Concert by violinist Evelio Tieles and pianists Rebeca Lluvera and Leonardo Gell, who will perform sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Concert by pianist Guillermo Tuzzio, with guest pianists Huberal Herrera, who specializes in the works of renowned Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, and the multi-prizewinner Chucho Valdés.

Gala performance in honour of Pedrito Calvo, former lead singer of the Van Van band and one of the most charismatic singers of popular Cuban music today, on his 50th anniversary of artistic life.

Concert by the Chamber Orchestra of Havana, conducted by María Elena Mendiola, with works by Cuban composer Carlos Fariñas, Antonin Dvorák from Czechoslovakia and Joaquín Rodrigo from Spain

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the first Cuban electroacoustic work, composed by musician Juan Blanco, violinist Martha Salgado and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional conducted by Enrique Pérez Mesa, will peform Divertimento for orchestra, Divertimento for strings, Elegía for orchestra and Textura for orchestra and tape, all by Juan Blanco; the Concierto for viola and orchestra and Como naufragios for orchestra, by Juan Piñera, and selections from the opera La taza de café.

Founded in 1984 and presided by composer and conductor Guido López Gavilán, the Havana Contemporary Music Festival has been honoured with the participation of important musicians, including Luigi Nono, Krystof Penderecki, Hans Werner Henze, Luis de Pablo, Marlos Nobre, Alfredo del Mónaco and Xavier Montsalvatge, just to name a few. This is a good opportunity to catch up with the latest trends in current Cuban and international classical music.

Príncipes enanos, by Maykel Herrera, is a collection of eleven large paintings, where the child's world becomes the perfect setting to point out the dramatic absurdity beneath all wars, hoping that today's children-'midget princes' José Martí called them in one of his poems-may have the ability to prevent them much better than the adults of our time.

Starting on the 7th of October, El primer trazo, an exhibition by artist Peter Nadin (1954, Liverpool, England), constituted by paintings, sculptures and a book from his homonymous series (2000-2006), will allow viewers to approach an artistic creation that combines elements of conceptualism with abstraction, in line with a reflexive expressivity.

Relaciones negativas, an exhibition by artists Marta María Pérez and René Peña, whose always disturbing works of the representation of the body strain symbolism to extremes.

Graphic Design Exhibitions

On the occasion of the Congress of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA), a number of exhibitions have been announced:

Exhibition in tribute to one of the greatest Cuban designers: Eduardo Muñoz Bach, a master of drawing, colour and composition, who with a very personal style became an icon of Cuban poster designing, especially film posters, with works that are considered classics today.

The exhibition Carteles por la diversidad cultural, a collection of more than 100 pieces by artists from thirty different countries, proposes a look at formal, stylistic and conceptual diversity in today's contemporary graphic production.

Niklaus Troxler en Cuba: carteles de jazz is a collection of twenty large posters designed for jazz concerts by one of the most outstanding Swiss designers today and founder of the Willisau Jazz Festival.

It was in the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba where the first known choir pieces in the Island were composed by Havana-born composer Esteban Salas (1725-1803), who for years was chapel master. Honouring this tradition, in 1961 Electo Silva, who has been for decades director of Orfeón Santiago, organized the First Choir Festival. Throughout the years, choral groups from different countries have also participated in the festival together with their Cuban counterparts, winners at prestigious international competitions. An intense programme of concerts in theatres, schools, factories, hospitals and public squares characterizes these days in which audiences can enjoy the best of the repertoires of choral music.

The African Roots Festival opened for the first time in 1989 in what once was called Asunción de Guanabacoa Village, a primitive aboriginal settlement founded as a town in 1554. Because of its proximity to the Havana harbour, it the place where many slaves and free blacks lived. Its Mayor José Antonio Gómez Bullones (Pepe Antonio) lives on in his compatriots' memory thanks to his courageous confrontation with the British occupation troops in 1762. The mixture of traditions, cultures and sense of belonging is expressed in Wemilere-meaning 'a festivity dedicated to the orishas or deities' in the Yoruba language-whose main objective is to gather and transmit knowledge about the African universe in Cuban culture, and which every year invites an African country or one with a strong Black presence. The variety of music and dance activities and the issues tackled at the Coloquio Presencia (Presence Colloquium) has aroused the interest of artists, ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists and musicologists from Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Haiti, Canada, United States, Italy, Austria and numerous African nations, including Mali, Senegal, Angola, that have participated in talks, panels, lectures, or as members of the jury of the competition which is also organised. During the Wemilere Festival, the variety and richness of African cultures take over the streets of Pepe Antonio's village, infecting villagers and guests alike with their catching and colourful rhythms.

Since 1979, Havana has been the venue for the immensely popular New Latin American International Film Festival. Millions of film buffs across Cuba attend the event which has served as a launch pad for Latin American cinematography and become one of the leading film festivals of the region. Awards are given in categories that include animation, documentary, fiction, first work, unpublished script and poster, as well as direction, screenplay, actor, actress, art direction, photography, music, film editing and sound. Numerous professional workshops and seminars also take place during the festival, plus much awaited screenings of international contemporary cinema.

Like many other festivals of this type in Cuba, the charangas (popular son-influenced Cuban music that began in the 1940s emphasizing flute, violin and piano orchestra) are related to Christmas celebrations, when white Catholics and black slaves would take to 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 (representing the Spaniards). However, thanks to the fusion of cultures that characterizes Cuban identity, racial and class differences were lost with time, and belonging to one or another side was simply determined by each person's preference. Rivalry between both sides today - now named La Ceiba de Plata and La Espina de Oro - consists in the ability to construct the most colourful and striking floats for one of the oldest popular celebrations in Cuba.

Legend has it that during the 1820s, a young priest officiating in Remedios - the eighth town founded by the Spaniards in Cuba - decided to have a group of children make a noise with whatever they had to hand in an effort to awaken lazy parishioners to attend mass in the almost always cold mornings of 24th December. From then on, neighbours would go out into the streets on the nights prior to Christmas for music and merrymaking. Eventually, there came about a competition or parranda between two neighbourhoods, El Carmen and San Salvador, each with its own hymn, colours, kites and lanterns. In 1875, complicated floats lit by flares and fireworks began to be paraded by each side at the town's Plaza de Armas (town square). To this day, the two neighbourhoods continue with a rivalry characterized by the beauty and originality of these floats, as well as by the amazing fireworks that from 9 pm on 24th December to dawn on 25th December illuminate the city sky.

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.