The 38th Festival del Caribe is attracting more than 700 artists and intellectuals from 26 countries, held from July 3 to 9 in the city of Santiago de Cuba, with Puerto Rico as the guest of honor.
Last Sunday, during the press launch of the event, Orlando Vergés, director of the House of the Caribbean, highlighted the Puerto Rican presence, which will be felt with a delegation of almost 300 people, including notable visual artists, musicians, craftsmen, filmmakers, poets and academics.
The call to the festival has been made from solidarity, said Vergés, while underlining the work done in this regard by the Committee of Solidarity with Cuba in Puerto Rico, chaired by Milagros Rivera and that, in an extraordinary way, contributed to swell the representation Boricua to the festival, also called Fiesta del Fuego.
Rivera meant the revelry as a space of cultural resistance, and from which the participating Puerto Ricans, with the maximum effort, will put their country in the place it has in the Caribbean.
As is traditional, various manifestations of folk art will converge in the meeting that, in 38 years of being celebrated uninterruptedly, will for the first time exceed the limits of the city of Santiago and will reach the municipalities of the Second Front and the Third Front, according to Daniela. Anaya, deputy director of Casa del Caribe.
Anaya highlighted the presence of the plastic arts in the great celebration, in which there will be more than 30 scenarios to enjoy that cultural aspect, and of the hand of prestigious creators, among them the santiagueros Alberto Lescay Merencio and Eduardo Roca Salazar (Choco), National Prize of Plastic Arts 2017.
As a preamble to the press launch, the typical borinqueño rhythm of the bomba was heard, interpreted by the Tambuyé group, which will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the festival, and to which other musicians of music in Puerto Rico will be added as the famous salsa artist Andy Montañez, who will perform on Sunday the 8th at the Heredia Cultural Complex.
The usual theoretical space and book displays such as ‘El Caribe, between being and defining’, by Joel James (1942-2006), founding director of Casa del Caribe and architect of the Fiesta del Fuego, are among the attractions of the nearby event, in which after the one in Puerto Rico, the largest delegations will be those of Argentina, Venezuela and the United States.
Inaugurated in April 1981, the meeting, as well as a cultural event, constitutes a space for antihegemonic reflection and resistance.