Andrea is eight years old and has never had music lessons. Between sobs, she waits for the rest of the children to leave the room to approach the musician. She does it with sorrow and with the same shudder that the audience felt the night before at the luxury concert that Swiss harmonica player Gregoire Maret performed together with brothers Harold and Ruy López-Nussa, as part of the Habana Clásica International Festival, at the theater of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.

–That music touched my heart–. Says the girl, as she holds her hands to her chest and waits for Maret, who answers some questions to the press.

While Andrea waits, she chats with the production team, in what was a different Monday afternoon for the community of Timba, where she lives. Her love and sensitivity for music are evident, but her fascination for this instrument has revealed in the girl a special connection. Who knows if, in a few months, it will awaken in her a hidden talent!

***

As part of its social program dedicated to children, the V edition of the Habana Clásica International Festival has been extended to pediatric hospitals in the neighborhoods of La Güinera, in the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, and La Timba, in Nuevo Vedado. In both areas of the city are located the projects El Triángulo and La Manigua respectively, both beneficiaries of the Youth Art Fund (YAF) in its calls for cultural undertakings.

It happened on Sunday, November 26, with Sonja Kraus and Willem Stam, virtuoso cellists from Germany and the Netherlands, together with the talented Cuban tenor Bryan López and the composer in residence of this edition, Daniel Toledo, who gave special moments to the audience present at the El Triángulo venue.

A similar event took place on the following Monday at the Gustavo Pozo school in the La Timba neighborhood, an ideal place for a journey through the secrets of classical music.

The musicians Chérif Soumano (Mali) and Grégoire Maret (Switzerland-United States) arrived at the La Manigua venue, where twenty children were waiting for them to discover the magic behind the traditional instruments of African and European cultures.

In this context, the harmonica player Grégoire Maret made a special presentation and donated new harmonicas to the children of the community, awakening in them not only their curiosity for the musical instrument but also their passion for music.

For his part, Chérif Soumano, like a Malian griot, told the audience the history of the kora, not without explaining the mysticism surrounding its twenty-one strings, which represent the life of a child: seven to bring the past to life, seven to heal the moments of the present and another seven to call the future.

In this way, he accompanied a choir of enthusiastic little "musicians" who premiered their harmonica, as a ceremony to please these queens and kings brought from the past to the present, who were the stars of the afternoon.

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As a bridge that enriches and diversifies the artistic experience both in Cuba and beyond its borders, the YAF builds an innovative, interdisciplinary, and resilient space, also in Habana Clásica.

This space has managed to become a possibility of development for multiple visual artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and institutions of Cuban culture; as well as a niche of creation, involvement, and access to cultural goods in a context of crisis, with the certainty that art and culture are capable of changing the world.

With these precedents, the festival has opened a door of articulation from the YAF between projects and collaborators of various kinds, to bring new sounds to the national public, to promote innovative exchanges between musicians, and above all, to bring new sounds to our public.