His name is not unknown in Cuba... as he has participated in for four festivals providing his art and unique way of dancing; not always in the ranks of his company, but also with Victor Ullate , or with Puerto Rico Concert Ballet. The charm of Havana and its people and ballet have bewitched the dancer Carlos Lopez since the first time he stepped Cuban soil. His love for dance began at eleven in the ranks of the school of the famed Spanish dancer Victor Ullate, along with other important figures in the dancing universe as Tamara Rojo, Joaquin de Luz, Lucia Lacarra, Igor Yebra, María Giménez, among others; until at the age of 15 he joined the company that bears the name of his teacher. International specialized critics saw in Carlos a portent of dance, showing physical strength and histrionics to assume various roles within the international and stylistic choreographic landscape. How was the change from school to the professional world ? "We never saw it as a professional level. We started at eleven and thanks to Victor the training was so strong that two years later we did galas around the country and Europe. The company was just...

I do not know that to say; during the first days of festival what I had seen up to the moment was great pain, raw and hard realism prepared with polemic situations, whether they were pure fiction or based on real facts. La película de Ana, the most recent release by Cuban Daniel Díaz Torres came to be kind of a encouragement sigh in the face of so much visual bleakness that up to the moment I had watched. I was not prepared to amuse myself so much, I must confess it.

We are just a few days away from the start of the 23rd Havana International Ballet Festival, the most important dance event, that this year marks its fiftieth anniversary. The first Festival was held back in the 1960s, when the National Ballet of Cuba, one of the largest dance companies of today’s world was still in its infancy.

What’s the classic figure of a dancer? Tall, svelte, well-built and confident. But, what to do when your body doesn’t meet the requirements? And, still, your soul demands to be dressed in tights, doing pliés, semipliés y arabesques. Thus you could summarize, though hastily and wrongly, what was happening in the heart of young Eduardo Blanco when, in the already distant 1991, while he was studying violin, he witnessed the rehearsal of prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso in his hometown Santiago de Cuba.

The top dancing event of our country already approaches... The 23rd International Ballet Festival of Havana is already around the corner and there is tension in the air and efforts all around the venue of Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC). The company directed by prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso presented in its last performance before the official opening of the celebration a varied program that included the different dancing styles they have in their repertoire: classicism, neo-romanticism and contemporary dancing.

Poetry contains a subtle spell that charms thousands, that transports them to another world where sadness and suffering disappear. But can you imagine what it would be like to combine poetry with music and turn it into a song?

Art has always served as a way to channel the concerns of people and irreverently show discontent with those failures that society may have. Theater has been one of the art manifestations more open to such forms of expression and these days one of the main theaters of Havana and the country hosts a piece that promises to shock more than one, and doesn’t think twice before saying truths no matter how raw they are.

As the title of a book on the dance by Cuban journalist and art critic José Luis Estrada Betancourt reads, the world will dance in Havana at the end of October and beginning of November when the curtains of the 23rd International Ballet Festival of Havana will be drawn.

One of the most dynamic and renewing companies of Cuban contemporary dance is back on the stage. Interesting about the work of DanzAbierta is their ability to blur the limits that may exist between the different styles of dancing and interpretation; to create bridges, to go from one state to another without being noisy or tedious. Their most recent performance took place a few months ago, exactly in March 2012, with the choreography Showroom of the authorship of master Susana Pous and music by X Alfonso.

The mixture seems simple to prepare: flour, eggs and sugar to create the classic dough that passes through a very peculiar artefact that squeezes it through a nozzle of a few centimeters in diameter, falling right into a small saucepan filled with hot cooking oil. That is the classic churro for us, that we inherited from our Spanish ancestors, those we used to buy at the entrance of the school when the bell rang, when we were going home after work, when we are craving for something sweet to avoid fainting by the intense and oppressive heat.

Fashion is an art as old as civilization itself. Humankind, since the dawn of times, has worried about how it would dress and look in the eyes of society. Rich people showed off their power and wealth through the flashiest of dress while the poor ones had to wear rags made of scraps of cloth.

The historical cannon shot at 9:00 p.m. announced from the Fortress of San Carlos de La Cabaña that it was time to start. The amphitheater of Habana Vieja’s historical center was lit and the animals took possession of it. I am not using metaphors nor was this a show of the national zoo. Since the last days of July 2012, the theater company that performs in this space of the city has been presenting El Rey León (The Lion King), directed by maestro Alfonso Menéndez and inspired in the Broadway classic.

One hundred years are now being celebrated of the great Ernesto Lecuona’s La comparsa, a unique piece in the music repertoire of our country. This extraordinarily Cuban composition creates the image of a carnival dance through its notes and the intensity of its rhythm and movement.

Countless are the names that Cuba has contributed to world culture. If it comes to music there is a person of unquestionable creative and interpretive value that can not go unmentioned: Manuel Saumell Robredo.

The Cuban National Ballet, directed by prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso, has got us used to receiving surprises of technical, good dancing taste on the stage. Their latest performance at the García Lorca Hall of Gran Teatro de La Habana was a fine display of talent and first class dramaturgical concepts.

Twenty years have gone by since a young woman named Haila María Mompié irrupted in the Cuban music scene. Following her participation in important popular Cuban music groups like Azúcar Negra and  Bamboleo, this charismatic singer started performing as a soloist, enjoying the favor of critics and the public. To celebrate her art career, Haila is preparing two unparalleled shows at the Karl Marx Theater of the Cuban capital on August 10 and 11.

Cuba is a musical island... Throughout our history there have been numberless representatives of this art genre that have become milestones of universal culture. Among them were families who dedicated their lives completely to this art, passing it from one generation to the next. Caturla, Vitier, Romeu, López Gavilán are only a few names of families whose art has manifested itself in different music genres.

The curtains of the García Lorca Hall of Gran Teatro de La Habana rise, and an experienced Alicia Alonso, ballerina of worldwide renown, irrupts on the stage embodying a seductive and sensual gypsy.