions exist to establish this assistance at a physical site in five of the municipalities—Boyeros, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Bayamo, and Bartolomé Masó—where what is planned to be called Orange Houses will be established.

On this point, Teresa Amarelle Boué, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party and secretary general of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), elaborated that the idea would be to bring together in the same space all the instances that intervene in a violence process, thus avoiding the revictimization of people and the loss of time, so that the pertinent decisions for the protection of those who turn to the institutions can be made immediately.

In another agenda item, the lack of knowledge on the part of sectors of the population about the conditions and procedures that configure scenarios of vulnerability and where to go was reiterated, for which it was proposed to place special emphasis on communication actions, also understood as the structures that make known to administration councils and popular council presidents the situations that may arise in each place.

The agenda was completed with the accountability reports of the Vedado Popular Council, in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, and on the strengthening of the Public Health system in the capital, sections in which, although progress was evident, much remains to be achieved, although good experiences are glimpsed in this regard that should guide future work.

Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly of People's Power, accompanied the meeting via videoconference, as did the working groups in the provinces and other Party and Government authorities.

A solidarity donation of 750 metric tons of vegetable oil delivered by Russia was allocated to the emergency response reserves of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Cuba.

The shipment was financed by the Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of the Consequences of Natural Disasters of the Russian Federation, through a biennial contribution of four million U.S. dollars corresponding to 2025-2026.

The reception ceremony was presided over by the ambassador of the Eurasian nation in Havana, Viktor V. Koronelli, and the WFP representative in Cuba, Etienne Labande. On the Cuban side, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Trade Oscar Pérez-Oliva and Minister of Domestic Trade Betsy Díaz attended.

Koronelli highlighted in exclusive statements to Prensa Latina the importance of this gesture by the Russian government and people in helping the largest of the Antilles.

"This delivery has a quite significant impact taking into account the situation Cuba is experiencing as a result of the consequences of the criminal blockade imposed by the United States," he stressed.

Moscow's humanitarian collaboration with the Caribbean nation has been channeled through donations of medicines, vehicles and food, often through cities such as St. Petersburg and the capital of the Slavic nation.

These shipments, which also include contributions to the WFP, reaffirm the historic ties of friendship and Russia's continued support for the Caribbean island.

In this context, this United Nations program has acted as the central multilateral channel through which these donations reach the country, coordinating with the Cuban government the distribution of this aid to the most vulnerable groups.

A solidarity aid shipment of 425 tons of rice donated by Japan, destined for consumption by the population of eastern Cuba, was delivered today in this capital in the context of World Food Day.

The shipment is part of the one-million-U.S.-dollar contribution provided by the Asian nation's government through the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to support the humanitarian response after Hurricane Melissa passed through eastern Cuba in October 2025.

The reception ceremony was presided over by Japan's ambassador in Havana, Nakamura Kazuhito, and the WFP representative in Cuba, Etienne Labande. On the Cuban side, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Trade Oscar Pérez-Oliva and Minister of Domestic Trade Betsy Díaz attended.

In statements to Prensa Latina, Kazuhito highlighted Tokyo's current policy toward Havana in developing the food security program in the island nation.

"My country's position currently consists of supporting the Cuban people through the different programs of the United Nations Organization," he stated.

Japanese cooperation with Cuba began in 1961 and has focused on sectors such as agriculture, health, and the environment.

After the passage of hurricanes such as Matthew, Irma, or Ian, the Japanese nation has delivered emergency aid through the WFP, including one million dollars after Hurricane Melissa in 2025.

In response to that last natural phenomenon, the WFP was the central executor and coordinator of humanitarian aid in Cuba, converting donor funds into emergency rations for some 190,000 people, and assuming logistics and supply amid fuel shortages.

At 84, Isabel Allende has discovered that she has not "matured at all" and that "age does not make you wiser," she said today at a press conference after winning the Planeta Prize the day before with "La hora antes del alba," for which she reviewed "many of the things I lived through" during Chile's dictatorship.

Writing this novel, starring Alba, a young woman tortured and raped in prison, who gives continuity to the character from "The House of the Spirits," she discovered that "I haven't changed that much. I am the same person. I haven't matured at all."

She is "passionate about the same things, I fall in love with the first one who comes along, I still like Antonio Banderas. I haven't changed. In writing I haven't changed either."

Allende is interested in "the same themes: I like to write about anonymous people who seem insignificant and who, when put to the test, display overwhelming heroism. I saw it at the beginning of the military coup. I saw how many solidarity-minded people risked their lives to help others. And that is the theme that reappears in the books."

Chile "is never mentioned in The House of the Spirits or in any of my novels, but it is supposed to be the land to which I always return."

For this novel she reviewed "many of the things I lived through" during Chile's dictatorship, which she left in 1973.

In it, the protagonist, Alba, "stays in the house, which represents the country. Everything that happens in that magical house is what happens in the country. There are two levels of reading: her story, of tragedy and romance, and the story of the country, how the dictatorship evolves, the dictator, and how it ends," she advanced.

Alba "has a tyrant, the torturer, who does not leave her in peace. However, she does not leave her country because she loves her land very much; it is very hard to leave and adapt, one lives in nostalgia when abroad. She stays waiting for her lover, who was a guerrilla fighter who disappeared in the first days of the dictatorship," the writer noted.

Allende said she cares "a lot about democracy because I know what it means to lose it and how much it costs to recover it. Since I was 30 I have lived in a state of memory, trying to keep my country alive in my life and living with the memory of all the people I lost."

Circumstances—she stressed—"force me to return to that exercise of memory."

In the United States, where she lives, "democratic institutions are in danger. It is a country that has such a solid democracy that it is an example for the world. But democracy is lost, sometimes suddenly as in Chile, and other times it is undermined until it collapses."

The best-selling writer in Spanish—more than 80 million copies—since she published her first, "The House of the Spirits," in 1982, believes her books "work because I always talk about emotions and relationships, and those are universal. Emotionally we are all the same."

She recounted that when she was writing "The House of the Spirits" she "didn't know what I was doing. I wrote with the confidence of the ignorant. With a tremendous freedom that I never had again afterward."

She has written "32 books, and has that made me more confident? No, not at all. That lack of confidence forces me to test myself constantly."

The first weeks of writing her novels "are terrible, because they are totally unknown terrain. And suddenly one of the characters does something unexpected and there I know the novel has taken off (…) When I finish the book I am terrified again. Many times I don't know what it is about until some critic tells me," she pointed out.

"La hora antes del alba" will go on sale, with a print run of 210,000 copies, on November 4, the day it will be presented at the headquarters of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in Madrid.

The writer does not believe this novel will be banned in some U.S. school libraries as happened with "The House of the Spirits," but she believes "it is an honor to be banned. That means they are going to read you."

Asked what she has left to win after this prize, she answers jokingly that "maybe a fourth husband. No, the one I have works. For now": "I have nothing to gain. What I have left of life is to have a good time, keep writing while I can, and enjoy my dogs and my husband, in that order."

The Planeta Prize, the highest-endowed in Spanish—one million euros—for an unpublished book, was the first award Allende ever submitted to in her entire career, and she did so under the pseudonym Luz Ventura and the title "Los que faltan."

Yesterday she received it from King Felipe VI at a gala held in Barcelona with 1,300 attendees, alongside the finalist—a prize endowed with 200,000 euros—Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández Carrasco, 32, with his work "La añoranza," with whom she appeared this Friday at a press conference.

The Alazanes de Granma and the Gallos de Sancti Spíritus won their respective challenges today and produced a three-way tie for first place in the Eastern Zone of the 65th National Baseball Series.

On a day marked by rain, which forced three games to be suspended, the Alazanes defeated the Avispas de Santiago de Cuba for the second consecutive time — until today the lone leaders of the bracket — to reach seven victories and share the top spot.

With a score of 14-10, the eastern horses, managed by Marcos Naranjo, defeated the indómitos at the Guillermón Moncada stadium thanks to a cluster of eight runs in the third inning, in a duel marked by the offense of both teams.

Alexquemer Sánchez, Ernesto Pérez, Leonardo Alarcón and Roel Santos homered for Granma. For Santiago, Edilse Silva, Eduardo García, Harold Vázquez and Yordis Perera did so.

The Gallos, for their part, also added their seventh win by beating the Tigres de Ciego de Ávila 7-3 at the José Antonio Huelga stadium, where they played as hosts.

Reliever Daniel Reyes earned his third win without a loss, backed by the work of Leonardo Gallardo and an offense of 10 hits, including a home run by Lázaro Fernández.

On the road at the Cándido González stadium, the Leñadores de Las Tunas defeated the Toros de Camagüey 12-6 and remained in the fight for the top spots in the Eastern Zone.

Yordanis Alarcón and Henry Quintero hit the ball out of the park for the winners, the latter twice, to reach five home runs in the championship.

In the west, the Vegueros de Pinar del Río kept the lead by beating the Cazadores de Artemisa 5-3 at the 26 de Julio stadium.

Ronaldo Pérez delivered a home run with a runner on base to give his team the lead, while Yancarlos García earned the win in relief.

At the Nguyen Van Troi stadium, the Indios de Guantánamo and the Cachorros de Holguín split honors.

In the first game, the Holguín team won by an 11-1 knockout, supported by an offense of 12 hits, including a home run by Andry Agüero, who also drove in four runs.

Wilson Paredes pitched the five innings of the game and allowed only one hit, an RBI double by Carlos Suárez.

In the second game, the hosts took revenge with a 5-2 victory, thanks to a decisive home run by Yeimer Félix with two teammates on base, while Rolando Veranes hit the ball out of the park for the losers.

Finally, Villa Clara knocked out Matanzas 13-2 in the continuation of the game sealed the day before at the Augusto César Sandino stadium, with a home run by Emmanuel Sañudo.

The second game between both teams was suspended by a heavy downpour when the Matanzas team was winning 2-0 in the third inning.

The rains also prevented the game between Mayabeque and Cienfuegos at the Nelson Fernández stadium, as well as that of Industriales and La Isla at the Cristóbal Labra, where doubleheaders of seven innings will be played tomorrow, starting at 10:00 a.m.

After these results, Pinar del Río continues at the top of the Western Zone with nine wins and two losses, followed by Matanzas (6-4), Cienfuegos, Industriales and Mayabeque (5-5), Artemisa (5-6), Villa Clara (4-6) and La Isla (2-8).

In the Eastern Zone, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Sancti Spíritus share the top with seven wins and four losses, followed by Ciego de Ávila, Holguín and Las Tunas (6-5), Camagüey (3-8) and Guantánamo (2-9).

The Cuban film "Neurótica Anónima," a hopeful for a nomination for the Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film, was dedicated to the island's audience by its director, also an actor, Jorge Perugorría, during its premiere this Friday on the island.

"This film is for you, for the Cuban public," said Perugorría, one of the country's most international film figures, before a large audience that gathered on a rainy afternoon at the central Yara cinema in Havana for the presentation of the film.

Screenings will extend throughout the weekend in the capital before touring other cities in the country.

"Neurótica Anónima" is based on the play of the same name written by actress Mirtha Ibarra, who took on the screenplay together with Perugorría and also played the leading role of Iluminada, who has a refuge of mental peace in the Havana cinema where she has worked as an usher for several decades, under threat of being demolished due to structural problems.

Iluminada suffers from neurosis due to frustrations such as having wanted to be an actress, but she decides to film a documentary with her co-workers to confront the possible closure of the movie theater.

Alongside Ibarra, a series of renowned Cuban actors participated in the film, including Roberto Perdomo, Osvaldo and Andrea Doimeadiós, Fernando Hechavarría, Néstor Jiménez, Vladimir Cruz, Tahimí Alvariño, and Hilario Peña, Carmen Ruiz, as well as Puerto Rican Benicio del Toro, who has a brief presence.

The late artists Mario Limonta and Paula Alí were also especially remembered at the event.

Perugorría thanked the "great cast" of actors who "with so much passion gave themselves to the work, sometimes making an appearance only to accompany me in this dream of making this film, and to be part of this fight to defend cinema and the magic of movie theaters," where "a film is so enjoyed."

"We will keep making cinema under any circumstance," affirmed the actor who rose to international fame after his portrayal of the homosexual character Diego in the acclaimed film "Strawberry and Chocolate" (1993), the only Cuban film that has been nominated for a Hollywood Oscar.

"Neurótica Anónima" is a co-production of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) with the Mexican studios Ítaca Films and An Ag Company.

This fiction feature has been shown at international festivals such as Málaga 2026, the Havana Film Festival in New York, Biarritz América Latina, and recently at "Oberá en Cortos," held in the province of Misiones, Argentina.

Earlier this week, ICAIC reported that the film, proposed by that institution's Committee of Experts, is among the 19 Ibero-American productions that will compete for a nomination at the 41st Goya Awards, to be held at the Navarra Arena in Pamplona, northern Spain, on February 6, 2027.