HAITI: EU offers 500,000 euro grant for cultural projects

Stories of Caribbean Cinema, Maroon Culture, Transmission, and the Imagination. Texts by Guillaume Robillard. Ciclic, 2026

The history of Caribbean cinema continues its journey through the 1980s. After three episodes devoted to the early developments of several cinematic movements in the region, this fourth installment brings together two films from Martinique and one from Curaçao. From the “marronnage” in *Le Sang du flamboyant* to the international trajectory of *Rue Cases-Nègres*, and on to the unique worldof *Almacita di Desolato*, these three works explore different relationships to memory, oral tradition, Africa, and Caribbean imaginaries. This article is the fourth installment in a series of ten. The first three are already available on Richès Karayib, and six more will continue this story through the 2020s. 1981: MARTINIQUE — *The Blood of the Flamingo*, by François Migeat This film is unique in Caribbean cinema. Indeed, its director is a “Metropolitan” (that is, a white man from mainland France who had no deep-rooted ties to the French West Indies) who

23/09/2026 No Comments

Doubles, plat de rue de Trinité-et-Tobago composé de deux baras frits et de pois chiches au curry

CULINARY ART

Doubles: The Story of Emamool Deen Behind Trinidad’s Street Food Dish

In Princes Town, in southern Trinidad and Tobago, the “doubles” were born in 1936 from a simple gesture: a customer asking for a second piece of bread. At the time, Emamool Deen and his wife Rasulan were selling curry chickpeas on a single piece of fried bread, unaware that they were inventing the country’s most iconic street food. Nearly a century later, doubles still tell the story of Indo-Trinidadian heritage through this chickpea sandwich, which has become a national symbol. A Morning in Princes Town, 1936 At 4:00 a.m., in a courtyard in Princes Town, in the southern part of Trinidad and Tobago, Rasulan Deen lights the fire that will heat the coconut oil. Her husband, Emamool Deen, is boiling the chickpeas that the couple was able to buy by selling a goat, the only possession they had. The year is 1936, and according to oral tradition preserved by several

23/09/2026 No Comments

María Elena Llorente recevant un hommage floral, Ballet Nacional de Cuba

DANCE

María Elena Llorente: 50 Years of Ballet in the Service of Cuba

In May 1977, a Cuban dancer took the stage in New York with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. In the audience that evening, actor Harry Belafonte watched the performance and would later describe the evening as a significant historical event. This dancer’s name was María Elena Llorente, prima ballerina and ballet mistress of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Her career spans fifty years of dance, spent almost entirely with a single company—the one founded by Alicia Alonso in Havana—on an island where, over the decades, classical ballet has become as much a source of national pride as it is an art form. María Elena Llorente, of the Sociedad Pro-Arte at the National Academy It all began at the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, a school in Havana where young Cuban women learned the basics of classical ballet even before the official founding of the national ballet company. María Elena Llorente then continued

22/09/2026 No Comments