Students from Cuba's top music academy will present a free concert of big band jazz with a Cuban accent in New Orleans on Thursday (Jan. 5). The nonprofit group Horns to Havana says the 14-member high school jazz band from Havana's Conservatorio Amadeo Roldan will be in town Monday through Jan. 10 for a jazz and cultural exchange program with the Preservation Hall Foundation. 

Over the past few years, more and more Cambodian communities in the rural areas have become willing to open their homes to visitors, inviting visitors to get a taste of the local culture or to explore the wildlife in the country. Unlike general tourism, these Community-Based Tourism (CBT) and Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) projects are managed by local communities themselves or with the local communities strongly involved in the decision-making process.

Callejón de Hamel (Hamel Alley) — a vibrant street in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Central Havana devoted to Afro-Cuban culture —is where Elier Lima first fell in love with dance. [...] This significant cultural space, which also features music, theater and art became the first stage Lima danced son, salsa and rumba before joining the Dance School of the National Theatre of Cuba and the National Folkloric Ensemble of Cuba.

A new exhibition of works from the Barjeel collection recently opened at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art to considerable international fanfare. No reviews have appeared at time of writing (and this is also not one) [...] In the context of this fraught historical moment, Tehran’s new exhibition is being promoted as a bracing act of cultural diplomacy. 

China, which regards itself as one of the world’s oldest civilizations, but one that has been repressed by outsiders, has often made culture a battlefield. It has tussled with its neighbors and rewritten history textbooks. In other instances, soft power skirmishes may be seen as substitutes for hot war. So China’s recent embrace of Japanese movies may be more complicated than audiences falling for the cuteness purveyed by Japan’s cartoon factories.

Confucius Institutes in Egypt are seeing a huge surge in popularity. According to the manager at the Institute at Cairo University, they are gradually moving away from targeting students of the Chinese language, and are beginning to attract interest from different faculties, and educational establishments in other cities across Egypt.