Communist-run Cuba, which once frowned upon the Beatles as a decadent Western influence, on Thursday held an open-air covers concert in a Havana park to celebrating 50 years since the release of the band's landmark album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Beatlemania has flourished belatedly on the Caribbean island, where authorities in the 1960s and 1970s considered Beatles songs "ideological diversionism."
That censorship faded after the Cold War ended and late President Fidel Castro in 2000 pulled a cultural about-face, calling John Lennon a "revolutionary" hero and unveiling a bronze statue of him sitting on a bench in a park.