Famous Cuban Ethnologist Miguel Barnet to Hold a Talk with Young Researchers at the Romerías de Mayo
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- 05 / 07 / 2008
The author of Biografía de un Cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave) talked about his compromise with tradition: "we have dedicated our whole life to rescue what has been lost, what is one away... and when that is related to tradition and culture, it is truly tragic. Sometimes people do not measure that, which is why I think this workshop is so important, because tradition is precisely the base for culture."
To look towards the past, to extract from there the necessary ingredients to build a better future is a lesson he tried to pass on to the new generation of researchers: "young people tend to look only towards the future and to forget the past, the difference was that I was young man who was born with the Cuban Revolution and lucky enough to guide a guide such as Fidel Castro, who taught us also to reject the bad things from the past and to collect the good things, what is truly nurturing and what is rooted."
He recommended them: "you should always remember that with the revolution there began to be created a series of institutions that were precisely dedicated to this rescue of our traditions, of our culture and those institutions were guided by important personalities, among them are very important names such as Fernando Ortiz in the first place."
"You should also dedicate yourselves to the study of the predecessors, of those writers from the I century, when anthropological studies had not advanced yet, they were writers with a fabulous vision and intuition, our custom writers, not only novel writers such as Cirilo Villaverde, but also wonderful custom writers such as the Betancourt brothers and so many more writers that have to be researched in order to learn how was this island developed in between so many debates, contradictions and how African, Spanish and Asian cultures became inter-tangled to create what we now very proudly call the Cuban culture."
Identity is the main star of this festival of young art and in its space for reflection, the dialogue dealt precisely with the need not to loose the essence that allow us to feel unique as a country.
(CubaSi)
To look towards the past, to extract from there the necessary ingredients to build a better future is a lesson he tried to pass on to the new generation of researchers: "young people tend to look only towards the future and to forget the past, the difference was that I was young man who was born with the Cuban Revolution and lucky enough to guide a guide such as Fidel Castro, who taught us also to reject the bad things from the past and to collect the good things, what is truly nurturing and what is rooted."
He recommended them: "you should always remember that with the revolution there began to be created a series of institutions that were precisely dedicated to this rescue of our traditions, of our culture and those institutions were guided by important personalities, among them are very important names such as Fernando Ortiz in the first place."
"You should also dedicate yourselves to the study of the predecessors, of those writers from the I century, when anthropological studies had not advanced yet, they were writers with a fabulous vision and intuition, our custom writers, not only novel writers such as Cirilo Villaverde, but also wonderful custom writers such as the Betancourt brothers and so many more writers that have to be researched in order to learn how was this island developed in between so many debates, contradictions and how African, Spanish and Asian cultures became inter-tangled to create what we now very proudly call the Cuban culture."
Identity is the main star of this festival of young art and in its space for reflection, the dialogue dealt precisely with the need not to loose the essence that allow us to feel unique as a country.
(CubaSi)
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