Nicolas Guillen International Colloquium and Festival dedicated to Africa and the diaspora

Havana.- From March 22 to 24, music and poetry will be again intertwined in the Nicolas Guillen International Colloquium and Festival dedicated to Africa and the diaspora.

The event this year will be also devoted to 130th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Cuba, as part of the decade of the Afro -descendants, and to the 50th anniversary of the publication  of Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway), by  famous Cuban writer Miguel Barnet.

The event, organized by the Nicolás Guillén Foundation, will favor the exchange about the poet’s thought and work with a theoretical forum, poem readings, concerts and visual arts exhibits.

The Colloquium academic program will include conferences, debate panels and presentations and will be attended by relevant specialists in different disciplines like Keith Ellis, Jamaican-Canadian specialist in Guillen’s work, Doctors Reynaldo Sánchez Porro, Jesús Guanche and Ileana Sáenz and poet Waldo Leyva.

According to sources with the organizing committee some of the themes to debate will be: Guillén and the African diaspora; Ways of fight against discrimination and racism; On African origin religions; The African diaspora in Latin America Latina and the Caribbean, cultural and historic relations between Africa and Latin America, and Presence of the African diaspora in the Caribbean art and literature.

The inauguration of the Nicolas Guillen International Colloquium and Festival on March 22 will be in charge of famous researcher María del Carmen Barcia, National Social Sciences Award winner, who will offer the conference Memorias rotas, memorias construidas: la saga de los africanos en Cuba.

The Villena Room from the Association of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC), the Casa de Africa and the Faculty of Arts and Letters from the University of Havana will be some of the venues of the event while the artistic activities will take place at the Teatro Mella.

Source: RHC