Mesoamerican exchange of living cultures in Matanzas.

From June 28th to July 4th, the III Mesoamerican and Caribbean Congress will be held in Cuba, with headquarters in Matanzas, with the participation of delegates from about twelve countries with diverse experiences on living community cultures.

The participants will go through several of the circles chosen to exchange and confront on numerous topics ranging from Art as Social transformation; Raciality, religion, identity and traditions; History, tradition. Material and immaterial heritage; childhood, adolescence and youth; communication, virtual work and media; popular education and community artistic creation; and gender, diversity, women’s empowerment.

According to the organizers, led by María Eugenia Romero, spokesperson for Cuba in the Community Living Cultures Movement, the event will have the «bridge as a structure that helps us move from one place to another in our city of waters, but at the same time, it means embrace, help, collaboration, facilitation. (…) Cuba is a bridge of living community cultures», which covers each of the regions of the nation, east, center and west, represented with ten of these work experiences in urban and rural communities, which integrate the various facets that each circle will put on the table of opinions.

Debates, but also samples of socio-cultural experiences, of work with adults and with children and young people in urban and rural spaces; artistic and literary presentations, in which music, audiovisual and theater predominate; and visits to some of the projects such as Maravillas de la Infancia, Afroatenas, Galería Corazones, Castillo San Severino, La Marina, constituency 78 of the Peñas Altas Popular Council or Corazón Guamacaro Km 9, in Limonar.

These projects, together with the Pharmaceutical Museum, the Curator’s Office and the Casa de la Memoria Escénica will be some of the venues of the circles, while the Sauto Theater (MN), the White Room or the Canimao Hotel will host several of the spaces programmed for artistic activities or debates on future issues and strategies.

What can be expected from an event of this kind in Matanzas and how does it differ from others?

The experience of the recently concluded Contest of Local Initiatives of the Western Region, held last May 25 and 26 in Matanzas, with ten finalist experiences and an equal number of participants, showed the interest, the vocation of natural leaders, to contribute in different ways with the most disadvantaged communities of Cuban society.

Topics such as race; the environment; the rescue of customs, traditions and histories; the rural universe; internal migrations, which transform the identity map of several spaces and put them in dialogue; the inquiry into other cultures, such as the Japanese, for example; artistic creation, the dilemma of the elderly, but also of children, adolescents (the great forgotten ones) and young people, converged during two intense days of work, debate, analysis of results and also of the most representative obstacles.

The event of living cultures in Matanzas somehow brings us back to what happened with many of the Cuban participants in the 5th Congress of Community Living Cultures, held in October 2022 in Peru, and the possibility of reunion, of getting to know again the universes of work, with very different cultural policies, not only in each country, but in the regions and communities of those countries.

What do we learn? To dialogue, to understand, to be plural in the conceptions of each one, but also of the richness of the cultural fabric of Latin America and the entrails of our origins. In Peru, with the Andes in the background, strategies were woven, which in some way will be confronted in Matanzas in a new space, crossed by rivers, linked by iron and concrete bridges.

Everything will be under discussion: the intense controversies blessed by the ancestral wisdom of our peoples, the living essences of our neighborhoods, villages or old farms trying to survive, the spaces of the old sugar mills, the vestige of our indigenous, black or men of the countryside and the cities that live in our countries, with their pains and hopes.

But also immersed in the debate will be the performances, for example, among many others, of the Colombian groups Tambora Guache and accordion and Politriarte; the Banda Alientos Infantil Juvenil, from Mexico, which will integrate to its show on Saturday 1st, The Cuban children from the Maravillas de la Infancia and Escuela Vocacional de Arte projects will perform a repertoire of Mexican and Cuban pieces at the Teatro Sauto (MN), and the Atenas Brass Ensemble will also perform; while Teatro Comunitario 451 Colectivo Sanidad from La Plata, Argentina, will accompany us.

Matanzas will be a hotbed of living cultures from the 28th to the 4th.

Written by Ulises Rodríguez Febles.