Celebrated American writer Alice Walker (The Color Purple) put a great final spin on Havana’s International Book Fair with the presentation Sunday of her latest work. The Fair will now hit the road into 33 other cities across the island nation and is scheduled to come to a close next March 7.

Expobuceo 2004, an international event on scuba diving, is scheduled from June 29 to July 2 at the Plaza America Conference Center in Varadero. This will no doubt be a perfect setting for tour operators, travel agents, professional and retired divers, scuba aficionados, marine biologists, scientists, underwater shutterbugs, environmentalists and diving students from all around the globe to exchange views and experiences on the topic.

Around 90 percent of European tourists coming to Mexico swing by destinations in the state of Quintana Roo, in the Mexican Caribbean, thus making Italy “a very interesting market” that has been steadily on the rise in recent years, local tourist authorities stated.

Most European sunbathers stay in the Mayan Riviera, while a lower percentage goes to the Cancun hotel area, the same sources indicated.

The Berlin International Tourism Fair (ITB) –one of the world’s largest tradeshows in the industry- will draw in this year a staggering 9,000 exhibitors and somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 specialized visitors, IPK International, the event’s organizer in Munich, estimates.

The Thank God Carnival comes around every year to soothe the island’s image of a modern-age Sodom and Gomorra. The point is that watching hip-swaying women dancing in the streets of Port of Spain in G-strings really takes a sound heart. Nevertheless, scores of foreign sunbathers flock to this paradise-like neck of the woods to have fun in the picture-perfect and world-class Trinitarian Carnival, dubbed locally The Greatest Show on Earth.

The 13th edition of the Havana International Book Fair remembered Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1971) in his one hundredth birthday with a colloquium and the presentation of a couple of titles, The Winter Garden and The Separated Rose.

The colloquium took place at the Jose Antonio Portuondo Hall in old-timed San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress, the book festival’s traditional fairgrounds, in an event that will reach out to other 33 cities across the nation beginning next Monday.