More Music Accolade for Venezuela

A youth music education program in Venezuela that has earned praise around the world recently won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize.
Since it began in 1975, “El Sistema” has taught 600,000 young people from poor areas of Venezuela to play classical music. It is still picking up steam: 275,000 children are currently enrolled in a network [...]

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Venezuela Launches Online Library of Latin Literature

Thanks to Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, many classic works of Latin American literature are now available online for free.
To check it out, visit Biblioteca Ayacucho. You can download PDFs files of books in Spanish ranging in publication date from the early 17th century to the late 20th century. Many famous Venezuelan writers are included in [...]

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Venezuela’s “Sontizon”: Hip Hop That Heals

Sontizon is a salsa-infused hip hop collective that offers listeners more than just a sound: it offers them a vision.
The group got a slow start in 2000 and later re-grouped in 2002 after an aborted coup d’etat in Venezuela. The title of its new album, “For each 11th there is a 13th” (A cada 11 [...]

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Venezuelan Sports Stars in the News

The Venezuelan race car driver Milka Duno finished 19th in the Indianapolis 500 last weekend. Despite a crash, Duno was with the lead pack for most of the race, and showed much improvement over last year’s finish in 31st place. Here are some more staggering numbers: the race lasted 3 and a [...]

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Venezuelan Orchids Grace South Florida Festival

The orchid is Venezuela’s national flower. It’s no surprise, then, that the country was well represented at the Redland Orchid Festival in South Florida this week. Seasoned growers of these perennial plants hailed from Caracas and Maracay.
The Miami Herald quoted Alexis Pardo, the Maracay horticulturist, as saying: “This is a wonderful festival, both [...]

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Venezuela Gives Cuba Affordable, Eco-friendly Petrocasas

Remember the petrocasas we told you about back in March? These affordable, eco-friendly homes made of waste generated by oil refining are now being used to ease a housing shortage in Cuba. Reuters reports that 40 new petrocasas are being built per day to reach a total number of 14,000 this year.
Petrocasas are [...]

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Venezuela Hosts World Poetry Festival

Some say that poetry is a dying art. This is not the case in Venezuela, where the World Poetry Festival is hosted each year. The fifth annual event is taking place this week.
This time around, the World Poetry Festival is dedicated to the Venezuelan writer Gustavo Pereira. Pereira hails from Margarita, an island [...]

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Venezuela Helps Light Up Haiti

Unlike elsewhere in the world, electricity consumption rates in Haiti have declined steadily over the last five years.
To help increase access, Venezuela is expanding a project set up in 2006 to provide Haiti with more electricity assistance. A new processing plant to be built on the island is expected to extend access to electricity [...]

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U.S. Newspaper Editors Visit Venezuela, Duno Accelerates

Last week, the American Society of Newspaper Editors went to Venezuela on a fact-finding mission. Their travels included a meeting with President Hugo Chavez. You can read about their observations, and what the Venezuelan leader had to say, in the Orlando Sentinel (editor Charlotte Hall is pictured here) and the Boston Globe.
Cultural figures [...]

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Venezuela’s Famous Four-Stringed “Cuatro”

Venezuela’s national instrument, the cuatro, is currently on display at the House of Venezuelan History (Casa de Estudio de la Historia de Venezuela). This cultural institution is a library and exhibition center set in a beautiful old colonial mansion in downtown Caracas. It is an appropriate place to feature the cuatro, which also [...]

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Venezuelan Coffee, “From the Grower to Your Cup”

Consumers in the U.S. will soon be able to buy specialty coffee from Venezuela in Citgo gas stations. Citgo is a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Pdvsa, and its charitable donations of heating oil in the U.S. are well known. Now, Citgo is helping bring small producers in Venezuela to the [...]

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Venezuela’s Social Missions, Five Years Later

Five years have passed since Venezuela began its “social missions,” state-funded social programs across diverse areas of human development such as education, medicine, nutrition, and culture.
They began in 2003, when the government sought to revolutionize the country’s old social service institutions and reach out to communities all over the country in an aggressive program to [...]

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