The Caribbean Arts Festival (Carifesta) returns to Barbados in 2017. In order to renew the presence of the House of the Americas in this Caribbean country, the institution of the Comanche David Comissiong, president of the Movement Clement Payne of Barbados, who was received by the poet and essayist Roberto Fernandez Retamar, president of the House. Comissiong, during the meeting in the Presidential Hall, provided several titles of his own, including The Case of Reparations in an Era of Reconstruction and Re-colonization (2013) An Urgent Call to the Caribbean: The Case for Caribbean De-Colonization, Integration and Political Unification (2014) and Reasonings With The Youth: Black History, Culture & Politics (2014). Books that Fernández Retamar - along with Caridad Tamayo Fernández, director of the Casa de las Américas Editorial Fund - will value for possible publication in the Island.
The distinguished visitor also talked about the role that the House of the Americas played during the third edition of Carifesta in 1979 and what has meant the contest since its creation in 1972. The Barbadian intellectual referred to the importance of Cuba in the Caribbean environment: He has been a historical subject who has achieved nuclear identity in the area. "
Issues related to anti-colonialism, Caribbean thinking and racism came to light during the conversation. Camila Valdés, director of the Center for Caribbean Studies, commented, for her part, the existence of the recently founded Program of Studies on Afro-America, directed by the Cuban essayist Zuleica Romay.
There was also a dialogue on the presence of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who visited the institution on dissimilar occasions, the last one in 2011, when the poet also arrived in Havana to produce a special issue of Bim magazine, a publication he has been directing since Barbados.
Comissiong was interested in the publications of Lamming in Cuba and the translations made by the Editorial Fund Casa de las Américas, among them, In the castle of my skin and The pleasures of exile in the classic collection of Latin American and Caribbean literature.
"These are times when we must try to build a new civilization in the Caribbean, where young thinking becomes vitally important," said the intellectual, who arrived in Cuba as part of the Barbados delegation that attended the parade on May 1 And the International Encounter of Solidarity with Cuba, held on May 2.