Havana, July 4 (RHC)-- The Third World Congress on Death opened Tuesday at the Heredia Theater in Santiago de Cuba, with the aim of delving into this topic from a multidisciplinary perspective, as part of the 42nd Festival of Fire.

Carlos Lloga, general coordinator of the conclave, said that death is a permanent issue in the scientific agenda of the Casa del Caribe, which is why there is important research to contribute to the understanding and study of that natural process.

The assembly dissociates the topic from the concept of country and invites to understand Mexico's celebration from its roots and link with other festivities in the region, a tradition that the global market and cultural colonization tried to turn into a folklorized party, he said.

He pointed out that the event will promote academic dialogue on the famous dead, cemeteries, representations in art, ecological destruction and other topics, in order to broaden the voice of Caribbean culture.

Patricia Ledesma, a Mexican archeologist, reflected on the concept in the pre-Hispanic Aztec nation and said that the offerings, created with flowers, ceramics and food, represent a Mesoamerican symbol of great diversity.

According to Omar Lopez, curator of the city of Santiago de Cuba, the population of Cuba has several alternatives to appropriate a way of facing death, since the different religions or active popular cults offer assorted expressions of taking life to another dimension, a way of making evident the individual freedom to choose and decide the path of their own spirituality.

According to him, the Santiago wake became notorious for its local flavor, behaving as a social gathering with histrionic and dramatic passages, a kind of tragicomedy that added the strange custom of painting the dead, with the purpose of preserving the image of the deceased in the interest of the loved ones.

He said that as a funerary cultural landscape, the Santa Ifigenia cemetery is a place where recognized and anonymous heroes, African kings, religious leaders, practitioners and renowned artists mingle, thus becoming a site of national history.

The Festival of Caribbean Culture, known as Fiesta del Fuego, held in July every year in Santiago de Cuba with the most varied expressions of the life of these peoples, has had in this unique Congress one of its most crowded events both in participation and exhibition of studies on these topics, in the fundamental seen from a cultural, sociological, historical, religious and even from the art perspective.