The artist considers himself an observant man. In fact, a painter starts from how he sees his reality and then projects it on paper. “I have many ways to work. Sometimes I start by staining the canvas in white ─which everyone is afraid of. Other times, I draw what I want to do in a sketch and go live, or I mix the two ways of working”.

His mind is full of ideas and from there he selects the topics that interest him. The creative process that he follows is as simple, or as complex, as seeing the reflection of a dog drinking water and taking that image to a painting, or photographing snapshots with his phone that catch his attention and then have them as materials to work with. “I am always with my eyes open, attentive to what surrounds me and to the provocations of the morphology, the forms and the suggestions that the landscape gives you”.

***
How do you react when all eyes are on you?

“I’m scared of it. If I’m at a conference I get nervous because I imagine what the audience thinks of the nonsense I’m saying. My method is to focus on a person and think that I am having a conversation with them.”

And when nobody looks at it? What is Nelson Dominguez like?

“I am a happy man. Calm. I smoke a cigar while I think about my work or girlfriends”.

-How do other people define it?

“That answer can only be given by someone else.”

-How do you define yourself?

“I like puns and talking to people. I abhor closed and bitter faces. There are times when people get bitter for no reason and are predisposed with life and happiness. Bad character is one of the reasons why a man can last less.

***

-Master, why art?

“By chance. When we are children we are encouraged by many things. He studied at the Camilo Cienfuegos School City, in El Caney de las Mercedes in the Bartolomé Masó municipality of Granma. They invited me to a workshop where they stood up and recorded things. He was about 12 or 13 years old. My friends and I got excited and became the painters of the school, the first after January 1, 1959. I am student 126 of the Revolution”.

-How do you remember your childhood?

“Family life outside the city is simple: work in the fields, eat, sleep and the next day the same routine. As a child I was always very observant. I can now mentally walk, piece by piece, my father’s estate. They are memories that remain in your imaginary archive and that feed you without realizing it.

“I was born on a farm between Los Negros and Matías, in Baire, Santiago de Cuba. My mind is deeply rooted in those places where I traveled through my childhood and adolescence. Once, when I was fourteen years old, I went with my father and he told me: ‘look, you were born on that little piece of land’. I have a project called Rural Galleries, I did an exhibition in the Escambray and the other I will do in that place, on my grandparents’ farm.

“I cannot deny that growing up in that place has influenced my way of conceiving art. In the first moment of my work there is a lot of relationship with the field. The departure was always that, and from time to time a peasant appears in some canvas”.

***
-What does Cuba mean?

“The fundamental reason for being Cuban is the attachment to the land where you were born. That of your parents, your brothers. All that is Cuba. There are many countries where you can live, but always, I don’t know why, you long for this land. I have never thought of settling outside this country, under any circumstances. Being a foreigner hurts a lot.

-What is the decision or project you have taken that you feel most proud of?

“I have many projects: Gallery Hospitals, Rural Galleries, Skinny Pocket. I take them little by little and along the way I involve many people. I’m always up to something. I would say the saying: ‘when I am not in prison they are looking for me’”.

-What is the biggest mistake you have made?

“Falling too much and, above all, without being reciprocated. The best thing is that there is reciprocity, and that is valid for many things in life. I overreach. Sometimes I have no brakes with passions and that has affected me a lot. I advance like this, making mistakes”.

Nelson Domínguez says that the Camilo Cienfuegos School City was a kind of “laboratory” for Fidel to later found the schools in the countryside. “At the beginning of the Revolution, an internationalist brigade from various parts of Latin America came to Cuba. There was a Chilean, an art and trade graduate, who taught us many things about ceramics in the circle of interest workshops, such as preparing a cloth.”

The artist remembers that in that center there was a director, Isidoro Gómez Palacios, who was his tutor and saw something in him. “I had forty options to continue my studies and it was that teacher who told me to forget about all the other possibilities because I was going to take the tests to enter the National School of Art.”

He took the exam and with a lot of work he passed. The first three years were very difficult for Nelson Domínguez, to the point of almost dropping out of school due to poor performance. “He had no training as a painter unlike a group of students who were graduates of art schools and provincial schools. I worked hard and improved in the second year. In the third and fourth I matched up. In the fifth year, together with Pedro Pablo Oliva and Flora Fong, we were the first records of the group”.

After graduating from the ENA, the outstanding Cuban painter Antonia Eiriz chooses him to be her assistant to her. “That has been the greatest of my joys. During that year I learned a lot, teachings that I still use”.

***
What would you like to do that you’re not doing right now?

“Hear a concert that I like. An operates. Music attracts me a lot. I was going to study it but I left it because of the solfeggio. He was bad with numbers. Once I asked Leo Brouwer why I never understood that subject and he told me that music is pure mathematics”.

-What is your biggest flaw?

“Trust. My family says that I think everyone is good, but in the end that is not a defect. The mistake would be to believe that people are bad. All people have their truths.”

-And virtue?

“Falling in love with beautiful things, believing in people and their good intentions. I also highly value altruism and solidarity.”

***

-What did his time at the National School of Art mean?

“It was the school that placed me. Also, at a certain age you see art differently. Later I was a professor at that center and together with Luis Miguel Valdés, we made all the study plans of the University of the Arts”.

-And the magisterium?

“I stand in front of a student and start from those times in which I was taught and how important the load of responsibility that a teacher has with a student was for me, although I became aware of it in its full dimension when I practiced teaching .

“I was a professor at the ENA with a teaching system based on the Renaissance where the student chose his professor in some way. I had about 12 students. He worked that day alone with a student. He was teaching her today and I didn’t see him again for 15 days. He went to the national library and brought him boxes of books related to his line of creation of him. Once Arturo Montoto said that he painted as Nelson Domínguez had taught him. I felt proud.”

-What are his characteristics of him as a plastic artist?

“I always take a lot of risks. I am not afraid, nor do I settle for success. Even if a painting has a very nice part and I realize that another part is wrong and that is why it has to be removed, I do it. I work from doubt. I am always doubting myself and my work. That has done me good.”

-Is there any point in common in his works of him?

“Although the themes are different, in the work of a painter there are always points in common. For example, Picasso had seven or eight themes and then he took them down different paths. I think that artists don’t have so many topics to deal with, but it has to do with sensitivity. For example, everyday life is something that really catches my attention.”

***
-What do you prefer to do in your free time?

“I really like gardening, but I’m more passionate about cooking. My detractors say that I am a better cook than a painter. I also write, but for myself. Abel Prieto affirms that I should take literature seriously, but the jealousy I have for the visual arts prevents me from doing so. I can betray everything except painting.”

-What has been your biggest dream?

“Having a nice big house in the country. I recently bought a farm by Nicho de Cienfuegos and I am dreaming of that project. I think that at the end of my life I will live in the country.”

-Any secret that you have not shared in a previous interview?

“Life is full of secrets and they have to be kept secret to be secrets.”

Nelson Domínguez Cedeño defends the thesis that the paintings are not famous or become important because of the topics they deal with, but because of how they are made and the intention that their creator wanted to give them. If you ask about his work, he says that he does not keep track of the exhibitions he has done. “Perhaps we have to tell what I have not yet achieved.”

One of his favorite shows was “Self-Portrait”, when he won the National Prize for Plastic Arts. “I had the right to do it in Fine Arts, but since I had exhibited twice in that place, I decided that it would be in the Pabellón Cuba. Later Lázaro Expósito took the exhibition to Santiago de Cuba, from there to Baracoa and ended up touring the entire country, except for the Isle of Youth”.

Precisely, he feels fulfilled as a plastic artist when he gets his works to be seen by as many people as possible. “‘My friend Alicia’ is an exhibition that has given me many pleasures. Now I will take it to Mayabeque, then to Matanzas, Pinar del Río and it will end on the Island. I like that my creations travel throughout Cuba.”

If you ask him what he prefers between painting, sculpture, engraving or ceramics, he assures that the emotion of each medium is what is important. “I try to respect the parameters of the procedures.”

***
-What are you scared of?

“To the dentist or to get sick, although I know that the day he dies it will be from a bump. Sometimes I fear losing myself in the desire to have money. I feel like a rich man, although I don’t know if he really is, because material possessions are not what make people rich. True fortune is having a little of what you need. No accumulation.

“For example, I really like antique furniture and I’m not an antique dealer. If I see one that I like, I invent how to find money to buy it. That is one of my passions. Look—smile—I just told you a secret.”

-If a new person came into his life, what can he do to get to know him better?

“Speak”.

-If everything disappeared and you could rescue only one thing, what would it be?

“I would be selfish and rescue the most loved one at that moment. At Armageddon it makes no sense to save brushes or paintings.

-If you could start from scratch, what would you change?

“The furniture of my house”.

***

-How is Cuban identity manifested in the work of Nelson Domínguez?

“That Cuban identity is a cliché, just like folklore. To the extent that one reflects the environment ─in black or white, lines or stripes ─ the Cubanness is present. From the moment I am Cuban and I paint in Cuba. It is not the subject that says that, but the final results. I never look for those things. If it appears or is seen by the critics who are the ones who pay attention to those details, then fine.

“I paint for myself and transmit with the brush or my hands what I have inside. Of course, I do many topics related to culture, religious syncretism or others with a load of magic that are a vox populi of society”.

-What are the main paradigms of him within the plastic arts?

“I have admiration for the Cuban school of painting. That work with very strong popular and social roots: Carlos Enríquez, Eduardo Abela, Jorge Arche, Amelia Peláez, Mariano Rodríguez, Martínez Pedro, Mirta Serra, Wilfredo Lam.

“In my works there is always something of them because I have studied them and I don’t believe in the supposed originality. The origin of art is art itself. You always have to know who came before you to see what you’re going to do.”

-And your favorite aesthetic trend?

“I’m not interested in currents. You have to be careful not to fall into isms. They are limits for a painter and there are many who are slaves to the fame they have achieved and do not leave a single method. So, you fall in love with your work and that is another serious mistake for an artist”.

***
-If you make a panorama of his life, are you satisfied?

“Nope. Satisfaction is something that man never gets to know because the trajectory of a person is so short that he does not have much time to analyze what he has done. Someone said that the trees prevent seeing the forest and that happens a lot to human beings”.

-What advice would you give to the version of him from 20 years ago?

“That I paint more, although deep down I feel satisfied with what I have achieved. Each person has their own limits, but I think there are still more surprises to come in my career as an artist.”

-What are his principles and sacred values?

“Loyalty, and not so much that of a couple but towards another human being. Friendship. Sometimes I have two cigars and I take one to an old man who lives up there because I know he will never have the chance to smoke a cigar of that quality. When you share what he has, he feels happier”.

What is it that you would die for?

“I would do it defending my country and that is not a slogan, but a reality. Saving another person. I think I might as well die of laughter.”

The renowned artist does not believe that there is a before and after in his career: “A before is now that I am alive and an after when I am not. I keep going. What I do do sometimes is go back so as not to leave without doing things that interest me. There was a time when my painting went a lot towards the figurative, so I revised and took things up again. Now I am in a period in which I reconcile with the procedures, techniques and ways of doing things that I have used before. Basically what I intend to do is a painting without much complexity. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult because it requires conclusions. The elementary is made of complex things.”

For Nelson Domínguez, learning to paint is the greatest success he has ever had in his life. “Work with joy. Know all the techniques. Perhaps success is going down the street and people recognize you and greet you, but that is social success”.

Along these same lines, he says that the awards depend on a jury. “They are not symbols of stability for anyone. It is a vision of a group of people about your work”.

When he paints, engraves, draws or molds a piece, he feels that he has no way to go. “You start a work and you don’t know how it can end. It is also a pleasure to see a finished painting that you like. But also, you see problems that you cannot solve.”

Nelson Domínguez firmly believes that art is his way of breathing, of living, of thinking, of loving. A communication media. “Sometimes I’m a little selfish and I put my work above everything else, because I think that’s the only way to get where you want to go. I also haggle a lot, for example, I want to learn computers and I don’t do it because I think about the time I won’t dedicate to painting. Is incredible”.

This job has removed the bad habit of wasting time and has given him the pleasure of doing what he wants and loving what he wants through his work or that of other artists.

***
Have you ever thought about taking a gap year?

“Nope. I can’t stand a day off. I am very attached to my work. It’s a beautiful disease.”

-If you could choose one way to die or one you don’t want to, what would they be?

“Drowning is horrible. I would very much like that necessary death to come when I am making love.”

-How would you like to be remembered when you are gone?

“Like a happy person. A deluded man who thought that he was going to live longer than he was given”.

-A word that defines your life…

“Doubt”.

-What do you think is his greatest legacy to Cuban culture?

“First you have to be aware of whether you have achieved a legacy or not. I work to leave things for others. For Cuba. That is my satisfaction.”

(By: Thalia Fuentes Puebla/Cubadebate)

The work owes its name to the homonymous Matanzas neighborhood and gave rise to the dance known as danzón (or habanera). The public danced it for the first time on January 1, 1879, in the old Liceo Artístico y Literario de la Atenas de Cuba (today Sala White).

The documentary ¿Qué es el Danzón?, directed by Armando Linares, highlights: “It was derived as a result of the transculturation of the European contradanza that arrived at the beginning of the 18th century via the Spanish courts, due to the taking of Havana by the English in 1762 and at the end of the 18th century due to the migration of French settlers and blacks and mulattoes from Haiti to Cuba”.

As a danceable manifestation, it comes from a piece of paintings that was performed in Matanzas at the end of the 19th century. The body and spatial movements of this new genre were slower, cadenced and with greater creative freedom than previous dances, which denotes the process of stylistic transformation that Cuban ballroom dance underwent from the contradanza.

“The danzón became more varied than the dance; Specific instruments would star in each particular part in the melodic conception, constituting a distinctive element of this genre, what would be known as: part of the violin, part of the flute, part of the clarinet, according to the function and intervention of each one”, affirmed Maritza Cuba Núñez , director of Patrimony of the city of Matanzas.

Dancers were allowed to wear wing collars, jackets, vests, skirts, long skirts, and tight corsets without worrying about suffocating rhythms. It gained great popularity and acceptance among the population in a short time.

Doctor Ercilio Vento Canosa, historian of the city of Matanzas, stated that its emergence provoked political controversy on the part of the repressive press organs that described the dance as immoral for being a music of black origin. On the other hand, its defenders recognized it as Cuban music and a step towards the Spanish and Creole cultural separation.

The danzón was danced in pairs, up to a number of twenty, who executed square pieces, figures and steps with movements adjusted to the beat of the music. In later times, ladies used conspicuous fans.

According to the website Memoria de Cuba, by the writer Jorge Molina, the danzón has as a unique and novel characteristic in its time, the quality of alternating danced parts with breaks.

With the emergence of other dances such as the danzonete, the cha-cha-cha and the mambo, the danzón fell into decline in popular preference. However, since 2013 the dance has held the distinction of being the intangible heritage of Cuba and cultural organizations carry out actions to rescue the elegant steps of a danzón couple from the years.

In such a masterful way towards his entry into the dramaturgy of our country, a voice with an artistic scope similar to that of a contemporary Lope de Vega, due to his eminently popular character and his extensive literary production to help us clarify, from the scene, in depth, the passions, crossroads and dreams of a large significant portion of our society.

But not satisfied with this, his career also, time and time again, touched the audience’s Diana with shows under his leadership such as “Odebí el Cazador”, where the magic of our cultural syncretism reached a dazzling expressive height that won us all. spectators and the collective of the National Folkloric Ensemble of Cuba and the author himself.

But it was not enough and with an unusual vigor and a protean and desecrated vision of our contemporary reality he masterfully played in the Diana, with critical success on our daily life at that time in “Calixta Comité”. The most honest, brilliant and controversial text that has risen to the stage in our theatrical panorama, in a long time.

No to the saga he knew how to delight us with texts like “My partner Manolo”, “Emelina Cundiamor”, “High risk”, “Lagarto Pisabonito”, “El Venerable”, “La Raft”, “Eclíptica, what’s wrong with that woman ” and “Aedes aegypti”. And with the expression of some of his texts and film scripts, which clearly speak of the transcendence of this predestined man who will continue to be for us our Big Brother, Papi, better known as Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.

The couple travels by sea to Mexico, where the poet will assume the position of Consul General of Chile, and once in that position it will be very difficult for him to move to the Cuban capital without a plausible reason. That is why Delia asks Marinello that the Cuban friends write to the Chilean authorities “and let them know of your wish that Pablo pay you a visit.” He adds that the poet “is getting quite ahead of his Canto General”, and that “if he does not write personally and has left me that pleasure”, it is because he is overwhelmed by a series of “tedious and unpleasant” letters that he must send to Chile and he wants take advantage of the stopover that the ship they are traveling on will make in Lima to send them.

That handwritten letter dated July 29, 1940, which is in the collections of the José Martí National Library and whose reading is difficult, especially the initial page, due to the faded ink, bears a postscript from Neruda himself. “I can’t wait to go to Cuba,” he tells Marinello and asks him to greet Wenceslao Roces, translator of Marx into Spanish, the poet Manuel Altolaguirre, Nicolás Guillén, Francisco and Félix Pita Rodríguez, and Emilio Ballagas. He immediately adds: “And in particular to all of Havana except for the old bastard Juan Ramón Jiménez.”

It is worth clarifying that by then Platero’s poet had left Cuba. They had an old quarrel, which time had been intensifying, motivated by Juan Ramón’s opinion about the Chilean’s poetry, whom he considered “a great bad poet, a clumsy translator of himself who sometimes confuses the original with the translation” . Opinion that in 1942 he modified to say that Neruda expressed “with exuberant trial and error an authentic general Hispanic-American poetry, with all the natural revolution and the metamorphosis of life and death of this continent” to conclude: “You are prior, prehistoric and turbulent, closed and gloomy”, a judgment to which the Chilean was not insensitive, who did not stop expressing “the deep emotion with which I read his lines, which with their sincerity magnify the admiration that I have felt for his work throughout my life”.

deed song
It will not be until 1942 that Neruda comes to Havana for the first time. The great communist poet has been invited by a Catholic writer, José María Chacón y Calvo, then Director of Culture of the Ministry of Education. At the National Academy of Arts and Letters he gave four lectures, two of them on Francisco de Quevedo, and he evoked, says Volodia Teitelboim, in his biography of the poet, “for the first time in America, His Majesty’s Post Office, Don Juan de Tassis , Count of Villamediana, in love with the Queen, who one day sets fire to the curtains of the Palace stage in order to have a pretext to flee with the tall forbidden beloved in his arms”.

He came back in 1949 or 1950 for a few hours. He was returning to Mexico from Europe – he had attended a peace conference in Paris and the celebrations for the sesquicentennial of Pushkin’s birth in Moscow – and the plane he was traveling on made a stopover in Havana due to a technical failure. Persecuted in Chile after President González Videla’s betrayal of the Popular Front, then-Senator Pablo Neruda was “the wandering poet,” as the journalist Enrique de la Osa called him.

When he returned to Havana for the last time, at the end of 1960, he brought the poems of Canción de gesta, the first book – he boasted of it – “that a poet in any part of the world had dedicated to the Cuban Revolution”, and which closes with a Meditation on the Sierra Maestra that is also a summary of the poet’s life in that dawning hour: “… I receive my past in a cup / and I raise it for the entire earth, / and although my homeland circulates in my blood / without his career ever fading / at this hour my nocturnal reason / points to Cuba its common flag / of the dark hemisphere that awaited / finally a true victory…”

On that visit, in the Plaza de la Revolución, before a million people, the poet read, with his peculiar intonation, his song To Fidel Castro: “Fidel, Fidel, the people thank you / words in action and deeds that sing , / from afar I have brought you / a glass of the wine of my country…”

Bohemia magazine offered a cocktail in his honor and, of course, he did not leave Cuba without tasting the dormant black beans, the tachinos, the yucca with mojo and the roasted pork slices with juice at La Bodeguita del Medio. Aware of his presence in that very Cuban restaurant, two excellent comedians, René de la Nuez and the “Galician” Posada, did not want to miss the opportunity to greet him and, oddly enough, they entered the establishment riding a donkey, which made Neruda burst out laughing.

“The usual nonsense of the poet, his inconvenient attitudes, which led him to be offensive at times, perhaps without meaning to, did not leave the slightest memory,” narrator Lisandro Otero wrote in his memoirs (1997).

His love and fidelity to the Cuban Revolution were not clouded by those “painful misunderstandings” of 1966, when Cuban writers, in an open letter, judged “his poetic, social and revolutionary activity,” according to Neruda himself. The poet, offended, responded sharply.

While he did not forgive those who signed the letter, whom he lambasted or disparaged in his memoirs, the incident did not dampen his sympathies for Cuba and his Revolution. He says it explicitly in I confess that I have lived: “A black point, a small black point within a process, does not have great importance in the context of a great cause. I have continued singing, loving and respecting the Cuban Revolution, its people, its noble protagonists.”

(By Ciro Bianchi)

In a Cuban television report, it was reported that among the novelties, the presentation of a collection of books on the work and legacy of Eusebio Leal Spengler stands out. One of the texts is You have to believe in Cuba, a compendium of interviews conducted with the historian by the journalist Magda Resik, Director of Communication of the OHCH.

According to Resik, under the seal of Ediciones Boloña, the El Historiador collection has already begun, bringing together the best of Leal Spengler’s thought and work.

It will be a kind of anthology of the thoughts and ideas of Leal Spengler on various topics: heritage, history and national culture, argued the Director of Communication of the OHCH.

Resik added that the Andar La Habana collection is also being expanded, which includes all the programs that the eternal Historian of the City led for more than 20 years.

As part of the program of activities, there will be new presentations of the documentary The Capitol of all Cubans, by the OHCH, which summarizes the restoration work carried out in that building.

Resik announced that the Beloved Homeland room will be inaugurated in the Eusebio Leal Spengler House, a space that shows his close relationship with Cuban identity, his defense of Cuban values ​​and his passion for Cuba.

As usual, the traditional ceremony is planned in the Bandstand, the founding site of the city.

Well chosen musical greeting to the Day of Cuban Culture. And also the celebration of the date by artists and intellectuals, who did not go to a theater to celebrate themselves. They walk through the towns of Pinar del Río where Ian’s winds took away the roofs and the souls of many people.

Reinier Duardo accompanied his greeting to the Cuban artists and intellectuals, with a praise for that work of love for the people that embodies with deeds, the ideas of the recent message to the colleagues of the world, which has already accumulated more than one thousand one hundred adhesions and that has annoyed the haters.

He reminded the analyst how much they have done to separate the artists from the revolutionary project. And, they have managed to buy several, but, in the midst of the difficult situation that Cuba is experiencing, here are the big ones, what is worth and shines with its own light. And they are defending the Revolution with their art and with their signature.

At her time, Bárbara Betancourt meant that there are not only writers and artists. In fact, the message was made public by intellectuals in the broadest concept of the term: relevant educators and scientists from all specialties. A very brief, but very forceful message, which recognizes the enormous sacrifices imposed on us by shortages and blackouts, which even speaks of mistakes, but ratifies the defense of the nation. She also goes against the haters and the haters and quoted:

“We condemn hate speech, defamation, distortions of our reality, and we hope that truthful information reaches those who follow events with good will and honestly care about this country. With our contribution, school activities begin, the tireless struggle of science, life in the communities is revived, cultural programming available to all is restarted and the truth of Cuba is defended”.

In a certain way, the declaration includes the courageous position of Cuban emigrants such as those from Puentes de amor or the NEMO movement, who against all odds, against attacks of all kinds, are fighting within the United States to fully lift the blockade. In a direct half-hour the night before, Carlos Lazo reacted emotionally to Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez’s announcement that the United States had donated 2 million USD and 100 firefighting suits, of which 43 arrived. His reaction provoked a strong debate in the networks, of many people outraged by the squalid aid from the country that has imposed a blockade on us that already costs us more than a million million and is capable of giving more than 3 billion million in one stroke just for weapons, destined to sustain the war in Ukraine.

This episode contrasts with the quick and generous reaction of Mexico, Venezuela and other friendly countries, which both in the Matanzas accident and now due to the damage caused by Hurricane Ian, extended their hands and their help to Cuba. Given this generosity, the blockade stands out more with its charge of abuse against an entire people. The Cuban Foreign Minister summed it up masterfully: “The blockade is the permanent pandemic, the constant hurricane.”

A very novel approach that, precisely from that very small but unexpected donation, makes more visible, shows with facts, the criminal extent of the damage caused by the blockade.

A synthetic and exact explanation of what it means to keep on the list of sponsors of terrorism those of us who are, several times, victims of terrorism. A transparent exhibition that dismantled manipulations, like the one they use so much on the North American products that our stores sell. The issue is not only from whom they are bought, it is what they are bought with, if we do not have fresh credits, if the financial persecution is surgical, hitting where it most affects the Cuban economy.

The presentation of the blockade report is thus part of the best tradition of Cuban diplomacy. The truth told without offense, without bombast. A blockade of more than 60 years was exposed in a few minutes with the essential arguments. Compared to the two million of the donation, the gross numbers of everything that the North American government has taken from us and harms us, acquires its genocidal dimension in a more exact way.

It had to be said and it was said on a day of such significance, since Perucho Figueredo wrote on the back of his horse the Hymn of Bayamo, our Marsellesa, our Bayamesa, the song of Cuban culture that is a school of creativity and beauty in the resistance, with the unquestionable verse that even today marks our collective fate: To die for the country is to live.

(By: Arleen Rodríguez Derivet)

Just on the date marked on the island for the Day of Cuban Culture (October 20), the brigade stands out as a space for the dissemination and defense of traditions, popular practices and artistic manifestations, which -by its hand- reach the communities most remote of the largest of the Antilles.

According to the entity’s national president, Emilio Toledo, among the actions, the Get closer initiative stands out, developed by the organization’s muralist network in prisons, as well as the photographic exhibition My brigade is still here, installed in the Casa del Alba Cultural .

Forums, concerts, workshops, historical routes and presentations for infants, appear in the calendar of proposals that since last October 5 bring closer to the work of the entity, which since its foundation seeks to transform the socio-cultural environment, raise aesthetic tastes and promote artistic and human values.

With the premise of preserving youth and extolling identity and Cubanness in all spaces, the Brigade dedicated the activities of this birthday to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Nueva Trova Movement, to the 55th anniversary of the Protest Song and to the 60th of the art education system.

Likewise, the 50th anniversary guerrillas carry out various actions, especially in territories of the province of Pinar del Río, recently affected by the impact of Hurricane Ian.

As an idea of ​​Commander Fidel Castro, the José Martí Brigades of Art Instructors emerged in 2004, an organization that honors the social work of these professionals and enhances Cuban culture from the commitment to bring art and critical thinking to the greatest of The Antilles.

(With information from Prensa Latina)

“I deeply regret the death of Doña María Salud Ramírez Caballero, Mama Coco, a tireless woman and example of life, who was an inspiration for this beloved character who went around the world,” reported Roberto Monroy, Secretary of Tourism of Michoacán (west ), the state of origin.

According to local media, Doña María had turned 109 last September and died in her hometown of Santa Fe de la Laguna, near the touristic Patzcuaro Lake, famous for its colorful celebration of the traditional Day of the Dead.

After the success of the film, which portrays this deep-rooted Mexican holiday, the old woman had become a kind of celebrity, with tourists visiting her to take photos with her due to her remarkable resemblance to her animated character, highlighted media Mexicans.

Coco tells the story of a boy who embarks on a fantastic journey to the world of the dead to learn the history of her ancestors, in particular her great-great-grandfather, Mama Coco’s father. “The greatest thanks to the people of Mexico. Coco would not exist without her culture and her infinitely beautiful traditions,” Lee Unkrich, the film’s director, said when he received the Oscar in March 2018.

(Taken from The World)

We share with the readers of Cubadebate the special program for the centenary of Haydee Santamaría:

In 2022:
Friday October 21 || 5:00 pm. || Casa de las Américas: Inauguration of the exhibition The Fabric of Memory. Tribute to Haydee Santamaría, with works from the Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America Collection.
Tuesday October 25 || 3:00 pm. || Che Guevara Room: Presentation of the 2023 calendar “Haydee Santamaría one hundred years after her birth”. A co-edition of Ocean Sur and Casa de las Américas.
Friday, November 25 || 5:00 pm. || José Antonio Echeverría Library; Inauguration of the bibliographic and documentary exhibition “Centenario de Haydee Santamaría”.
Thursday, December 15 || 3:00 pm. || Che Guevara Room: Presentation of the book Hay de defend la vida, a compilation of texts by Haydee Santamaría, which Casa de las Américas publishes in co-edition with Ocean Sur and a special issue of Casa de las Américas magazine dedicated to its founder.
Thursday, December 15 || 5:00 pm. || Che Guevara Room: “Songs for Haydee”. Concert by the Ensemble Vocal Luna, under the direction of the teacher Maribel Nodarse.
Friday December 16 || 2:00 p.m. || Cinema 23 and 12: Special function of the Cuban Cinematheque with Icaic materials dedicated to Haydee Santamaría or that include her presence.
Friday December 30 || Broadcast on Cuban television: Screening of the documentary “Nuestra Haydee”, a production of the Casa de las Américas, directed by Esther Barroso.

In 2023:
Sunday January 15 || 5:00 pm. || Avellaneda Hall of the National Theater of Cuba: Special function of the National Ballet of Cuba dedicated to the centenary of Haydee Santamaría.
Friday January 20 || 7:00 p.m. || Che Guevara Hall: Concert by José María Vitier dedicated to Haydee Santamaría.
Thursday, January 26 || 7:00 p.m. || Che Guevara Hall: Concert by Amaury Pérez dedicated to Haydee Santamaría, as part of the activities of the 2023 Casa de las Américas Literary Prize.
From February 20 to 24 || Manuel Galich Room: Dedicated to honoring the memory of Haydee Santamaría, the International Colloquium “Politics and Politics in the History and Culture of Latin American and Caribbean Women” will be held as part of the Casa de las Américas Women’s Studies Program.
Wednesday, March 8 || 3:00 pm. || Manuel Galich Room: Women and women’s struggles from the Casa de las Américas. A panel in homage to Haydee Santamaría.
Friday April 28 || Che Guevara Room: Celebration of the 64th anniversary of the Casa de las Américas.

News of his death arrived like a bolt of lightning that strikes without warning, reported the Ministry of Culture, while echoing the words of praise spread by the painter and critic Manuel López Oliva.

Death does not respect root makers either, it has just taken away one of the Cuban artists who knew how to fulfill -with poetry and generational roots- the human and expressive mission that life assigned him, affirmed López Oliva.

Likewise, the creator highlighted Moreira’s fidelity “to the Nation, his nobility of spirit, his values ​​as a draftsman and painter, the paternal and family substance exercised, and the weight of a diverse imaginary.”

In this sense, his prolific work stands out, which “went from his somewhat naturalistic notes of the visions elaborated on the Isle of Youth, to a poetic one that combined his work on billboards with a very professional one,” López Oliva highlighted.

Highlights of his career include his work as an illustrator of editions of the text Don Quixote de la Mancha, his participation in the murals of the Hotel Habana Libre and the building where the Prensa Latina agency was founded, the portraits of heroes and friends, as well as his erotic art. .

Professor of drawing at the San Alejandro Professional School of Plastic Arts, Moreira registered twenty personal exhibitions and dozens of collective exhibitions in his career, while his pieces remain in prestigious collections in Cuba and the world.

He conceived ornamental and symbolic compositions for fountains and urban spaces, “and also made his house – along with his wife, also a painter Alicia Leal – a friendly space for communication,” said López Oliva.

Deserving of the Distinction for National Culture, it is time to say goodbye, but not before thanking his legacy, the one that extolled Cuban culture from the visual arts and was imprinted on his disciples.

(With information from Prensa Latina)