The 2018 National Award of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba in Natural and Exact Sciences has been jointly awarded to Prof. Dr. Carlos Pérez​ Morell (Universidad Central "Marta Abreu"' de Las Villas, Santa Clara, Cuba), Dr. Bac Nguyen Cong and Prof. Dr. Bernard De Baets for their work on Supervised distance metric learning for pattern recognition. The award ceremony took place on May 10 in La Havana Vieja, Cuba. This is a milestone in the longstanding Flanders-Cuba cooperation.