Culture

The Cafe Cantante located at the Teatro Nacional is a night club offering live presentations of the most popular Cuban bands and soloists of the moment. Located in the basement of the theater, the locale is air conditioned and has a bar and tables around the small stage. There is also a dance floor for the public.

The 21st Havana International Ballet Festival opened Tuesday and runs through November 6. The event, considered one of the world’s most prestigious dance festivals, takes place every other year and brings together many of the top Cuban and foreign ballet dancers.

The 2008 Guillermo Barreto in Memoria Drum Festival gets underway in Havana on Tuesday, October 21, taking place at several theaters and cultural venues in the capital through Saturday.

Soloists from the National Lyrical Theater will perform selections from Mozart’s Magic Flute opera on Thursday October 23, 7 pm. at the Oratorio San Felipe Neri building located on the corner of Aguiar and Obraria in Old Havana.

An exposition of photographs of Alicia Alonso, director of the Cuban National Ballet, and one of the greatest dancers of all time, opened recently at the Hotel Inglaterra, located on the corner of Prado and San Rafael Streets in the heart of the Cuban capital.The show titled Simplemente Alicia consists of 20 photographs -many unpublished- by photographer and visual artist Jorge Valiente,

“Cuba y el Mar” (Cuba and the sea), is an anthological exposition of painters from the 19th century to the present. It recreates the sea in different moments in the history of visual arts with different interpretations of the ocean’s immensity.

If you visit the Maqueta de la Habana, a giant scale model of Havana city, take the time to check out the “Natural Seduction” photo exposition in one of its halls. The solo showing by physician Elier de Hombre has as a central concept the relation and subtle seductions that are established between animals, plants and other inanimate elements of nature, and which to a large extent seeks to remind us of our own relationship with other human beings. The photographs are in a small format, with impressive use of color, illumination, concepts and angles.