Calum Baird was the only Scottish artist to perform at the 2024 Havan Biennial in Cuba. He sat down with Coll McCail to discuss Cuba’s cultural resistance.
In the final days of his first Presidency, Donald Trump designated Cuba a ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’ (SSOT). The US unleashes the most extreme form of economic warfare against the adversaries it places on the SSOT list. The Caribbean island was effectively cut off from the systems of global trade, finance, and tourism. Despite promising to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, Joe Biden retained Trump’s cruel designation for four long years. This bi-partisan effort compounded the impact of Washington’s sixty-year blockade by adding additional sanctions to those which are estimated to have starved the Cuban economy of more than $130 billion since 1962.
The Biden administration cynically removed Cuba from the SSOT list days before leaving office, safe in the knowledge that their judgment would not last. Sure enough, by January 21st, their decision had been reversed. The imperial violence of US foreign policy is played like political football, as it has been played for centuries. On his return to the Oval Office, Donald Trump was accompanied by a host of ghouls intent on picking up where he left off in 2020. Marco Rubio, the Cold Warrior responsible for the “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, is now Secretary of State, while Trump’s new Special Envoy to Latin America has promised to be “very creative” in his efforts to foster regime change on the island.
The White House, fortunately, has no monopoly on creativity. In Cuba and throughout Latin America culture has long served as a site of resistance to the subjugation wrought by the Monroe Doctrine. From the poems of Pablo Neruda to the music of Buena Vista Social Club, the arts have reached across the continent’s open veins to embody the resilience of its people.
In November 2024, the Havana Biennial marked its 40th anniversary. Established in 1984 after one of Fidel Castro’s legendary brainstorms, the international exhibition was inaugurated to offer an antidote to the commercialisation of the art world. The Cuban government, promised Castro, “will never strangle creative freedom because revolution and socialism were precisely created to guarantee that freedom.”
The Perfect Festival
In 2023, while suffering from COVID-19 and fever-dreaming about the streets of the Cuban capital, Calum wrote ‘Una Semana en La Habana’. The track, recorded in early 2024, combines bongo drums and Cuban tres guitar in a beautiful ode to the old city where Calum had once holidayed. Less than a year later, with the support of Scotland’s trade union movement, he was playing the single on Havana’s Malecon as part of a packed Biennial programme celebrating the City’s 500th anniversary.
“It was a pretty surreal experience,” Calum tells me. The Biennial is the largest arts extravaganza in Latin America – bigger even, as Calum pointed out, than the Edinburgh Fringe. “The combination of art and politics means it’s the perfect festival for someone like me,” he said. Three hours after his flight landed at José Martí International Airport, Calum was thrust on stage for a gig organised at the last minute. The venue was packed and he was exhausted. “I’d fallen asleep on Sunday night in Scotland and then didn’t
sleep again until Tuesday night in Havana. Wearily, Calum recalls the crowd’s expectations. “Everyone in Cuba seems to be able to sing or play an instrument. They get taught this at a young age, and it’s free in school, so they have a strong kind of connection to art and culture.”
Fostering cultural development has long been a key objective of the Cuban revolution. “Culture,” declared the Cuban Congress of Education and Culture in 1971, “like education, is not nor can ever be apolitical
or impartial, insofar as it is a social and historical phenomenon conditioned by the necessities of the social classes and their struggles through the course of history”. In its early days, the revolutionary state facilitated musical education throughout the countryside via neighbourhood cultural centres, provided instruments for free to school children, laid on free festivals of Cuban music, and drastically reduced the prices of Havana’s nightlife. The famous Club Tropicana, for example, was taken from the grip of Florida’s mobsters and nationalised.
Culture as Defiance
Calum met or surpassed his first crowd’s expectations and he was back on stage less than 24 hours later at La Mansion Castillo. Reminders of the blockade, however, were never far away. “There were five-hour rolling blackouts in Havana every day,” he said. Were it not for the ingenuity of the organisers, this second gig would have taken place in the pitch black.
Two weeks earlier, hurricanes Oscar and Rafael had swept across the island causing widespread disruption to essential services and infrastructure. Some 50,000 people were forced to take shelter in Havana as Cuba’s power grid was temporarily knocked out, compounding the island’s acute energy crisis. In January 2024, the price of fuel rose five-fold as the state sought to mitigate ever more strangling
sanctions.
In these circumstances, as Calum noted, it would be easier for there to be no Biennial and for the Cuban people to succumb to the immiseration of the embargo. “They could easily just mire. But they don’t. They keep going and they go to things.” The Cubans persevered, as they have done for decades. TV directors saved their unfinished work on USB drives. A backup generator afforded performers with partial light. Drinks were poured in darkness. Artists played without soundchecks. “People just got on with it,” Calum remembers.
Their perseverance is an expression of a resolute political identity. “The role of music in Cuba now is the same as it was 500 years ago when the Spanish took the slaves there. It’s an act of resistance and an act of defiance. Even the Cubans I met who were opposed to the government were like, ‘well, we don’t want to be part of the United States because we’ll lose our identity’. So Cuban culture and the Biennial give them space to express their identity.”
During a two-hour-long conversation with a Cuban musician who hated the revolution, Calum asked about the blockade. “It’s designed to kill us. It’s designed to sink Cuba,” the fellow musician replied. Sentiments like this, Calum explains, demonstrate that the people the Americans think are in their camp still “hate Washington for what it’s doing.” The SSOT designation, meanwhile, is understood as “just another tariff on the Cuban’s ability to exist. It’s just another boot on their throat.”
Calum immersed himself in the Biennial’s exhibitions when he wasn’t on stage. “I saw work on the legacy of colonialism and slavery, the environment, and issues like global poverty,” he told me. A week before we spoke, the official Facebook and Instagram accounts of the Havana Biennial were suspended by Meta, just as Mark Zuckerberg prepared to attend Donald Trump’s Presidential inauguration ceremony. Evidence, perhaps, of the barriers that such collective cultural resistance erects against Washington’s destabilisation efforts.
While Zuckerberg’s censors and Donald Trump’s new, more aggressive posture threaten the independence and dignity of all peoples in the Americas, Calum’s reflections from Cuba underscore the importance of deepening Scotland’s cultural links with the island. Scotland has much to gain from such connections. As our conversation wound up, Calum related his experience in Havana to Scotland. “I’m on the Musicians’ Union Regional Scottish Committee, and at every meeting we have a discussion about some local authority somewhere trying to cut music tuition. But in Cuba, despite the fact they have nothing, free music education is taking place. They’re trying to fight back for something better.”
Calum Baird’s music, including ‘Una Semana en La Habana’, can be found on his Linktree by searching calumbairdsongs. Details of his forthcoming tour are on calumbaird.com.