Within Cuba, Santiago has attained a culture very much of its own, a rich culture that accurately expresses the character of the territory, its mixture of races and traditions, more varied than in any other part of the island, a condition that has contributed through times to the emergence of prototypes of the national folklore, as all artistic manifestations are performed here.

Santiago de Cuba boasts classics like Esteban Salas, considered the Father of the Cuban Music, intellectual Pablo Laf argue, who was married to Carlos Marx’s daughter, and Pedro Santacilia, who was married to a closed relative of Mexican patriot Benito Juárez, poet lose Maria Heredia, the pioneer of Romanticism in the continent, Emilio Bacardi, Santiago de Cuba’s first mayor and the founder of the first museum-library in Cuba.

Santiago also became the home of important personalities that one way or another became attracted to the city, like the Henriquez family, from Santo Domingo, and French immigrants and their black slaves, who arrived here at the end of the 8 century. These are but a few of the many reasons why Santiago rightly deserves the name of Cultural Capital of the Caribbean.

The foundations for most of the cultural movements that later would become popular in the Caribbean can be traced to Santiago de Cuba, in areas like music, poetry, painting, sculpture and handicrafts.

The Contradanza was developed, and the Cuban son was born here, as was the bolero, the coral songs, and the so-called Santiago traditional Trova (song movement), which combines French violins, Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Cuban country music.

It has institutions devoted to consolidating cultural manifestations in a systematic way, like Casa del Caribe (Caribbean House), the African Cultural Center, the “Antonio Bravo Correoso” Cultural Athenaeum, the Antonio Maceo Research enter, and Casa de La Musica (House of Music).

Santiago is responsible for much of the country’s music development, as confirmed by many international arts festivals, like those of choir, Caribbean music, Terracotta (a visual arts expression) as well as the naive arts encounter at Mella municipality, the Matamoro Son Festival, and the national ‘Pepe Sanchez” Trova and Charanga (at Palma municipality) festivals.

Expressions of the cultural development at Cuba’s most Caribbean city are its fourteen museums, twenty-one archives, eight libraries, nine 6 mm and eighteen 35 mm cinema halls, in addition to the Orfeón Santiago, the Coro Madrigalista, the Ballet Company, and the Arts School. Other cultural institutions include two exhibition halls, an amphitheater, ten cultural houses, nine theater halls, two concert halls, several folkloric dance troops and cultural community associations, and the “Antonio Maceo” Revolution Square.