Some 150 artists from 18 nations on Tuesday participated in the opening of the 18th "May Pilgrimage" cultural festival of young Cuban artists, organizers said.

Alexis Triana, president of the organizing committee, said that Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Australia and China are among the countries most represented in the festival held in Cuba's eastern city of Holguinn from May 3 to 8.

The program includes meetings with Cuban personalities of culture, including noted writer Daniel Chavarria, filmmakers Rogelio Paris and Rigoberto Lopez.

The annual pilgrimage festival originates from the religious event in which Spanish friar Antonio Alegre on May 3, 1790 climbed to the top of the Cerro Bayado peak with a wooden cross on his back in accordance with Spanish custom of placing a cross in the highest place near populations to prevent them from epidemics or natural disasters.

The tradition of the festival was rescued in 1994 when writers, painters, musicians and researchers made it a way to form a space for the exchange and debate among artists from different continents.

Art critic and re-founder of the Festival, Jorge Luis Sanchez Grass, emphasized the importance of the meeting as a "thermometer to validate the proposals from the new generations of Cuban and international artists."

During the 2010 celebrations of the festival a unique exhibition of the "Portraits Imaginaires" collection by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso was shown for the first time in Cuba.

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