The Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (CITMA) has announced that it will be paying tribute to Cuban archives and archivists in the country from this month until Monday, November 3.
The initiatives include workshops, conferences, theoretical events, professional exchanges and spaces for dissemination, Isbel Vivar González, head of the Ministry’s Directorate of Documentary Management and Archives (DGDA), told the Cuban News Agency (Agencia Cubana de Noticias).
She explained that the main activities would begin on 9 June, International Archives Day, made official in 2007 by its corresponding council, in reference to its constitution on that date in 1948, under the auspices of UNESCO.
According to the director, this Monday saw the presentation of the DGDA’s Blog En clave archivística, Facebook profile, and the meeting of its representation in the province of Ciego de Ávila.
There was also a conference on the importance of archiving in the digital era at the University of Oriente and a workshop on the organisation and conservation of school documents at the Provincial Directorate of Education in Mayabeque, as well as a travelling exhibition.
Today there will be an event on the basic conservation of documents at home in Ciego de Avila and another in Camagüey on the government system, and tomorrow there will be a seminar on the Law of Transparency and Access to Information in Ciego de Avila, and on Thursday there will be a talk on the digitisation and preservation of documents in the digital era.
On the same day, in Guantánamo, they will inaugurate an exhibition of the Scientific Societies of the Medium Technician in Documentary Management, while in Artemisa they will award the student competition My school: its history in the archives.
On Saturday there will be a ceremony for the International Archives Day in José Martí Park in Ciego de Ávila, and on Sunday a workshop on Preserving the past, promoting the future, organised by the General Directorate of Education in Artemisa, while in the Oscar Mateo López Basic Secondary School in Santiago de Cuba, a circle of interest will be held.
The director of CITMA’s DGDA added that the remaining activities will be held in October in Camagüey and in November at the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba.
The event for the Day of the Cuban Archivist will be held on the third of the same month at the Fausto Theatre in Matanzas, in homage to Joaquín LLaveras Martínez, who on that same date in 1922 was appointed director of the island’s National Archive.
This event was celebrated for the first time in Cuba in 2009, not only in honour of Llaverías Martínez, who reached the rank of Captain of the Mambí Liberation Army in the war of independence in 1895, but also for the performance of several generations in this profession.
The National Archive of the Republic of Cuba is the fifth such centre created in Latin America, after Argentina (1821), Mexico (1823), Bolivia (1825) and Brazil (1838).
