Cuba will embrace the magic of the International Poetry Festival of Havana today and until 1 June, which in its 30th edition will be prestigious with 82 international poets from America, Europe and Africa.
The event is dedicated on this occasion to African poetry and to the 90th anniversary of the birth of the recently deceased Cuban ethnologist, researcher and poet Natalia Bolívar, and invites to writing laboratories, literary recitals, book presentations, visual arts exhibitions and concerts.
The event’s programme will also be enriched by readings in universities, primary schools, communities and in the Calle de Madera in Havana’s historic centre, together with the final event at the Casa del Alba Cultural with the company Ópera de la Calle, among many other surprises.
According to the president of the meeting, Alex Pausides, the festival is an accumulation of many wills, efforts and generosity.
Among the main activities to be highlighted, he pointed out, is the Meeting of Poets in Defence of Humanity, which will be held on 31 May at the José Martí National Library with a tribute to Palestine and Africa.
There will also be a Hispanic American Poetry Reading on the Generation of 27′ of the last century, and the evening Palabra del Mundo (Word of the World).
Another important event is the inaugural evening at the Basílica Menor del Convento de San Francisco de Asís, where the CubaPoesía competition will be awarded, with an extraordinary character this year for Cuban poets residing in the national territory, he said.
According to Pausides, as usual, poems written in the original languages will be heard, followed by a concert by the singer-songwriter Gerardo Alfonso «which closes very well because of its connection with the theme of the festival and with poetry».
For the occasion, the National Museum of Decorative Arts has booked contemporary poetry readings for the 28th, 29th and 30th, while the Ministry of Culture’s Abelardo Estorino Theatre will host the inauguration of the Havana Poetry School.
The meeting will extend its presentations to the Casa de la Poesía, the Carmen Montilla Gallery, the Fidel Castro Ruz Centre and other equally important venues where writers can contribute to the promotion of fine literature.
On the region being honoured, the intellectual added that Africa is an ever-renewed pending page, poets from Burkina Faso, Burundi, Algeria, Sudan and Kenya will be with us.
There will be a tribute to African poetry at the National Library on Tuesday 31, also an initial reading at the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba with the greatest African poets we have, and Africa will be present with the work of Natalia Bolivar throughout this week of poetry in Havana and in Cuba, he said.
Pausides recalled the generosity of the eternal historian Eusebio Leal and his team with the festival, also that the Historic Centre is the main venue of the event since its inception.
