Pope Francis warmly approached many of the over 300,000 people who gathered at the Revolution Square in Havana to attend mass on Sunday morning. “Despite the wounds they have suffered, the Cuban people keep their arms open to hope,” said the Pope in his sermon, which was broadcasted live on national television and radio stations. “We don’t serve ideologies, we serve people,” he said, adding that true greatness can only be attained putting oneself at the service of others. The people in attendance were not only there to see the highest representative of the Catholic Church, but also to show their respects to the man who played an essential role in the recent changes that have taken place on the island nation, namely, the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. “Thank you for visiting our country,” Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega told the Pope in his public address. “Thank you for sowing interest in our numb minds, too used to mediocrity. Thank you for these new winds of hope, and for supporting the process of reestablishment of relations with the United States. May your call on peace reach not only the highest political hierarchies in both countries, but also the...

The gray car will first come to Havana. The projection of a 1919 silent film - which tells the story of a band of thieves, serves as background to the live performances, to weave a range of intertexts that shaped one of the proposals of the Latin American and Caribbean Season Theatre which will take place from May 16 through the 25 in several Cuban cities. Inspired by the Japanese tradition benshi Theatre, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, brings to the insular space a Mexican production that has had more than 500 functions. Since its premiere in 2002, it has been presented in Japan, Germany, Egypt, Poland and Latin American countries. On these interstices between different artistic expressions and crosses (generic, geographic, aesthetic) the next edition of Theatrical May will focus, an event organized every two years by Casa de las Américas. Through the discursive polyphony and disassembled scaffolding structure and tradition are still moving the creative boundaries, often with the idea of questioning the political-social and of deepening into the construction of the imaginary environment of our continent. In this edition of the event, the Brazilian actor Narciso Telles takes two-person scene. The first-Potestad, authored by the Argentine Eduardo Pavlovsky-...

At present she is the "other view" of Cuban art that was born after 1960. Her paintings, assemblages and prints are a record of the cracks, the lights and shadows that accompanied a time vortex that did not escape her revealing and never apologetic gaze. As a teacher, she "taught to see" several generations of artists who found in Ñica an exceptional teacher. From the National School of Art Instructors and the National School of Art she formed creators like Tomas Sanchez and Flavio Garciandía. Her approach to popular art and community work in the Havana municipality of San Miguel del Padrón, during the 1970s, complete the uniqueness of an immense artist who returns to Cuban exhibition space. A woman was born 85 years ago in Havana who filled the canvas with the wounds of a difficult time, but also with the balm that humanizes social processes from vital impulses. So the gallery The kingdom of this world at the José Martí National Library exhibits 37 pieces of Antonia that reflect different moments in her artistic creation. The sample consists of inks, prints and assemblages from the Municipal Museum of San Miguel del Padrón, the Servando Cabrera Moreno Museum Library...

Ernan´s sacrilege began several decades ago. From his first years of training, while going over the work by the classics, he was always aware of whatever was happening outside the window. His love for popular music was born, perhaps, thanks to that quality of being aware of the surroundings though his fingers and his head were virtuously performing Chopin’s or Debussy´s pieces. During his initial training, led by his mother, he was also influenced by Miles Davis and Winston Kelly, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. On the other hand, he listened to Los Zafiros, the Cuban Modern Music Orchestra and professors Emiliano Salvador and Frank Emilio. Right in the middle of these aesthetics, Ernan learned to play with feelings to authentically create his own music. That’s the reason why, the CD/DVD Sacrilegio –recently presented at Abdala Studios, in Cuba—is some sort of autobiographic memory of an artist that doesn’t hide his interest in expanding jazz boundaries and reinvent the most academic art with the colors of the popular. “I always enjoyed playing around with music. My mother, who was a really good musician, used to yell at me: Ernan, focus and study for your tests, then you can concentrate on...

In the end the coronary artery devours all possible limits. Tomas Sanchez knows that, that’s why he goes irreversibly deep into everything there is. He digs universal shapes; he digs and wonders about shadows and colors because time best defines us in solitude or in love. He digs and crumples canvases or the camera; he digs in the eyes, in the paradise of the eyes, in the injustice of the eyes, in the singularity, in the chaotic beauty of the eyes, in its contingency, its display, in the revelation of its solitude. That’s just a game of illusions but it tries to poke a personal shape of truth. I warn you, you should not be amazed by the fact that the plastic work by artist Tomas Sanchez (1948) moves around different landscapes knitted from the inside. He returns to Cuba, after more than two decades without a personal exhibit in the island, with Notas al paso, a digital photographic sample in large scale, which takes over the halls of the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center in Havana. Right in front of us pieces are reborn, suggesting, inviting, questioning because the most transcendental occurs as spectators look at them,in sensibility, in...

There is a set of signs in vertical shapes, scorched wood and the disc of hidden light by the most universal Cuban sculptures. Beyond the window, his work gives off small fire columns. Memory also seems to have the head of a horse touring the halls, while he builds a mirror of sun with his hands. That’s the work of Agustin Cardenas (1927-2001). His work is obligatory reference in the international artistic scenario, mostly in European academies, yet he needs to establish new links with the Cuban audience. That need for recognition has motivated his Forms of Silence, an exhibit at the Wilfredo lam Contemporary Art Center, in Old Havana, until May. More than six decades after that exhibit that granted public recognition to a group called Los Once –of which he was a member—his pieces take over a space that is legitimately his given the singularity of his proposal that moves away from “tropicalized” Eros to define a nation full of movement, shades and depths; with a work that universalizes and doesn’t stop in front of local forms. About 20 marble, bronze and wood sculptures, as well as several sketches –an essential part of his creative process—make up the...

New York City, also known as “the big apple”, will host Havana Film Festival from April 3 through 11. This polyphonic city, which has held some of the most important cultural movements of all times, will exhibit 24 Cuban films as part of the 15th edition of Havana Film Festival. The film Conducta, produced by Ernesto Daranas – awarded with the Biznaga de Plata at Malaga’s Spanish Film Festival– will open this event, which aims at showing contemporary audiovisual works from Latin America and represents a window to take a look at the latest Cuban films. The project by the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba (AFLFC), an organization with no profit motives in mind in charge of creating intercultural links between Cuban and the US, has arranged the exhibit of 45 films from Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Venezuela, as an invitation to appreciate Latin American culture in the cradle of Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. The sample includes films such as Esther en alguna parte (2013), by Gerardo Chijona; Melaza (2012), by Carlos Lechuga, and Se vende (2012), by Jorge Perugorría, which have been enrolled in the official...

We have to save the ship, trova singer Frank Delgado says with the title of his new album in production SOS (save our ship) and I’m sure that his songs convey an alert on Cuba’s complex and sharp reality today. That ship can represent a song, a philosophy for life, a paradigm, a dream, a country. The author of Trovatur, Veterano and Las dos orillas brings a new album with a chronicle he has been working on for years, based on a musical tradition that reminds us of Miguel Matamoros or Sindo Garay and that constitutes an undeniable memoire for the Cuba of the last decades. SOS: the choir goes… SOS is the provisional title for the album. I’ve already recorded a few songs with Kelvis Ochoa, Buena Fe, Pancho Cépedes and Ray Fernández. I will also include a version of the song Orden del Dia with Isaac Delgado. On March 25, at 8:30 p.m., I will share some of these songs at the Mella Theatre, in Havana. I always try to make a concert per year so that the audience can tell me if I’m still on the right track, where I standand if they are still interested in...

From his second journey to Africa Ernest Hemingway brought with him a lesser kudu skin. He would write barefooted on it, in his room at the Vigia farm, as a token of good luck. It is impossible to know for sure how that antelope skin may have had a bearing on his luck, but there it remains, lurking around curious visitors, apprentices, museum researchers, storytellers, and myths. It is also impossible to know if some of the participants at the signing of the First Cooperation Agreement between a group of US activists –Vigia Foundation- and the Cuban National Heritage Council on November 2002 had previously walked over the animal’s tanned skin. It was a very complex context between both nations and to think that a cooperation agreement invited many pessimists. The truth is that day Hemingway’s luck began to change; the luck of a Hemingway spread among Balzac and Benito Pérez-Galdós books, epistles, spiritual jazz records and classic music or numerous hunting trophies; a Hemingway of multiple forms, human, magical and brutal. James McGovern doesn’t look like Ernest, or any of his trophies. McGovern is a democrat congressman from Massachusetts. James one day took the challenge. He arrived for the...