Festival of the Caribbean in Santiago de Cuba (Version al español disponible)

By Amauris Betancourt.

amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

The Festival of the Caribbean makes temperature go up more than usually in Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo where cultural complicity merges to welcome artists from all over the area.

Santiago de Cuba, for 28 years in a row now, plays host, together with Cuba’s easternmost province of Guantanamo, to the outstanding and peculiar cultural diversity from the Caribbean countries in a Festival to honor one of its members by dedicating the yearly celebration. Mexican states off the Caribbean's coasts are paid homage this time: Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Campeche Wood, Tabasco, Quintana Roo and Yucatán.

“The Caribbean People’s Cultures, defended and enhanced by the Festival, are, according to late Joel James (founding Director of the Festival), the spirit's area, where sovereignty of nations settles down.” said Orlando Vergés, director of the House of the Caribbean in the inauguration ceremony.

The Snake's Parade is named after the cult to this animal within ritual voodoo practice of religion.

Internacional Congress on Peopl's Cultures .

The Monument to the Cimarron, by artists Alberto Lescay, seems to raise the slaves’ decision to achieve freedom.

El Cobre town yields tribute to slave’s rebelliousness, a tradition rooted in our national culture itself.

The ballet company from Santiago set the difference off.

Next edition of the also known as the Fire Party will be dedicated the people’s cultures from Honduras

Cuban and Mexican Trova music united in Eliades Ochoa and Mexican singers.


A Guateque campesino is a party where traditional music is danced and creole food is eaten.

Photo Awards Granted in Eastern Cuba’s Province of Holguin (Versión al español)

By Leandro Estupiñán
leandro@ahora.cu

The seventh Provincial Photography Exhibit got inaugurated last July 15 on revealing the prize-winning photographs at the Electa Arenal gallery, the only surviving space to the restorations in the Art Center.

The members of the jury –Frank Batista, Dagoberto Driggs and Ramón Legón- met previously to assess the aesthetic values of some 20 works in contest and agreed to acknowledge mentions to Maikel Domínguez Báster, Yunior Pérez González and Margarita Lores Montero's works.

Yolanda Rodríguez, photographer of the !Ahora! Weekly, won third prize with the series “When Little Armando Played to Be a Teacher”, a work standing for a photographic discourse without being afraid to let photography reveals itself as such, according to the members of the jury.

Kaloian Santos Cabrera, a young photojournalist, got the second award with another series: “A diverse world is also possible”. Santos's proposal stands out for his narrative condition and the use of light to get it as much real as possible to the world of a transvestite. Yet the fine photographic treatment in black and white in terms of a metaphor of the reality stuck up for Yoxi Velázquez to win the first place with “Juancito”.

First-place winning work.

The Oldest Barber in the World Lives in Eastern Cuba? (Version en español disponible).

By Amauris Betancourt.
amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

His steady hand holds up the scissors. His sight, 20x20, can not be better. He has never worn eyeglasses. Some neighbors have him help threading needles. The oldest active barber in business in Cuba; maybe in the whole world, but it is difficult to say.

He is 95, but keeps a desirable freshness worthy of envy by any young boy. A fine, witty sense of humor, part of Cuban idiosyncrasy, keeps him company. José Azze Yunes, alias Pepito, started as a barber in 1927. “Nowadays three months are enough to become a hairdresser.” – Pepito says– “I learn by watching after having been apprentice for 18 months at Alberto Garcia’s barber’s shop."

Pepito knows how to use the modern small hair-cutting machine; Present-day barbers prefer to avoid scissors. New styles are also different but I keep them the old way. His barber's shop at Peralejo 37 resembles a plateau for a XX century movie and is a meeting place for friends and passing-by neighbors who never miss a chance to pull his leg as a way of greeting. Pepito was born on March 19, 1913. Is he the oldest barber in the world? I hope these lines for the World Wide Web help us find it out.

Felix Arencibia: a Teacher for Life, a Very Close Friend (Versión en español disponible)

By Amauris Betancourt.
amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

The Cuban photographer Felix Arencibia’s death surprised the photo world in the Island. This chronicle was published on hearing from his death.

Felix Arencibia, our Arencibia, has left us physically. The news of his passing away could hardly be believed. The day before he was admitted in the hospital, he put me in touch solicitously with the photographer Roberto Salas from whom I needed a collaboration for La Luz, a cultural weekly from Holguin.

Arencibia was always so: openhanded, solicitous, affectionate and helpful to others as a friend; competent as a professional; engaging and contagious when it came to photography out of the love he had for the art and technique patented by the French Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre.

Holguin’s Photography Club, his closest colleagues, photoreporters all over Cuba, commercial photographers included, were deeply surprised to hear to news.

Desperate due to our distance from Havana, where he lived, we could only have him bought a funeral wreath as a symbol thanks to the brotherly friend Rufino del Valley. A formal gesture compared to the big, truly friendship Arencibia privileged us with.

His long and rich career turns a legacy of dedication and endeavor, an example to the Cuban photo press world. But more than that, he gave us his knowledge that never kept for himself. Always offering because it was better giving than receiving, he taught because he also learned thus.

Those who love photography found an oasis in Arencibia to please our thirst of knowledge; a converging nest at Jose Marti International Journalism Institute, a meeting place for inland photographers while visiting Havana.

Juan Miguel, Juan Pablo, Elder, Edgar, Kaloian, Roy González, Héctor Luis, the namesake Amauris, and other grateful people from Holguin, me included, will miss his friendship, his tireless way of speaking, his timing piece of advice, his everyday e-mails with the most updated news related with the world of photography, his invitations to workshops in Havana, the spaces and opportunities he put at our disposal.

The Jose Marti International Journalism Institute, and Havana, will have a different tinge without him. Felix left us physically. We, however, will bear him in mind and it will be difficult to get used to the habit of his departure, a surprised to him amid all those yearly workshops administer by him. His darkroom was our darkroom! Thanks Arencibia!

Felix Arencibia: Photography is not a Job; it is a Way of Life (Versión en español)

By Amauris Betancourt.

amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

This interview was originally published on knowing Felix Arencibia’s death in July 15, 2007 at http://www.lentecubano.blospot.com/, a blog to promote today’s Cuban photojournalism administered by a friend photographer, Rene Pérez Massola, who is at the head of a specialized photojournalist group from the Association of Cuban Journalist (UPEC in Spanish).

Felix Arencibia was an outstanding Cuban photojournalist and photography lecturer from the Jose Marti International Cuban Journalism Institute.

Published interview:
Felix Arencibia visited Holguin about two years ago to share his knowledge and photographic secrets of an almost forty-year career as a professional photoreporter who ended up as a photography teacher to almost all currently active photojournalist in Cuba. That is why many photographers from the Island and Latin America, me included, are thankful and truly heartfelt indebted to him.

A friendship came into being out of this visit, one of the many starting in the early 1960’s. It seems to me as if I had known him all my lifetime. He had a truly gift to make friends and win them over completely.

While on a visit to Holguin to teach a photography course to local photojournalist he agreed to an interview that went unpublished for two years. I aim, by giving it out, at paying due homage to Felix Arencibia who died in Havana at the age of 68.

How does Felix Arencibia begin photographing?

I believe one chooses a career out of love, even though sometimes you do other jobs for the sake of a change. I have been in touch with the photo world since I was a child. My mother loved to have me photographed then, as it certainly happened to other photographers. Thanks to José Marti’s mother, comparisons apart, who always worried about having Marti, as a child, photographed, we have an amazing iconography of Marti. Not coming to such an extreme my mother also liked to do the same thing and he kept all those pictures. Photography seems to come out of that family love. Not to forget I come from a peasant family. It was for peasants a means to keep the childhood innocence; those beautiful years when boys grow up that could be seen years later. So I really ran into photography thus, out of love when I was very young. I have been making pictures almost 40 years out of the 66 I am now and I am not tired of it at all.
Somebody asked me once if I was going to retire. I could get retired when I was 60 and I did not. Photography is not a job it is a way of life. One feels happy making photos if you really love it.

You stated you have been making pictures for almost forty years; do you still have your first frozen photogram?

Yes, I do; and I have been aware of improvement with time. Picture making has to do with visual appreciation, with practice and technique, a technique you have to master to perfection but somehow forget when shooting. You have to use it as a conditioned reflex. Experience and time added it to your sub-consciousness. The difference between an amateur and a professional is, in my opinion, that the former makes from time to time a good photo, but the latter is always forced to do something good and when he presses the shutter speed button, he knows right away what it is going to come out. You have developed your work in many fields and topics of photography during your long and highlighted professional work as a photoreporter and teacher.

Do you keep a preference for a particular field?

I care very much for portraits. I love making portraits of peasants, of ordinary people. I suggest photographing mornings and afternoons. The angle of the sun is very good and the subject can be moved around the sun, a source of fixed light with a good quality that adds a lightweight hot coloration. The noon light does not behave thus. Zenithal light is chaotic; its quality is bad and has a bluish color. Besides, the shades put in an unpleasant bagged-eyed effect. Light can be improved under other conditions but mornings and afternoons are the best hours. Some photographers get up even very early or they go to bed late to make good use of sunlight.

Photography and photographers intend to moralize, to bear witness, to hint, to teach, to philosophize. What does Felix Arencibia do?

Teaching; trying to get across to others this love for photography and that they devote themselves to teaching too. Roberto Rodriguez de Cal, who died some five years ago, was one of those good Cuban photography teachers. I believe that I have tried to follow his example and talked other young photographers, right here in Havana, into getting this love for teaching, because Marti said once that “climbing up hills make people brothers”, yet also stated that “photographers will people the world”. In fact, photographers’ number in Cuba is going up. Nowadays half the Cuban photographers are young. Old photographers have their own history but young people are making theirs their way, perhaps better.

Making pictures is a pleasure that enriches life "stated Jorgen Goomy. Do you share this statement?

Photography has saved many people. One of the best Cuban photographers owned a car business in the early years of the Revolution. When his business was nationalized, he went practically out of his mind. The psychiatrist asked him, what do you know to do? I make photos for a hobby. Devote yourself to photography. Taking pictures cured him. Photography helps you get rid of certain sorrows; it is a way of expression and a form of liberating everything, a series of impulses that one has inside.

You know a lot about Cuban photography. What do you think of its current situation?

There is such a boom in Cuban photography as never before. A great quantity of young women is making photos. Before and after the Triumph of the Revolution there were not many. They have a good quality. There is also a difference: older photographers, even the ones that have died, were self-taught and had a low cultural level; today they have a university level and that academic formation helps them learn the know-how faster, and can understand better the concepts of physics, of chemistry, of composition, that have to do with photography; Therefore, it is easier for a young man today to learn than to the one 60 years ago.

Digital photography is in fashion nowadays. Does it harms or favors? Does it block or open new creative roads? Does it replace the analogical?

It will, in the long run. It will happen as it did with long-play records replaced by cassettes and these eventually by CD. Analogical photography will stay there, but for professionals generally and for specific works. Today, a color film is worth three dollars; one in black and white is 6. That is, it is used by a few number of photographers. Development is inevitable. There are many factories that have reduced 75 percent of the production of analogical photography film elements. A few have kept it to send it to third-world countries.

What about you? Have you particularly yielded to digital photography?

I still use both because the former provides the basics, which is common to both. Digital photography is practically heir to all of the knowledge of the analogical world.

Does the new digital technology make anyone owning a digital camera into a photographer?

No, they take pictures; they do not make pictures. Photographer's concept is deeper. The photographer makes or creates photos. A professional photographer's image is creative, artistic, because the photographer puts in soul, feelings, philosophy, his way of looking at life, his mood inclusive.

What do you advise to beginning photographers?

Studying, studying and studying, besides sharing the knowledge with others without fear. The more they learn, the more we know.

From Inland in Havana ( Versión en español)

By Amauris Betancourt.
amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu


Havanna, capital of the country, is the most populated city all over Cuba. Thousands of people from all corners of the Island –or from inland as the call it down here: all Cuban provinces’ inhabitants but Havanna City’s- have settled down mainly in Old Havana where this photoreportage takes place. This massive settlement gave birth to Havanna’s solares, street’s inner inhabited spaces with a common one-way-out door.

Havanna’s solares –famous for the overpopulation in a very reduced area, the cultural melting pot, and the way of life of its dwellers- has a charm; but running alongside, as everybody wants to live in the capital, lots of problems come around, specially in the housing field.

The following photo-series was taken in Old Havana while on an AP-sponsored worshop last May where Cuban professional photojournalists got together to learn and share experiences lead by outstanding AP photojournalist and photo editors: Enric Marti (Chief photo-editor for Latin America and the Caribbean), Ricardo Mazalan (AP Photographer in Colombia), Javier Galeano (AP photographer in Cuba), and Dario López-Mill (AP photo-editor in Mexico).

To see the photo-stories from the other participants, visit:

http://web.mac.com/dariolopezmills/Site/AP_Latam_Photos.html

Opening Parade of Gibara’s Non-Budget Film Festival (Versión en español)

By Amauris Betancourt.
amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

The Cuban flag held by Bolivian students headed the Parade.

Gibara –a small, beatiful, sea city north of north-eastern province Holguin, 800 km from Havanna- houses every year the Non-Budget Film Festival. Held this current year from April 15 to 21, for the seventh time, it broke out with a crowded parade, where people and artists mixed throughout Independence street till the city’s central park, topped by a concert by Raul Paz.

Humberto Solas, the Festival’s director, welcomed participants and invitees. He also recalled the Festival’s engagement to foster low or non-budget film related productions taking into account a due aesthetic level.

The closing day was rewarded with a crowded concert by the Cuban acclaimed songwriter Carklos Varela.

Cuban film-makers paraded too.
Puppet Theater from Holguin.
Gibara’s dweller, candles in hand, flanked the parading street.
Solas, the Festival’s director, during inaugurating Speech. Fireworks during opening ceremony.
Raúl Paz in the inaugurating concert.