El Patio del Pelegrín Community Project

Despite our love for the beautiful city of La Habana, by our 5th day we were ready for an adventure outside of the city limits. Our first stop on this new adventure was an hour east from La Habana, in a providence called “Piñar del Río”. There we stopped in a small town, where we visited a beautiful community project called “Patio del Pelegrín”. Run by Mario Pelegrín Pozo, the community project was housed in his family’s countryside home, where he ran the project along with his brother. The community project featured a large house and outdoor space where free workshops of all kinds were held for local students, from painting and drawing classes, to dance, chorus and music theory courses.
We started out our tour with an introduction from Mario, a friendly man who immediately welcomed us into his home and made us feel at ease. We toured the lower section of the home, where an art gallery of local artists was housed, and I greatly admired a few paintings displayed.
This second painting was by a young artist named Andrés, who I had the pleasure of speaking with. He was a very talented professional artist of 25, who had trained at the local professional arts university, and now gave classes at Patio del Pelegrín to aspiring young artists in their teens.
After our introduction and tour of the house and gallery, we toured the two-acre grounds, in which we saw the restaurant and coffee shop (pictured below), the open-air dance studio, the free community library, the extensive organic farm, and the ceramics workshop. The students were very impressed with the ceramics workshop and especially the “tree rats” and hummingbirds that were to be found throughout the property. After touring the facilities of the community workshop, my co-coordinator and I vowed to return with students in the future, but with a full day’s time so that students could take a painting, ceramics, music or dance workshop from the hosts.
After our tour, we ate a buffet lunch in the leafy patio, where Mario Pelegrín’s brother and Patio del Pelegrín’s music teacher serenaded us throughout the lunch hour. As the music teacher of the community project, he did a wonderful job engaging our students, having two of our students, Sierra and Carolyn, join him at the front for the music performance, as he also taught us a bit of Cuban salsa. On our first night in Cuba, our host at the "Cimmaron" restaurant told us that we would be dancing and listening to live music daily, and he was right! The Patio del Pelegrín, thankfully, was no exception.
We bid farewell to Mario with a quick café, and vowed to return in our next trip to Cuba. That’s a promise I won’t have trouble keeping!