The AfroOchoDance Fund

AfroOchoDance, April 17-19, 2020, will feature eight Afro-Cuban dance performances by nationally renowned Afro-Cuban dancer Marisol Blanco and her Little Havana-based Sikan Afrocuban Dance Project. Each performance will feature a different genre of Afro-Cuban folkloric/popular dance (e.g., rumba, Yoruba, palo) and each will commemorate and honor people of African descent connected in some way to Little Havana. These figures will include, for example, general Antonio Maceo (whose statue stands in Little Havana's Cuban Memorial Park); iconic Celia Cruz, who performed in Little Havana; Afro-Cuban actress, poetry reciter and artist Eusebia Cosme, whose funeral was held on Calle Ocho; jazz legend Billie Holiday, who performed on Calle Ocho; African American convict laborers who built the Tamiami Trail (Calle Ocho); Afro-Costa Rican artist of Jamaican descent Oscar Thomas, Sr., who painted most of the Summit of the Americas mural in Little Havana's Domino Park; and Mariel poet Eddy Campa, who documented the lives of the area's disenfranchised residents in his poems. We are also commemorating still-living contributors to Little Havana.

The festival will also include exhibits, talks, book signings, walking tours, film screenings, a pre-festival gala (in Overtown), and a culminating ceremony of remembrance (featuring live drumming) at Historic Virginia Key Beach, MIami's first "blacks only" beach during the era of Jim Crow.

The festival is co-produced by Corinna Moebius, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, critical race scholar and longtime Little Havana tour guide who co-authored the book, "A History of Little Havana," and whose forthcoming book focuses on the history of Little Havana's racial politics of public memory, and Angela Betancourt, a communications professional with an M.A. in Global Strategic Communications from Georgetown University.