This year, the International Poetry Festival of Havana promises to be a big event, with numerous activities, extensions to various spaces and more than 140 foreign poets from 30 countries have been confirmed, said Pierre Bernet in Guantanamo, founder and coordinator of the event.
This distinguished intellectual born in the Villa del Guaso, also vice president for the Americas of the Movement of Poets of the World, participates these days, along with other poets, in the Itinerant Poetry Festival, which started in his hometown and will travel the country to end at the Capital Festival, which every year calls for poetic action for peace in the world.
In an interview with the ACN Bernet pointed out that during these previous days for readings poems in all the provinces of the Island, there will be a special moment on May 19, when it will activate a song to honor the National Hero and exquisite poet José Martí, on the 123 thd anniversary of his fall for the independence of the Fatherland.
Another climax of the program will take place on the 29th, when the Festival starts in Havana with the Word of the World space, Basilica and the Monastery of San Francisco de Asis, from where the traditional simultaneous poetic readings summoned throughout the globe and read some of the most important poets that come to Cuba to participate in the event.
Pierre Bernet stressed that this year the event will be dedicated to oral tradition in Cuban culture, popular poetry and the décima (ten-line stanza), declared a World Intangible Heritage, and among foreign guests are the presidents of the Society of Writers of Pakistan and Slovenia, and about twenty American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize, Rita Dove.
The Peruvian Hildebrando Pérez, Casa de las Américas Prize, will be another of the relevant writers who will participate, who in one of the activities, together with the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar, will honor the coming centenary of the publication of Los Heraldos Negros, by César Vallejo, considered one of the greatest innovators of the poetry of the twentieth century.
The International Poetry Festival of Havana -sayed its coordinator- will be extended to 80 classrooms of some 30 Havana schools, also at the 10 classrooms museums of the Historian's Office, cultural centers, community projects of several municipalities and other diverse sites, even scientific institutions such as the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology.
This is the most sustained Cuban poetic festivity, founded in the capital 22 years ago, that is worthy to praise the value of the words, of poetry and culture as an instrument and universal action for peace and other just causes, such as the safeguarding of environment.
Translation: Liubis Balart