Mexican poet to be honored in Havana

HAVANA, Cuba, Jan 5 (ACN) Come January 9, the conference Elogio Oportuno [Timely Praise] will celebrate the 95th anniversary of the birth of the Mexican poet, painter, designer, journalist and translator Fayad Jamís at the library named after him in Old Havana.

The meeting, conducted by journalist and critic Fernando Rodriguez Sosa, will address the work and share some of the poems of the Mexican creator, one of the most relevant figures linked to Cuban culture in the last century.

Fayad Jamís, who was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1930 and died in Havana in 1988, is the author, among other titles, of the poetry collections Brújula, Los párpados y el polvo, Vagabundo del alba, Los puentes, and Abrí la verja de hierro, as well as Por esta libertad, which earned him the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize in 1962.

He also exhibited his paints in Cuba and abroad, compiled and prefaced several anthologies, translated the works of several poets and, for years, served as cultural counselor of the Cuban embassy in Mexico.

Sponsored by the Fayad Jamís Library and the Departments of Culture and Social Sciences of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country, Elogio…, which aims to pay tribute to writers, books, historical events, and institutions on their anniversaries, takes its name from Marti's aphorism "Timely praise fosters merit, and the lack thereof discourages it", published in the newspaper Patria in April 1892.