Cuban philharmonic orchestras will get together during the week from the 11th to the 18th when they will each perform works of their repertories, and jointly, compositions which require a large format.

10th edition of the International Competition of Young Jazz Musicians, Jo Jazz-2007, dedicated to art education and art schools in Cuba. An excellent opportunity to get acquainted with Cuba's young jazzmen and women, enjoy the concerts that are organized together with the competition, participate in academic meetings or harmony and improvisation workshops run by outstanding musicians.

Concert dedicated to the influence of electronic means used in musical compositions in digital art where artist Angel Alonso and percussionist Damir Fuentes will present pieces of their own making, accompanied by images created by Alonso. Guests will include singer Miguel Chávez and guitarist Yoelxis Amiel Abreu.

Each year, Latin Jazz lovers get together for five intensive days with the best Cuban jazz. This year, the event will pay homage to Felipe Dulzaides on his 90th birthday, to the 10th edition of the Jo Jazz Festival, to the 60 years of Chano Pozo's 'Manteca' and to showman Bobby Carcassés. After each night's performances, there will be a jam session by the talented participating musicians.

A meeting with world-famous pianist and composer Chucho Valdés who will reveal details of his life and work. Guests include guitarist and composer Sergio Vitier, plus guitarist Carlos Emilio Morales and drummer Enrique Pla, two of the founding members of Irakere, the famous band formed by Chucho in the 1970s.

Concert in homage to Luciano Pavarotti Soprano with soprano Beatriz Jiménez and tenor Albert Deprius who will sing arias from operas including, Elíxir of Love, Tosca, Gianni Schicchi, La traviata and Torna a Sorrento.

Twenty-five Cuban sculptors from different generations, including Osneldo García, José Villa, Rafael Consuegra, Guillermo Ramírez Malberti, William Cabrera and Pedro Pulido, exhibit large and medium sized works, allowing the viewer to appreciate the diversity of aesthetics present in contemporary Cuban culture.

An exhibition by painter Raciel Gómez Golpe who in his work explores a marginal Havana, a topic which has been privileged in the most recent artistic and literary productions in Cuba.

Paintings by painter and engraver Agustín Bejarano who is noted for putting to question ethical, social and historic behaviours, for expressing the connotations of intimacy and everyday life, and exploring into the existential crisis inherent to contemporariness, maintaining the internal poetry of his visual metaphors.

Ninety-three photographs of Cubans with different professions and from different parts of the country by photographer Roberto Salas: a look into the physical features of the national identity.

Like many other festivals of this type in Cuba, the charangas are related to Christmas celebrations, when white Catholics and black slaves would take the streets with their musical instruments to pay tribute to their deities. Eventually, they divided into two groups: La Musicanga, which gathered the criollos, freed Blacks and slaves; and Los Malayos, which represented the Spaniards. However, thanks to the fusion of cultures that characterizes the Cuban identity, racial differences were lost with time, and belonging to one or another side was determined by each person's liking. Rivalry between both sides today-now called La Ceiba de Plata and La Espina de Oro-consists in the ability to construct the most colourful and striking floats. The traditional music of Los Tambores de Bejucal accompanies this festivity now attended not only by the inhabitants of this town, 20 km south of Havana, but by hundreds of visitors who enjoy the fantasy and creativity of designers, engineers, painters, musicians, choreographers, and dancers whose talent guarantees the vitality of one of the oldest popular celebrations in Cuba.

Held as a way of expressing the identity and cultural diversity of different countries, this fair has promoted arts and crafts attracting thousands of visitors each year. Lectures, exhibits, fashion shows, sales and the crafts themselves offer an opportunity for interaction and exchange between artists and the public. In its ten previous editions, the original treatment of contemporary design in handicrafts has been remarkable, in pieces which, without losing their ancestral nature, exhibit an undisputable touch of modernity, whether applied to textiles, fibres, leather, precious and semiprecious stones, metals, clay, or any other material ready to be fashioned and beautified through the sensitivity of handicraft artists.

Initiated in Havana in 1960 to draw attention to the most significant literary production in Latin America-and at a later date, also the Caribbean-in the genres of poetry, novel, short story, essay, theatre and testimony, as well as works in other languages spoken in the region, the Casa de las Américas Literary Award has gathered outstanding figures of contemporary writing, including Miguel Ángel Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Allen Ginsberg, Nicolás Guillén, Nicanor Parra, Jaime Sabines, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Eduardo Galeano, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, José Lezama Lima, Italo Calvino, Camilo José Cela, José Saramago, to name a few. Throughout the years, many of the prize-winning works have become classics of the continent's literature; thus, each year's announcement creates great expectations among the public, who also have the opportunity to attend collateral activities programmed during the event. In 2007, the prize-winning books were the novel Mil y una, by Susana Silvestre (Argentina); the essay Los juegos de la escritura o la (re) escritura de la Historia, by Alberto Abreu (Cuba); the play Heptalogía de Hieronymus Bosch, by Rafael Spregelburd (Argentina), the testimony Oblivion, by Edda Fabbri (Uruguay), and in the category of Brazilian literature, Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves.