Around twenty countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia, will participate in Intervision

The Intervision Song Festival, which will be held next September after a 45-year hiatus, confirmed today the participation of representatives from 21 countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia.

“The Intervision final will be held in Moscow on September 20, 2025, at the Live Arena concert hall. Competitors from 21 countries from the BRICS, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well as the USA, will participate,” the organizers said in a statement.

Latin America will be represented in this contest, the alternative to Eurovision created in the extinct socialist camp, by the singers Omar Acedo (Venezuela), Nidia Góngora (Colombia) and Zulema Iglesias Zalazar (Cuba).

Singers from Belarus, Vietnam, Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Qatar, China, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, the United States, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, and South Africa will also participate, in addition to Russia, represented by the officialist singer Shaman.

Previously, the organizers had included Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates on the list, but later withdrew both countries.

According to Alexandr Zhuravski, deputy director of public projects at the Russian presidential office, the wide selection of countries “seeks to show through the prism of music the richness and diversity of the world”.

He added that Intervisión “is not a political but a cultural, social initiative”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed at the beginning of the year to resume this festival, which was created in the sixties of the last century under the auspices of the International Radio and Television Organization of the countries of the socialist bloc and was an alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Its first edition, held in Prague in 1965, awarded the Czech singer Karel Gott, described by his compatriot, the novelist Milan Kundera, as “the idiot of music” for his light and commercial songs.

Subsequently, it was embraced by Bulgaria, the USSR, Poland, and even Finland, but it was thwarted after its controversial 1980 edition in the Polish city of Sopot.

And it is that in neighboring Gdansk, the massive protests of the opposition union Solidarity broke out, which marked the beginning of the collapse of the socialist camp.

In 2009, Putin proposed rescuing the festival and hosting singers from post-Soviet countries and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but the idea was stalled until now, with the aim of expanding the project to the BRICS countries.