|
|
|
C
U B A |
Havana.
August 20, 2010 |
|
|
|
Celebrating the bicentenary in
colonial Havana
• Ten years of
the Routes and Walks Project
Mireya
Castañeda
TEN summers ago, Routes and Walks to
Discover as Families was born, organized by the City
Historian’s Office within the national heritage
environment of colonial Havana.
The program includes visits to
museums, first hand information about the process of
restoration of the Cuban capital’s historic quarter,
and a wide selection of cultural activities.
Its fundamental premise: to interact
with families in the public sphere.
Last year, 57 museums and cultural
centers attached to the City Historian’s Office
received a total of 13,155 visitors thanks to Routes
and Walks.
Precisely this interconnection with
families was recognized by the Ibero-Museums
Program in the first edition of its Ibero-American
Education and Museums Prize, a competition that
recognizes and identifies educational practices
which promote personal development and social
cohesion.
The first prize went to a Ministry
of Education initiative in the City Government of
Buenos Aires and the National University of Luján;
the second to the program Identity, Culture and
Memory of the Museum of the Word and Image; and the
third to Routes and Walks to Discover as Families
from the City Historian’s Office.
The Cuban entry responded to an
outline of the project, including a
theoretical-methodological analysis of the
communication strategy and an audience study by
Katia Cárdenas, Lilibeth Bermúdez and Ailec Vega.
WONDERS OF THE OLD CITY
For this
anniversary summer, the most requested Routes… are
to be repeated, among them: Memory
(Government Palace, the 9 de Abril Armory, the Juan
Gualberto Gómez Casa, the Numismatic Museum, José
Martí’s birthplace); Science (the Havana
Pharmacy Museum, the Alejandro de Humboldt Casa, the
Aquarium, the Taquechel Pharmacy and the National
Museum of Natural History); Decorative Arts (Casa
Lombillo, the City Museum, the Gold and Silver
Craftsmanship, Cuban Contemporary Ceramics Museums,
the sacred gold and silver workmanship rooms in the
San Francisco de Asís Convent); or Discoveries (the
Mural Paintings and Archeology Museums, the
Castillo de La Fuerza Real).
For their part, the Walks are tours
designed on the basis of participant requests and
include: from universal to contemporary art; the
restoration of Old Havana; the libraries of the City
Historian’s Office; hygiene and the healing arts in
colonial Havana; archeology in the historic quarter;
international cooperation projects and the Havana of
Cecilia Valdés.
The International Year for
the Rapprochement of Cultures established by
the UN prompted the Walk through Presences that have
left their imprint on the city. From the Plaza de
Armas, it takes families via the African presence;
the Chinese presence (with a stop at the
Dragones Street Portico); the Franco-Belgian
presence (in the Wallonia shop window and the
Victor Hugo Casa); the German presence (the Humboldt
Casa); the Catalan presence (a stop in the
Bacardí Building on Monserrate Street); and
the Arab presence (in the Arab Casa on
Oficios Street).
The Culture Walk emphasizes
Latin America on the occasion of the Bicentenary of
Independence, without forgetting Cuban culture. For
example: the Cinematógrafo Lumière Theater is
showing the documentary Ya era otoño en París,
accompanied by a visit to the Wifredo Lam
Contemporary Arts Center and La Dominica Restaurant;
Zoila Lapique Becali, Cuban colonial music
researcher offers an approach to the habanera
musical genre, which closes with the Habaneras en mi
Habana concert, presented by the group Voces
de Ultramar.
The Colombia Bicentenary has brought
to Havana a presentation by Los Niños Vallenatos
group, under the general direction of Andrés
"El Turco" Gil Torres, at the Basilica of San
Francisco de Asís, and the Numismatic Museum is
mounting a Colombia and its culture in Numismatics
exhibition, comprising coins and paper money
reflecting its culture and history.
SPECIAL BICENTENNIAL OF AMERICAN
INDEPENDENCE ROUTE
A very special Route is among
this summer’s options in celebration of the
Bicentenary of American Independence. The program is
run by the Hispanic-American Culture Center and
every week will be dedicated to one of the countries
with a display of publications on the history,
literature and culture of the corresponding nation.
Presentations will include conferences, exhibitions,
film shows, and concerts by artists from Mexico,
Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and
Chile.
Participants have already enjoyed a
concert by the Orquestas Juveniles de Guitarras
of the Mexican Institutes of Chihuahua and
Puebla, directed by Maestro Boris Díaz; the
Colombian film Bolívar soy yo, from director
Jorge Alí Triana; and an educational concert by
the Camerata Vocale Sine Nomine conducted by
Leonor Suárez, with sacred and secular music of
colonial America.
On display in the lovely exhibition
hall of the Hispanic-American Center is
Macondo visto por Leo Matiz, which includes 50
images taken by this Colombian photographer,
considered one of the most outstanding of the 20th
Century (Aracataca, 1917-1998), who is known by
international critics as the "guardian of the
shadow" of Latin American photography, for the
unique contrast of light and shadow which he
achieves in his work.
In itself, the Hispanic-American
Culture Center could be included in one of
the Routes and Walks, because its headquarters is a
majestic and emblematic palace on the Malecón known
as Casa de las Cariátides for its unique columns on
the balcony of its main facade topped by women’s
faces instead of capitals.
For the Bicentenary Route
which we are proposing from these pages, the first
stop has to be the Casa del Benemérito de las
Américas Benito Juárez, which is an old restored
mansion on Obra Pia Street, inaugurated on November
1, 1988.
The Casa Juárez has a permanent
exhibition room with a display of Mexican ceramics
and a small exhibition of pre-Columbian art; the
Alfonso Reyes Library; and, particularly, a teaching
museum, one of the social programs directed at
different community groups living in the historic
quarter of the capital, in this case children, for
whom they have created a distinct environment, quiet
and beautiful, which inspires discipline and
respect.
After crossing the hallway of the
Casa Juárez, you come across the outstanding 1982
mural of the Traición y muerte de Zapata by the
artist Arnold Belkin, which won the Grand Prize in
the 1st Havana Visual Arts in 1984.
A few steps away on Mercaderes
Street is the Simón Bolívar Casa-Museum which opened
its doors on July 24, 1993, the anniversary of the
birth of the Liberator. It is located in an ancient
palace built between 1806 and 1817, whose principal
residents included the Marquises of Aguas Claras and
the Counts of Villanueva, who sold it to the U.S.
born Santiago Burnham. Then it was destroyed in a
fire in 1881. One curious detail is the rose window
at the end of the upstairs hallway with the initials
of the owner Santiago Burnham, Simón Bolívar, but
also, by coincidence, those of the new center.
Casa Bolívar has its own
library, the Simón Rodríguez, after the
Liberator’s teacher; a Contemporary
Venezuelan Arts Collection; the Bolívar Humanado
display by Venezuelan ceramicist Glenda Mendoza,
composed of 35 pieces or scenes created with
multi-colored clay, recounting the life of the
Liberator with great originality and charm and from
a very human perspective; the Iconographic
Collection of the Oldest Portraits of the Liberator,
made up of 41 photographs taken by Venezuelan
Feller Valois from original portraits of the
Liberator by countless artists throughout his life;
and the Manuela Sáenz Room, a place of
evocation, whose most important two pieces
especially made by the artists for this room: a
charcoal drawing of Manuela by Azalea Quiñónez, and
a bust of the heroine sculpted by Cuban ceramicist
Carlos Planas.
The final stop on this Route
would be at the Oswaldo Guayasamín Casa-
Museum at No. 111, Obra Pía Street. It is nothing
less than the old Havana studio of the great
Ecuadorian painter. It was inaugurated on January
18, 1992, due to the efforts of the painter himself
and the City Historian’s Office.
Its restoration brought back the
splendor of a mansion built in the 18th century for
the Peñalver family, and in the process discovered
mural paintings whose archeological wealth
constitutes a treasure of Cuban colonial
architecture.
The Casa Guayasamín has three
permanent exhibition rooms where personal items and
original work donated by the artist are on display.
But this 2010, new treasures have been added to
the already rich heritage, with the opening on the
second floor of another permanent exhibition of
works by the eminent painter, among which portraits
of the maximum leaders of the Cuban Revolution,
Fidel and Raúl Castro, stand out.
The Hands of Fidel, painted in 1996,
is very well known and was the last of four
paintings of the Cuban leader that Guayasamín did in
his life, but the one of Raúl, signed November 25,
1986, has not been shown as much and is a
masterpiece of the Ecuadorian master. The painting
shows only the face, to which Guayasamín gave
the indigenous features so characteristic of his
artistic style, and was created in sepia and terra
cotta tones, the distinctive colors of the original
peoples of Our America.
Also now on display is the
emblematic Niña azul, a painting given by the
painter to Fidel in 1993 with the aim that its
marketing could help to provide school supplies for
Cuban children during the so-called Special Period.
To the above is added the Cuba
paints Guayasamín display of portraits of the great
artist created to celebrate the 91st birthday of the
universal Ecuadorian by 26 contemporary Cuban
painters, among them Ernesto García Peña, Eduardo
Roca (Choco), Dagoberto Jaquinet, Jesús Lara, Kamyl
Bullaudy, José Fúster, Roberto Fabelo and Nelson
Domínguez.
Another of the great surprises of
the exhibition is an Agustín Bejarano recreation of
the first portrait of Fidel painted by Guayasamín,
currently missing, and of which only photographs
remain.
Colonial Havana, a World Heritage
site is being rediscovered by families thanks to the
Routes and Walks project which, on its 10th
anniversary, pays tribute to the Bicentenary of
American Independence.
|
|
|
|
|
