Cuba - Culture Smart!

Mandy Macdonald is an Australian writer, researcher, editor, and translator living in Scotland. A graduate of Sydney and Cambridge universities, she specializes in international cooperation with developing countries, with particular emphasis on the EU, Latin America, labour rights and gender equality.
She has lived and worked in Cuba as a translator and has spent time in Central America as a worker on human and gender rights, and has written articles and books on Cuba and Central America. Her work on European development cooperation took her to Brussels in the 1990s, and she continues to visit Belgium, among other European countries, as an amateur musician and performer of Renaissance music.
After a long career spent working for international and European governmental and nongovernmental organizations, Mandy is now an occasional freelance editor and writer, particularly on music. A new venture is poetry, and since 2011 her poems have appeared from time to time online and in print. Her experiences in many countries, and especially her own country, Australia, form a rich source of material for her poetry.
Mandy continues to travel as often as possible, and believes that travelling with open eyes and mind and a sensitive attitude towards local cultures and customs is the best possible kind of globalization.
Russell Maddicks is a BBC-trained journalist, who has spent the last 20 years exploring the countries of Latin America and publishing his experiences in print, online and in social media. A graduate in Economic and Social History from the University of Hull, England, he is fluent in Spanish and loves nothing better than mastering the country-specific slang of the Latin American countries he visits.
He has worked as a reporter and editor at the Daily Journal newspaper in Caracas, the editor of a webzine aimed at the Latin American youth market called Loquesea! (Whatever!), and as a regional specialist at BBC Monitoring covering political developments and general news.
In 2015, his book Culture Smart! Ecuador was awarded the Gold Prize at the Pearl of the Pacific International Travel Journalism Awards at the Ecuadorian International Tourism Fair (FITE) in Guayaquil.
He is also the author of the Bradt Guide to Venezuela, and has written articles for numerous international publications, including BBC Travel, National Geographic Traveller, the Mexico News Daily, Latino Life, ArtNews, and Songlines.
An accomplished public speaker, he has given illustrated talks on Latin American travel destinations at the Globetrotter s Club, the Telegraph Outdoor and Adventure Travel Show, Destinations: The Holiday and Travel Show, and at UK colleges and universities.
You can follow his Latin American travels on Twitter and Instagram