Afro-Cuban Poetry: From Myths and Memory to Social Transformation.This 60-minute workshop explores Afro-Cuban poetry and film as living forces of resistance—tools to defend identity, confront stereotypes, and turn silence into action. Moving beyond nostalgia or fixed religious readings, it treats poetry as something alive: memory that breathes, joy that resists, language that refuses disappearance.
Participants engage with selected excerpts from Nicolás Guillén, Nancy Morejón, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Yadian Carbonell Hechavarría, Mireya Rodríguez Frontela, and Hebert Poll Gutiérrez, listening to how rhythm, oral tradition, and ancestral memory build a collective voice that insists on presence and refuses erasure.
Short film screenings extend this field of meaning, where image does not illustrate poetry—it continues it. It becomes testimony. And testimony becomes resistance, memory, and survival.
Films links:There was a country: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19HR20KelRph_-NTG-ItSnjsfs2YKbvzf/view?usp=sharingWhispers from the black gods: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qYLUIGfTgQ0-vqwUf4La1xH9PzwIhgEG/view?usp=sharing The workshop also opens space for guided reflection through provocative questions:
•
What truth are you afraid to say out loud?•
What part of your identity has been silenced?•
How can we transform pain into strength through art?
Participants close by writing a short poem or reflection shaped by identity, resistance, and hope—leaving with something they can carry into the world: poetry and film as tools of cultural defense, and as forces that keep transformation moving inside the community.
As Rogelio Martínez Furé reminds us:
“What is not remembered, does not exist.”
