EDITORIAL: Culture Is the Homeland

The Cuban Culture Week is far more than a celebration of art. It is not simply a tribute to artistic expressions, but a homage to something deeper: culture as the foundation of a national ideal, as the spiritual fabric that has sustained the Cuban people’s identity through time.

Within it lie the values, traditions, aspirations, and memories that give meaning to collective existence. To celebrate Cuban culture is, ultimately, to celebrate a people’s ability to reinvent itself without losing its essence.

Cuban culture—diverse and fertile—is a space of constant convergence. It is dialogue between movements, generations, and worldviews. It is the living expression of a history where the native and the universal merge, where roots open themselves to the winds of influence without ever abandoning their own sap.

That continuous dialectic—that movement between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global—defines its strength. Culture is, in the end, the amalgam that unites a people in all its plurality.

For this reason, the celebration of Culture Week cannot be conceived as an elitist event confined to galleries or stages. It must be a popular festival—a collective recognition of who we are. This is how Fidel Castro and Armando Hart, to whom this year’s celebration was dedicated, understood culture: as shared heritage, as an instrument of liberation and awareness. Both promoted a vision of culture inseparable from justice, humanism, education, and social commitment.

The idea of a culture in Revolution must be embraced today without vanity or dogmatism, yet without losing the sense of hierarchy that allows us to distinguish the essential from the superficial. It must be a culture that is critical, participatory, and fully aware of its responsibility to the nation and to its time.

Because culture is not something external to society—culture is all of us. And in that certainty lies the deepest meaning of this celebration.