Thursday, 22 September 2022 — The Tricontinental

Roberto Matta (Chile), Cuba es la capital (‘Cuba Is the Capital’), 1963.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival. Founded in 1948 by the prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso (1920–2019), the school struggled financially until the Cuban Revolution decided that ballet – like other art forms – must be available to everyone and so must be socially financed. At the school in 2002, Castro remembered that the first festival, held in 1960, ‘asserted Cuba’s cultural vocation, identity, and nationality, even under the most adverse circumstances, when major dangers and threats loomed over the country’.

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