“Many congratulations to our art instructors, who teach, promote, and defend Cuban culture and carry its most genuine values ​​to every corner of the world, with the certainty that their work emancipates and saves,” he wrote in his post.

On April 14, 1961, amidst the Literacy Campaign and three days before the start of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel Castro inaugurated the country’s first National School of Art Instructors, with an enrollment of four thousand students.

Such was the importance given to culture in the nascent process of social transformation, as well as the need to make it the heritage of the people and to liberate art from the elitist character it had held until then.

Olga Alonso Gonzalez, a young woman from Havana, was part of that youthful vanguard tasked with bringing culture to every corner of our nation.

At just 19 years old, she lost her life on March 4, 1964, in an accident in what is now the municipality of Fomento, in the province of Sancti Spiriitus, where she worked as a theater instructor. Her birthdate, February 18, was chosen to celebrate Art Instructor’s Day ever since.

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