The Havana International Poetry Festival celebrates its fifth day this Friday with a morning program dedicated to Cuban poet Fina García Marruz in the year of her centennial.

The Ruben Martinez Villena Hall, of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, reopens its doors to pay tribute to the writer, one of the essential figures in literature, who bequeathed to the letters of this Caribbean country a vast production.

Cuban academic, art critic, researcher and essayist Roberto Mendez Martinez will give a lecture on the life and work of the intellectual, winner of numerous awards, including the 1990 National Literature Prize, the 2007 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize and the 2011 Reina Sofia Ibero-American Poetry Prize.

Her work has been translated into several languages and has been included in prolific anthologies.

She means poetry in all its splendor; with Fina, lyric poetry is magnified in the essayistic, critical and, in addition, investigative field, according to the guests invited to the event.

She published her first book of poems in the early 1940s and belonged, along with her husband Cintio Vitier, to the group of poets of the magazine Orígenes (1944-1956), created by Jose Lezama Lima.

According to the program of activities of the festival, today's day also includes an agenda at the Casa del Alba Cultural to resume the usual poetry recital with authors from the host country, as well as from Colombia, Spain, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela.

In the afternoon, the same institution will be graced by the Art Gallery and the Writing Laboratory, the Tango, trova and literature space and two speakers from Argentina.

In the same cultural site the protagonists of the contest organized the Gallery Project "Memorial of Cuban Poetry", with the renowned poet and editor Alex Pausides, one of the presenters.

As the central venue of the lyrical event, the Casa del Alba Cultural culminates the afternoon with Jardín: Lectura de CubaPoesía, by Oswaldo Calatayud, from Bolivia, Danith Urango Tuirán, from Colombia, and Giovanni Catelli, from Italy, among other international poets.