The relationship of man and nature, the lack of communication of people, especially women, the emotional relation with certain pets assumed as a palliative in the face of solitude, are the principal concerns of this artist who, in the opinion of the critic David Mateo, shows “a picture of free, instinctive, steady and sure strokes, which in spite of being based on the suppression of the superfluous, on the expressionist synthesis, she negotiates, quite naturally, the idyllic impressions of over-dimensioning, hyperbole.”

Exhibition by artist Ronal Espinosa, who assets the right of converting amply, proportioned figures into a beauty standard, relating his images with the glorious rotund women of Rubens or Botero.

The painter, draughtsman, ceramist, photographer, graphic designer and metal-worker Salvador Corratge, forerunner in Cuba of geometric abstraction and founder of the group Diez Pintores Concretos. Corratge, who celebrated his 80th anniversary last November, proves with this exhibition that he is still in the front line of Cuban art.

The artist Juan Arel Ruiz Contino, from the province of Matanzas, who exhibited for the first time in the prestigious La Acacia Gallery last year, returns with a new show that delves into the world of the city, exploring the interrelationship between man and the environment, marked by the coexistence of realism and abstraction.

The Brazilian artist Fernanda Vargas has drawn inspiration from the song El escaramujo by famous Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, to express her view of the relationship among human beings, among people and Nature or the every-day evolution of life in works that combine the traditional art of batik with other visual art techniques.

Dedicated to the 85th birthday of the late Cuban painter Servando Cabrera Moreno, the exhibition will assemble for the first time pieces from both the Cuban and the universal art collections of the National Art Museum, under the theme of eroticism. A program of collaborative activities with the National Sex Education Centre will be developed in parallel with the exhibition:

From the collections of the National and Topes de Collantes Museums, as well from the artist’s personal collection, paintings and sculptures by Ever Fonseca, who, according to the critic and curator Toni Pinera, “throughout the years, [Ever] has captured the personality of the beings who populate his creations…He is a painter who metamorphoses life, remembers, lives and creates. His work is the journey of the Cuban people; it is a poetic dialogue between man and vegetation.”

As part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Casa de las Americas, this institution has organized an exhibition of works from its valuable collection Art of the Americas.

The artist Eria Arrate has incorporated forms which are present in Nature to the codes of optic art in the works of this exhibition.

Personal exhibition by Jose Manuel Fors, one of the participating artists of Volumen I (1981), an exhibition that has become almost mythical within Cuban art. The experienced curator Corina Matamoros has defined the artist as “a creator of an enigmatic stance in art. Renowned as a photographer, he works with volumes. Appreciated for his pictures of the past, he talks to the present/future with premonitory overtones. Explicit in his figurations, he is dominated by abstraction. Described as bucolic, his perspective functions from the intellectual discernment.”

The renowned Cuban caricaturist Francisco Blanco (Blanquito) pays a tribute to the Caballero de Paris–the Gentleman of Paris–a legendary figure who for decades walked the streets of Havana, strikingly dressed and saying that he was a Spanish noble. The sculptor Jose Villa immortalized the Caballero in the sculpture that stands at the entrance of the Convento de San Francisco de Asis.

A panorama of the development of ceramic art in Cuba through works from collections in storage. The works of Amelia Pelaez, Mirta Garcia Buch, Jose Miguel Gonzalez and Juan Miguel Rodriguez de la Cruz, among other leading ceramists, may be seen in the area dedicated to the founders of the Santiago de las Vegas workshop, where during the 1950s, these and other artists decorated ceramic vessels. Another area has gathered works of a sculptural nature by artists such as Alfredo Sosabravo, Julia Gonzalez and Fernando Velazquez Vigil, as well as vessels made by Reinaldo Calvo, who is faithful to the tradition of making shaped containers. The third area of the exhibition includes pieces that highlight the three-dimensional character, in which the Terracota IV group stands out. And finally, a selection of pieces made by outstanding young artists and large-scale installations by Sergio Raffo, Carlos Enrique Prado, Ioan Carratala and Gilberto Gutierrez.

Discussion of topics dealing with visual art, conducted by the critic Rufo Caballero.

The travelling exhibition organized by the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a reflection of contemporary Colombia: faces, urban and rural landscapes populate 40 beautiful colour pictures by press photographer Francisco Carraza, winner of the National Grand Prix of Press Photography and the National Journalism Award of his country.

Opened on the occasion of the recently-held Havana International Festival of Latin American Cinema, the exhibition gathers film posters and wardrobes by renowned designers (Maria Elena Molinet, Diana Fernandez, Piedad Subirat and Erick Grass, among others) made for Cuban films, such as Cartas del parque, Lucia, La bella del Alhambra, Patakin, Bailando chachacha, Fangio, La edad de la peseta, El Benny and Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas.

The artist Diego Torres exhibits paintings in which landscape art acquires a present-day dimension, alien to the agreeable copy of Nature, and as noted by the critic Piter Ortega, “he speaks of the anxiety of telos, of the inevitable divorce between myth and reality, between mockery and experience. He tells us that utopia is fragile, frangible, that inertia is usually stronger than will. Where homes are inhospitable, uninhabited; when doors and windows turn their back on the world, escaping seems to be the only way out. Flight. Abandonment.”

Composed of Cuban landscape artists of different generations and aesthetic inclinations, the Nuevos Horizontes group, founded in May 2008, exhibits their most recent work. In the words of the curator Daineris Pena, “Defined by themselves as ecologist painters, their pieces go beyond mere contemplation…making a call to defend our habitat and their ecosystems...and warning us of the threat to the environment.”

According to Manuel Crespo, curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, in Molano’s pastels “his preference for Cuban late 19th, early 20th-century eclectic architecture is evident....In his paintings, the viewer may find the visual beauty of composition, colour, light....But it is in the surface where perhaps the greater values lie. The coexistence of multicoloured layers shows the artist’s taste for visual textures...They are live, although battered, buildings, which evidence the intervention of its inhabitants, who modify, adapt and also attack their appearance. The absence of the human figure...is completely justified. The artist is reflecting a way of life through the face of its abode...”

Opening of an exhibition by three of the most important photographers in Cuba today: Liborio Noval, Julio Larramendi and Roberto Salas, and launching of Las primeras villas de Cuba [The first cities in Cuba], a book written by Alicia Garcia Santana, an expert on Cuban colonial architecture.

Initiated in Havana in 1960 to draw attention to the most significant literary production in Latin America—and at a later date, also the Caribbean—in the genres of poetry, novel, short story, essay, theatre and testimony, as well as works in other languages spoken in the region, the Casa de las Americas Literary Award has gathered outstanding figures of contemporary writing, including Miguel Angel Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, Allen Ginsberg, Nicolas Guillen, Nicanor Parra, Jaime Sabines, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Eduardo Galeano, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Jose Lezama Lima, Italo Calvino, Camilo Jose Cela, Jose Saramago, to name a few. Throughout the years, many of the prize-winning works have become classics of the continent’s literature; thus, each year’s announcement creates great expectations among the public, who also have the opportunity to attend collateral activities programmed during the event.

This is an annual festival of early music, which has been celebrated since 2003 on occasion of the 200th anniversary of the death of Cuban musician Esteban Salas. Every year the event gathers outstanding performers of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music who perform in Old Havana headed by the Ars Longa Music Ensemble. Throughout the years, the festival has grown and added new venues to the two original ones, the Basilica Menor del Convento de San Francisco de Asis and the Iglesia de Paula: the Oratorio San Felipe Neri, the Centro Hispano-Americano de Cultura and the Palacio de Gobierno.

One of Havana’s most famous music events, the Jazz Festival is a display of the link between Cuban rhythm and jazz, which goes back to the late 19th century when newly freed slaves immigrated to New Orleans. Started in 1979 pretty much as a local event at the Casa de la Cultura de Plaza, the festival has grown in size and scope with venues that include several large theatres and nightclubs. International stars such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Haden, Steve Coleman, Michel Legrand, Ivan Lins and Ronnie Scott are just a few names in the list of past participants, who, together with Cubans Chucho Valdes, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Bobby Carcasses and Ernan Lopez-Nussa, to mention just a few, attract fans from all over the world.

What began as a modest book fair founded by the famous Cuban writer, scientist and philosopher, Alejo Carpentier, eventually became the most important literary event on the island. Every year tens of thousands of people pack the San Carlos de la Cabana Fortress in Havana, attracted by book launchings of all genres and topics from Cuban and foreign publishing houses, along with panel discussions, poetry readings, concerts, children’s events, and a crafts fair. After Havana, the fair travels to another 40 Cuban cities. The 18th International Book Fair will be dedicated to the poetess and essayist Fina Garcia Marruz and the historian Jorge Ibarra, with Chile as the country guest of honour.

The Itinerant Film Festival of Caribbean Cinema will present a series of English-, French- and Spanish-speaking fiction, documentary and animated films. The Festival seeks to preserve the Caribbean audiovisual memory as well as to make known films that thanks to their aesthetic values express the cultural identity of the region.

In its 16th edition, the colloquium will discuss an increasing topical subject seen from different perspectives and approaches: gender, territoriality, space: private and public; urban and rural; civilization and nature; urbanism and architecture in women.

An opportunity to become acquainted with the most recent production of young Cuban filmmakers.