The story
Festival Boleros de Oro in Havana
Founded in 1987 by the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists on an idea from composer Jose Loyola Fernandez, and expanded in 1988 to combine scholarly colloquium with live performance, Festival Boleros de Oro has grown into an international gathering of bolero creators, performers and musicologists, its recent thirty-seventh edition the first held after bolero's formal declaration as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The Union of Cuban Writers and Artists organized the first Festival Boleros de Oro in 1987, building on an idea originated by composer Jose Loyola Fernandez to create a forum for theoretical examination of the many different stylistic approaches within bolero, the romantic Latin American song genre.