Abstract

Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba implemented strong cultural policies. Effective and multi-leveled organizations were installed in order to manage, fund, promote, democratize and support the revolutionary popular culture. With the work of instructors and promoters attached to casas de cultura and other types of municipal departments, the state has been able to integrate its cultural policies at the level of the community. This thesis provides an analysis and an understanding of cultural policies applied to a few traditional popular groups located in Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba and Bejuco. Since the fall of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, the Cuban State was forced to adapt its socialist ideology and open the island to tourism and foreign investments. Once again, culture is put on display and politicized in order to counteract these threats to the socialist system. But members of popular groups are not passive when faced with the state's interventions in their traditional affairs. This thesis shows that traditions are invented, manufactured and put on stage to serve the state's desire to strengthen its hegemony. The ethnographic film "State the Rhythm" is a complement to this thesis. It illustrates with concrete cases, many of the issues developed in this document.