Cubans celebrate Chinese culture in Havana

Dragon dances on the streets of Chinatown along with other celebrations, have become annual events in Havana to mark the Chinese Lunar New Year. Cuba once had the largest Chinese population in the Americas outside of San Francisco, California. Very few remain today, but Chinese culture still exerts a strong and visible influence on this Caribbean island.
Early every morning – in parks all over Havana – Cubans gather to practice the Chinese so-called "soft" martial art, T'ai Chi. Many doctors here recommend it to their elderly patients.
Various forms of traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture are also widely available from the Cuban National health service.
Another popular pastime is Wushu or Kung Fu. Cuba's links to China go back to the middle of the nineteenth century when the first boatload of immigrants landed here in 1847.
Historian Theresa Maria Li is a director of the Chinese Cultural Center in Havana.
"This was a time when the battle was on to end the slave trade and the option was to bring in Chinese peasants. They arrived in massive numbers and were assigned to work in the sugar plantations as well as the tobacco and coffee fields." Theresa Maria Li, Cuban Chinese Historian said.
Around 130 thousand Chinese were shipped here to work as indentured labor in the fields-and they were often treated as badly as the slaves.
There are still Chinatowns in Havana and several other Cuban cities-and some of their clubs and societies have managed to survive. But these were mainly developed by later immigrants who arrived in the 20th century.
Very few ethnic Chinese Cubans remain. Almost all of the original laborers shipped here during the 19th century were single men who ended up marrying former slaves. Today their presence can be seen in the thousands of Cubans who have Afro Chinese ancestry.
In recent years the two countries have forged strong economic and political ties. China is Cuba's second largest trade partner after Venezuela. But it's a history which goes well beyond commercial and ideological ties.

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Carlos Acosta is exploring a life beyond ballet – review of his first novel

Carlos Acosta is exploring a life beyond ballet. Pig's Foot is the novel he created as he escaped into his own world of story telling whenever he had spare time in his hectic schedule of rehearsals and performances. The idea for the novel began with its title. Acosta imagined a tiny hamlet in a remote part of Cuba, somewhere between the Sierra Maestra and El Cobre. Apparently he never read a book before the age of 25, but then discovered the Latin American greats, especially Gabriel García Márquez. This novel reveals that inspiration, with its magical realist overtones. The village of Pata de Puerco (Pig's Foot) evokes Macondo in Marquez's ‘100 years of Solitude' – a place of incredible characters, and strange happenings and a village "where anything is possible".

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Women's presence in Cuban theatre

The play begins. Two women on stage, one black and one white, discuss and reflect on the prejudices and issues regarding the female gender, such as violence, abuse and discrimination; and women's struggle to obtain their rightful place in society. It is a dispute between the role that has been attributed to women over the centuries and their continuous struggle to achieve gender equality.
This play, Iniciación en blanco y negro para mujeres sin color (Initiation in Black and White for Women without Color), by playwright Fátima Patterson, is one of many that have been presented in recent years on the subject of women and their constant subjugation as an object within society. This dramatic text, written by a woman, shows that although times have changed, there still exist those who are prisoners of the past who try to stop the development of the female gender as a social being capable of doing, saying and feeling, equal to or more than any man.
The theater, given its great social influence, can be an instrument for denouncing these evils that still affect Cuban society and the entire world. Within this context, women have broken through to reflect in plays the existing contradictions, or to simply participate and develop as a great intellectual individual.
Since the nineteenth century, when a theatrical movement with its own identity began to develop in Cuba, women, despite the prejudices of the time, managed to assert themselves and challenge the limits of censorship. They became an active part of Cuban theater and directly influenced the construction of nationality.
Great drama figures such as Adela Robreño, Luisa Martínez Casado and Eloísa Agüero de Osorio stand out in this period. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who wrote about women and their discrimination within society, has to be mentioned. Some consider her the best playwright in the Spanish language.
The plays of La Peregrina, Avellaneda's pseudonym under which she wrote, have been staged in different moments, not only as a way to rescue the classics, but also because of the importance and validity of her theatrical texts. And because of her continuous struggle to achieve women's rightful place within their historical context.
After the establishment of a neocolonial republic in Cuba, Cuban theater seemed like it was going to disappear. A period of crisis began that threatened dramatic expression and its development. The number of places and performers decreased. Only the Alhambra remained open during this difficult time promoting what was known as "popular" theater and offering twenty-three shows weekly. But despite its heyday, it did not survive and disappeared in 1935.

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