Las Tunas has achievements on the international scene; first, there are the professionals of the Henry Reeve Contingent who do everything possible to save lives in the midst of such complex circumstances; and now, two students who have won awards in international competitions. 

Las Tunas, Cuba.- Pedro Pablo Álvarez Portelles, a twelfth-grade student at the Luis Urquiza Jorge Vocational Pre-university Institute of Exact Sciences, obtained the bronze medal in the International Computer Science Contest, held online due to the COVID-19.

Pedro Pablo participates in this subject since he was in tenth grade and from the eleventh he obtains international results. “This year, he said, the challenge was greater because of the pandemic, the isolation and the distance. I could not be in contact with the teachers at my school, nor with the national coaches, who are also from other provinces. I maintained communication with everyone on the Internet; they sent me the problems that I had to solve by email.”

This teenager says that the contest was a challenge because it had a fairly high complexity, but since it was not his first time, he was clear about his goal from the beginning: giving a medal to the province and the country. He highlighted that "We have a fairly wide community of contestants from Cuba and other countries that we know and we are in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, with whom I was in contact for the preparation. I also felt pressure from my family to study all these months so I will not disassociate myself.”

When he finishes the pre-university teaching, Pedro wants to study a Bachelor of Computing Sciences, better known as Cybernetics.

PARTICIPATING WAS ALREADY A VICTORY

From the Vicente García González junior high school, in La Posta, in the municipality of Majibacoa, the seventh-grade student, Liúber Alfredo Ramírez Cárdenas, participated in the international contest Children for friendship on the Planet, organized by the Belarusian Ministry of Education.

Liúber was trained by his school's art instructor of visual arts modality, Inés María Cutiño. "It was a work of several days, the advice on my part and his effort made this challenge a pride for us," she commented.

For him, it was a surprise because he knew that the simple fact of getting there made him a winner, but receiving the news of the second place was the best part: “The theme I addressed was Let's Save the Planet, and with the help of the teacher and my mother, who always supported me, I took ideas from the Natural Sciences book, nature and what I see every day.”