Sixty-five Years of Casa for Everyone

Today April 28, Casa de las Américas celebrates sixty-five years, which are, in short, the sixty-fifth of the triumphant Revolution that saw it born, that drove it, that offered it support and creative matter.

Casa is one of the largest, and most emblematic cultural institutions of the Revolution. And revolutionizing has been precisely the endeavor of its team during these decades.

Certainly, the spirit of the founders is kept and honored: Haydeé Santamaría, Mariano Rodríguez, Roberto Fernández Retamar... and many others, essential figures of Cuban culture... or faithful and enthusiastic workers, perhaps less renowned, but also essential...

But Casa has known how and has needed to reinvent itself, to cope with the particularly demanding time it has had to share.

Latin America and the Caribbean of that mythical year of 1959 is the same and is different in 2024, a unique paradox that challenges an institution that has set out to be (and has achieved it) a space for the confluence of writers and artists from a thriving region.

We are not talking about a social club, nor a society of intellectual elites. Because Casa's vision has always been integrative: culture of the people, which treasures expressions of the highest standards, in all areas of creation.

And that vision stands as a defense against the attacks of a hegemonic, colonizing, reductionist pseudoculture. Casa de las Américas has promoted and socialized an art, a literature, with deep roots, and which bear fruit often ignored by the mercantilist logic of certain spaces of cultural validation.

No wonder has this been the home of many of the continent's greatest creators. At Casa de las Américas we have always started from respect for cultural hierarchies. And that should always be the limit, the level.

Casa de las Américas was, is and will certainly be a benchmark. House of all those who love, create and found.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff