When Culture Persists: Notes to Close Out 2025

It has not been an easy year for Camagüey's cultural life, nor for Cuba's. Prolonged blackouts, material limitations, and a wave of illnesses that reduced mobility and attendance at public spaces set the irregular rhythm of 2025. Often, culture had to retreat, reinvent itself, or survive through minimal management, virtual exchange, or constant postponement. Even so, it did not disappear. It persisted as a gesture, as a collective endeavor, as a spiritual necessity in the face of an adverse context.

From community gatherings and literary projects in schools to festivals, youth fairs, and international exchanges, artists, promoters, journalists, and managers sustained a feasible programming, built more on will than on certainties. The year closes with events held "in spite of everything," with delayed embraces and reunions, with children listening to stories, young people creating, and communities defending joy as a right. May 2026 bring back stable electricity and full health, but may it not take away from us this beautiful stubbornness to keep making culture, even when it seems impossible.