Cuban National Day of Culture

By Leandro Estupiñan.
Translation and photos: Amauris Betancourt.

Cuba celebrates officially on October 20 the National Day of Culture: the past, the identity, the virtues and defects, the seasoning of food, the Cuban way of speaking Spanish: our Culture.

Perucho Figueredo wrote then in Bayamo, 140 years ago, the lyrics of our National Anthem; and Muñoz Cedeño, of mixed racial ancestry, orchestrated it. It happened in 1868, amid the patriotic environment of those days in a town where inhabitants would not doubt to set fire to before yielding it to the Metropolis.

The eve in Holguin, the legendary Avilés Orchestra saw to perpetuating the date with a concert. Its existence, filled with a history threaded in the Cuban countryside, serves to realize how important it is to keep up, and to pay homage to, traditions.

On October 20, the afternoon was suitable to remember why solidarity is a pillar of the Island. At the El Alba Profesional Art School's gallery, students and art-goers attended a painting exhibit. "Estructura (Structures)", its title, belongs to the Ecuadorian, living in Mexico
now, Xavier Léon Borja.

Leon Borja believes in collective art. His works aimed for assistants to finish up what he had started. It happened thus: his sketches ended up painted by the ones attending as observers. He goes in for democratic art. Something like that exercise inspired in the psychoanalysis that
surrealists called "exquisite cadaver."

Holguin has a whimsical conception of culture, trapped between aboriginal reminiscences and that day when three caravels broke the virginity of our naïveté.

October 20 is a date filled with all those meanings. Every minute leaves behind the existence's scratch; and existence is also to sing an unending Anthem.