The Meliá Cohiba Hotel of the Cuban capital will be home to a day of Japanese cuisine on January 21, in which patrons and guests alike will have the opportunity of tasting the most exquisite dishes from that Oriental gastronomy. The star of the one-day show will be Chef Mariano Takinami, who´s coming to Cuba armed with plenty of traditional and fresh recipes, that according to a press note sent to the writing staff of Caribbean News Digital.

BancoMex will finance the construction of a new convention center in Jamaica, large enough to host the region´s largest meetings, such as the annual CHA Marketplace. Jamaica´s President P.J. Patterson confirmed Mexico´s president Vicente Fox had assured him BancoMex will back up the costs. At the same time, the Jamaica Tourist Board divulge that more than 12,000 new hotel rooms will be added to the island´s room inventory over the next eight years, in particular 5,000 new units in the next two years from Spanish hotel developers RIU, Grupo Panero, Iberostar and AMResorts.

Representatives of the Latin American travel industry will huddle next week in Madrid for the Iberian-American Conference of Tourism Ministers and Entrepreneurs (CIMET is the Spanish acronym), an event that will take place within the framework of the International Tourism Fair (FITUR 2005). Caribbean News Digital has learned attendants will broach the present and the future of midsize and small companies within the leisure sector, as well as the internationalization of Spain´s travel industry in Iberian America.

The city of Rio de Janeiro will welcome as many as 770,000 local and foreign tourists for the upcoming carnival festivities, the Hotel Industry Association of Brazil (HIAB) informed this week. HIAB Deputy Chairman Angelo Vivacqua explained the number of local visitors could vary dramatically because lots of people usually make last-minute reservations.

The 25th edition of the International Caribbean Festival, an event that has traditionally taken place in the eastern Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba, will this time around move to Venezuela. Scheduled for early July, the event will serve to show the development of Venezuelan culture, of Hispanic and African roots, that strengthened during the Spanish colonial rule based on a mixture of races and civilizations.

An international conference on tourism and architecture will be organized by the Sultanate of Oman, represented by the Ministry of Tourism, from February 5 to 8. Under the name, Built Environments for Sustainable Tourism (BEST) — Sustainability, Cultural Diversity and Destination Image, the gathering will be held in conjunction with the UNESCO and the World Tourism Organisation (WTO).