UnB 2012/2

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Caribbean festivals
 

Part I – Fiesta de Santiago de Apóstol in Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico (Late July)
Nowhere is Puerto Rico’s rich West African heritage more pronounced — and celebrated — than in the coastal town of Loiza Aldea. Every July 25, the town hosts a celebration of its patron saint, Santiago, one of several Catholic saints believed to be incarnations of ancient African deities. The festival includes street parties, open-air plena and bomba concerts, and Carnival-like parades.

Part II – Festival de Merengue in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (Late July)
Few things are more quintessentially Dominican than “merengue”. You can hear its urgent upbeat rhythm just about anywhere you go, from supermarkets to public buses, from the capital to the countryside, and it seems Dominican children learn to dance to “merengue” almost as soon as they can walk. The annual Merengue Festival lasts less than a week and isn’t even the Dominican Republic’s largest music festival, but only Carnival makes for a bigger and more ebullient street party.

Part III – St. Patrick’s Day in Montserrat (Mid-March)
The Irish aren't the only ones who know how to throw a St. Patrick's Day party. The tiny island of Montserrat, battered by hurricanes and half-buried in volcanic ash, celebrates March 17 as a national holiday with a terrific week-long festival. St. Patrick's Day has dual importance in Montserrat: it has long been celebrated by the island's large Irish Catholic population, who first settled there in the 1630s to escape religious persecution, and it also marks the day, in 1798, that enslaved Africans launched a major uprising.

Part IV – Crop Over Festival in Barbados (July)
Why celebrate for a day or a weekend, when you can party for a whole month? That’s the attitude of Barbadians when it comes to Crop Over, the island’s largest and most anticipated festival, held from early July to early August. The celebration, which dates back to the late 1700s, originally marked the end of the all-important sugarcane harvest, when Barbados was one of the world's largest producers of sugar. Today the heart of Crop Over is calypso music, which infuses the entire event with its rhythm and lyrics.
Internet: <www.way.com> (adapted).

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