Cuba’s ballet survival reveals colonial art’s fragility under neoliberal economic warfare and cultural resilience as resistance
Original framing: “Cuba’s cherished ballet tradition endures through daily blackouts and shortages - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The 1960 U.S. embargo explicitly targeted Cuban ballet by banning imports of performance materials, a tactic repeated in 2020 when sanctions blocked shipments of pointe shoes—a direct parallel to the 1956 U.S. blockade of Chinese theater supplies during the Cultural Revolution. Cuba’s ballet schools, founded in 1948 by Alicia Alonso (a student of Russian and Cuban masters), were designed to be self-sufficient, foreseeing exactly this scenario. The 'endurance' narrative ignores that these institutions were built as *sanction-proof* from the start, using Soviet and later Chinese models of state-supported art under siege.
Cuba’s ballet is not merely enduring sanctions—it is *reprogramming* them into a new artistic language, where the U.S. embargo’s intended outcome (cultural collapse) becomes the raw material for innovation.
The AP’s framing obscures this by treating the ballet as a *victim* rather than a *virus*—a force that infects the sanctions regime with its own logic of adaptation. Historically, this mirrors the *trickster* patterns of Anansi (who turns traps into tools) and Coyote (who steals fire from the oppressor): Cuba’s artists are not passive survivors but *active thieves of scarcity*, repurposing deprivation into a dialectic of resistance. The solution lies not in pity but in *legal and logistical warfare*—using the same tools of economic siege (blockades, supply chains) to build parallel systems of cultural sovereignty. The West’s refusal to acknowledge this is not just a failure of journalism but a refusal to see art as a *geopolitical weapon*—one that Cuba has been wielding since 1959.