The Excelencias Awards were created in 2005 by the Excelencias Group with a view to foster excellence in different spheres, all of them tied up to both tourism and culture. Since then, the awards have become a benchmark for people and institutions linked to this major sector and willing to make excellence their common denominator in their respective fields.

The Excelencias Prize was awarded to the Civil Defense, the National League of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) and the Ministry of Culture, by Jose Carlos de Santiago, president and editor-in-chief of the Excelencias Group, a famous international promoter of Latin America and the Caribbean’s natural, heritage, cultural and touristic values through different world-class printed and digital publications.

We would like to inform our readers that Caribbean News Digital will be out during the holiday season from Dec. 24 to Jan. 3. The staff wants to thank all of you for just another year of support and confidence in our online newspaper. We want to wish you a merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

For a third year in a row, Spain-based Excelencias Group has attended some of Russia’s major travel and tourism fairs during a weeklong array of events that turned Moscow into the world capital of the leisure industry.

Caribbean News Digital avails itself of this opportunity to wish you all a happy holiday season and the very best for 2010, a year that might hopefully be teeming with good news despite the ongoing economic and financial crisis that encircles the globe.

With the weekend launch in Havana of issues two and three of Art by Excelencias magazine, out publishing staff stresses its commitment to a project that saw the light of day in the summer in an effort to showcase the very best of the contemporary arts in the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as to provide a space for sharing views and igniting debates among artists, critics and experts in the field.