Oriented on making people closer

This photograph was taken more than 30 years ago - it captures People's Artist of Turkmenistan and the USSR Sona Myradova with famous political figure, leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, Fidel Castro.

Sona Myradova, one of those who stood at the origins of the Turkmen theater and cinema, was a popular actress, one of the common people (after the orphanage, she graduated from the Ashgabat Pedagogical College and worked as a rural teacher for several years before getting into the theater environment).

Strong temperament, high emotionality were combined in the actress's play with a restrained manner of expressing the feelings of the heroines. On the theatrical stage, she played many roles, including in performances based on the works by Shakespeare, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Gorky (Vassa), but such films as "The Prosecutor", "The Quiet Daughter-in-Law", "When a Woman Rides a Horse", "The Magic Book of Murad", "Pigeons Live in the Kyarizes"… brought her wide popularity.

...In the first days of June of 1987, the capital of Cuba, Havana, hosted an international theater congress, in which a large group of Soviet cultural and art figures also took part. Sona Myradova was also part of the delegation. In addition to the working part, a cultural program for the delegates included visits to the theaters of Havana, the house-museum of American writer Ernest Hemingway.

And after all this, the congress participants were invited to relax at the world famous resort of Varadero. There, the meeting captured in the photo took place. Fidel Castro visited Varadero at that moment, and he noticed a multinational particoloured group, that, upon seeing him, began to greet. He stopped, greeting in response, chose Sona Myradova from the crowd, approached her and offered to be photographed for memory. It is not known whether he had ever watched a Turkmen movie, or whether Sona Myradova reminded him of someone, but eyewitnesses to the meeting claimed a minute later that Castro “recognized her!” And therefore approached her and respectfully hugged her.

This is how this spontaneous photograph came about, which also included other members of the delegation and which has been kept in the family of the outstanding Turkmen artist for more than three decades.

Or maybe the leader of the Cuban revolution was simply attracted by that strong human charm of Sona Myradova, which attracted everyone around her, from which she always became the center of everyone's attention, wherever she appeared.

Meretgylych YAGMYROV