Just Issued in Cuba: Two Books on the African Legacy

• © DR

Two new books about the rich African heritage in Cuban society have just been published in Cuba by Editorial Adagio, with support from the National Council of Houses of Culture. The works will nurture the Cuban network of art schools.

Iconografía de africanos y descendientes en Cuba y Artesanía y religiosidad popular cubana: la diversidad de sus elementos (Iconography of people of African descent in Cuba and Cuban crafts and popular religion: the diversity of its visual elements), are the two new titles that add to the extensive production of its author on the subject, Dr. Jesus Guanche, from his investigative work in the Foundation Fernando Ortiz and as Coordinator of the Cuban National Committee for the Slave Route.

The first paper was motivated by the desire of the author to work with the creation of a documentary on the history, iconography and visual documentation (photographs, video, film and new technologies), about Africans and their descendants in Cuba, in order to assess and disseminate the iconographic significance for the knowledge of African heritage in the culture of Cuba, the Caribbean and America, as part of the activities of the Cuban Committee of the Slave Route.

The book on Cuban crafts and popular religion: the diversity of its visual elements, is a revised and expanded version, much more enlightened of a text published in 2000 by the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). For this work, the author was supported by the Guanabacoa Historical Museum and the House of Africa of the Office of the Historian of Havana where he had studied some of their rich collections.

Alongside these works, Dr. Guanche also published El cuerpo humano y sus símbolos (The human body and its symbols), on a subject of fundamental interest to many people who use their body as an instrument of communication, from the performing arts to non-verbal forms of communication that are patterned by the cultures and their codes.

• More information (in Spanish)
• The Slave Route in Latin America and the Carribean
  
  
  
  

• Source:UNESCO Amérique latine et Caraïbes
• 16-11-2010