In Cuba, a wave of underground artists are reclaiming the capital

In the first week of October 2026, 20-odd dancers from Havana walked onto the stage at London's Sadler's Wells theatre to perform Cuban Baroque, a contemporary dance set to a Baroque score. Their company, Acosta Danza, was founded by Carlos Acosta, the Havana truck-driver's son who spent 17 years with the Royal Ballet and is now director at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Acosta Danza has spent this year almost entirely in Britain. In Cuba they have not performed at all. "There is a tremendous exodus of artists and of Cuban heritage," Acosta lamented in a 2024 interview with La Vanguardia. That outflow has only accelerated since.

I've been living and working on and off in Cuba for 35 years, and I’ve never seen it like this – it’s even worse than the Special Period that followed the Soviet collapse. This new Dark Age has a name: "La Situación", shorthand for empty fridges and pharmacies, closed schools, incarcerated neighbours, the proliferation of the toxic synthetic drug known as "kímico", and a sense that the crisis has no floor. Leonardo Padura, the island's foremost novelist, wrote last December: "From my rooftop I can see illuminated islands, and barely glowing points of light that scarcely break the enveloping twilight." Three-fifths of the country was dark when he wrote that. Since then, a combination of regime mismanagement and a brutal blockade by the Trump administration has left the whole country suffering relentless blackouts for days at a time.

Dr. Isabel Brava, 35, a neurosurgeon from Holguín, earns 5,600 pesos a month – about US$8. After working 12-hour days in a hospital with no antibiotics and a broken biopsy machine, she returns home to put her one-year-old son to bed before doing a nightshift as a Lada taxi-driver. "Whenever you think it can't get worse, it does," she lamented. "We are on the way to becoming Haiti."

Cuba has suffered mass emigration, mostly of its educated, young and prosperous citizens. They have moved to the US, Mexico, Spain, Serbia and – since Trump and Rubio tightened the US border – to Guyana and Brazil. And yet, in the face of economic and social collapse, most Cubans remain resilient. The most uplifting word in Cuba today is the antonym of "apagón" (blackout): "alumbrón" (illumination). It describes the redemptive moments when electricity returns. It is also the intangible energy driving the island's artists, who keep creating things.

“In Cuba,” the critic Gerardo Mosquera once observed, "artists grow like weeds." Liatna Rodríguez, 40, who runs a contemporary art space in Centro Habana called Cemí – named after a Taíno totem and a character in José Lezama Lima's novel, Paradiso – told me last week: "This is the most perverse moment in our history. Precariousness is now the dominant medium. There is no option. You have to produce." The younger artists she exhibits, like the recently graduated Darena Pedroso in a show aptly called "A Punto de Caer" (About to Fall), are exploring creative forms rather than confronting the system. "It isn't self-censorship, it's not even anger any more. It's weariness, it's an embracing of alienation."

In Old Havana, a block from where I too am trying to build a cultural centre, the 24-year-old artist Alejandro Cañer mines the city's uncollected trash for material. One work superimposes a commercial pornographic image onto an excavated slide of the 1961 literacy campaign, still the revolution's proudest boast. Another is a glass jar holding thousands of silicone balls that swell on contact with water: the deflated ones on top represent the millions who have emigrated; the inflated ones beneath those who remain. Lit from within, it is a heartbreaking portrait of a hollowed-out country.

My partner is an architect, a profession that is technically banned in Cuba, even though the government has recently – and unconvincingly – promised to legalise it. Against the odds, her company, Infraestudio, is flourishing, with commissions including an extraordinary boutique hotel in Mazunte, Mexico called El Beso, which depicts "the fiction of a kiss between two stones".

With no power for projectors or air conditioning, most cinemas are shuttered. But my friend Inti Herrera Núñez has continued to produce movies. Malecón, a Spanish-Cuban production about two young men trying to emigrate, premiered at the Cine Yara last month; tickets cost 10 pesos (US$0.02). Guantanamera, a dual-timeline action thriller set in 1959 and 2023, is the first Russian-Cuban co-production made since the 1990s, financed with around $1 million from the Kremlin-linked Gazprom-Media. It opened in Russian cinemas in February; there is no American, European or even Cuban distributor.

Projected on the wall of a friend's house in Siboney, I saw the most poignant recent short film about Cuba: La Retaguardia, a Canadian documentary about four Gen-Z artists who chose to stay. It was shot in 2023; all four have since left the island.

Theatre has fared worst. I wrote my Cambridge University undergraduate dissertation on Cuban theatre during the Special Period of the early 1990s, when the stages were the liveliest place in Havana. The Gran Teatro now programs almost nothing. The frustration among performing artists is caught by Heriberto Cabezas, longstanding coordinator of Havana's ballet festival: "The problem isn't electricity, water, gas, food, medicine or wages. The problem is time. Who will give us back our time?"

Out of this theatrical gloom I have seen two recent rays of light: Laura Alonso's astonishing Swan Lake at the newly restored Teatro América; and Una Novela Costumbrista, a series of poignant "paratheatrical" vignettes directed by the visual artist Wilfredo Prieto at his Chullima studio, as the sun set melancholically over the Almendares River.

Then there is music. Last June, at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano – the centre of Cuban cultural life since 2014, and shut indefinitely within weeks – I watched two superbly trained musicians, the cellist Sarah Gutiérrez and the flautist Yasel Muñoz, improvise a whole set to a packed hall. Out on the street, the same inventiveness has produced "reparto", a genre almost nobody outside Cuba has heard of and almost every young Cuban can sing. Producers like Chocolate MC created it around 2015 by dropping Afro-Cuban rumba clave and heavy percussion onto reggaeton's dembow beat and rapping over the top through blown-out auto-tune. Hypermasculine and irresistible, it travelled the same road as American gangsta rap: out of the poor, largely Black neighbourhoods on the city's edge – the “repartos” – that give it its name. Try Chocolate MC's "Bajanda," Bebeshito's "Sin Pena" or the late El Taiger's "La Historia".

Fashion is defiantly exuberant. Ama Havana, founded by two classically trained musicians who pivoted during the pandemic, employs eight women making crochet in lollipop colours. Devon Ruiz staged her Devi Devi label’s Barrio collection in the Plaza de la Catedral, a trumpeter playing from the bell tower and high-heeled models negotiating cobblestones that would end an ankle in Manhattan. I bought snazzy trousers from Christian Izquierdo's Left Limited: black pleated cotton drill, the maker's spec sheet printed on a frayed patch stitched to the outside of the garment – the label worn as a wound.

Gangs, on the rise throughout Cuba, have a long record of creating art. Hip-hop came out of the Bronx gangs of the 1970s, one of which, the Ghetto Brothers, was both a street gang and a Latin funk band. In the movie Gangs of New York, Scorsese mined the slang of the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys. Havana's emerging gangs have names that are found in poetry: Pacto de Sangre (Blood Pact), Faceta del Mundo (Facet of the World), Trasnochadores (Night Owls), Miki Pintao (Marked-Up Mickey), 100pAbajo (100 Downward), and the untranslatable Atá Perositan Nangorian. Spray-painted across the city's crumbling walls is the Orwellian “2 + 2 = 5”, representing resistance to the regime. The music genre, reparto, is as sharp as a machete blade; the slang moves faster than anyone can record it.

The artists who have left the country are flying Cuba's flag more proudly than ever. Carlos Celdrán, winner of Cuba's National Theatre Award, now receives standing ovations in Madrid and Miami. In Paris, the actress Miriel Cejas, who left in 2016, opened her own Théâtre à la Minute in the 11th arrondissement. Dagoberto Rodríguez, half of Los Carpinteros, works out of Madrid; the collective’s work hangs in Tate Modern, MoMA and the Reina Sofía, and its sculpture "Catedral" sold for $456,500 at Christie's. Even reparto is now made in Miami, where Bebeshito filled a 19,000-seat arena within a year of arriving.

Like Carlos Acosta’s dancers at Sadler’s Wells, these artists carry Havana onto a London stage while their home city waits for the lights to come on. They are all reminders of a creatively extraordinary island, improvising brilliantly inside its own collapse, facing a future that is both exciting and full of terrifying uncertainty.