The Sublime Act of Doing Theater in Cuba
Text and Photos by Nester Nuñez (Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – There isn’t room for another person in the theater. The theater, which has a bar in the corner and lacks proper seating, was once a bar called El Biscuit, a cafeteria, a dive in one of the four most central corners of the city, next to the government headquarters and perpendicular to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Cuba in the province. When you enter, you turn your back on all of that, literally, and on the everyday misery figuratively, just like when the movie lights go off (used to go off) and you give yourself over (used to give yourself over) to fiction, to fantasy.
Except here, the environment is completely cabaret-style, with garish colors, large posters, Pullman-style seats, a plastic and removable stage, a glittery curtain, lights, and people who will inevitably end up dancing reggaeton after the show ends. No fear: Hasta que se seque el malecón (Until the Malecon dries up); Diablo, qué linda (Damn, how beautiful); La totaila; me las voy a llevar a todas pa’ un viaipí (I’m taking them all to a VIP); whatever the latest catchy refrain is, along with the Van Van, who are never missing. That’s what you find at the operational base of Teatro El Portazo, a group I thought would disappear, but no.
“Before I went to Mexico two and a half years ago, I was in a moment where I felt quite comfortable formally, in terms of search and expression… It wasn’t even stagnation; it was more like fulfillment. But that fulfillment precisely scared me,” says Pedro Franco, the director of El Portazo. “I needed a stimulus big enough that could change a bit the way I thought about theater. Something new that I couldn’t find in my immediate context, in the city where I do theater, neither with the actors, nor in the media, nor in the production and circulation models in which I was doing theater in 2022.”
It was a group cohesive around shows like CCPC, La República Light (a type of cabaret), the musical comedy Todos los hombres son iguales (All men are the same), and the drama Por gusto (For Fun). It was a group that had received and distributed donations of medicines and food during that S.O.S. Matanzas, during the pandemic, and many caught the coronavirus doing that work. They had performed in several provinces across the country; they shared the rent and cigarettes, went to the same gym… A few traveled to Mexico, and others stayed behind.
Over time, some crossed the border into the United States, while others stayed in the beloved Mexico, where after El Biscuit’s shows, they would pay tribute with popular rancheras sung by the audience and the highly anticipated tequila shots, preceded by salt and lime to make them go down easier. What was difficult for everyone was what was to come after the split: the possible end of the project.
“I never announced that I was leaving, I didn’t think it would be so long, but Mexico won my presence,” says Pedro. “I had been to Spain, the United States, Argentina, Venezuela… Never to Mexico, I don’t understand why. I spent two years saying: I don’t know why, if Mexico is so close, I’ve never been here before. It’s an incredible city, an incredible country, an incredible culture that has so much to teach us. These are links that transcend us and enhance our abilities to develop ourselves.”
“While I was there, I looked at what I had achieved in those 11 years. El Portazo started with scaffolding on the roof of the Patio Colonial of the Hermano Saiz Association with four amateur artists, and in a decade it evolved to become a solid company; it had a theater venue and a production mode that could be sustained. I think that was an important achievement. But precisely because the decade had been so productive, I asked myself: What will the next one be like?”
The situation is truly dreadful and terrifying, you’ll see how a mouse will die of hunger… Very early on, to connect with the audience, which is large and new, and to introduce them to the discursive proposal, the actors sing and dance that children’s song about the little mouse Miguel. Later, they will do the same with the song made popular by La Colmenita: “We are here for passion, for love, and feeling, and because having talent is having a good heart.” Children should come together, at least from time to time, and together do good, in their own way: by playing.” In this playful way, Martí is already on the stage, and so is childlike joy: a show of intentions and varied and very Cuban references with which Pedro hooks you and prepares you for what’s next.
“When you are an emigrant, it becomes inevitable to cast that gaze full of so much nostalgia at everything you have achieved, and you compare what you had with that starting from scratch, that starting over. When you move out of your context, no one knows you, no one has to trust you, and that gives a terrible feeling of orphanhood.”
“In Mexico, I did everything: restaurant host, party organizer, masseur, bartender, I taught acting to children… But there were two jobs that allowed me to develop, fortunately. One was as coordinator of the cultural area of the Cuban Circle of Mexico, which also exists in places like Tampa, New York, Venezuela, Puerto Rico… My basic job was to program the activities they organize in defense of Cuban identity and to bring together the Cuban community in that territory. A significant job where I felt very useful, very connected with the entire national history.”
“The second job, which was very practical and which I still do from Cuba, is project coordinator for a company called Ajedrez, Eventos y Soluciones, which is an important cultural production and management company in Mexico. That’s where I connected with the cultural industry in Mexico, which was more or less what I went looking for.”
“That’s when I understood everything that production really means. Here it’s said that nothing gets produced in Cuba. Yes, in Cuba, things do get produced. Although, above all, they are managed. But I understood that there is executive production, operational production, logistical production, all kinds… I learned the value of producers, the producer’s way of thinking, about the necessarily tense relationship between the producer and the creator. I saw what the true responsibility and usefulness of the creator is in a production framework, in the creation of a product for reaching audiences. How is a project profitable, sustainable, viable? Or not? I don’t know if it’s fortunate or unfortunate, but since my time in Mexico, I see theater in numbers. That is, I see theater in human resources, in audience, in profitability…”
At this point, the Biscuit audience enjoys the burlesque. The mulatta has heard the “seductive” proposals from the mulatto and the Galician, and in the end, she says neither of them, she’ll stay with the Chinese woman. This Yunay no one can judge her, oh, and the yumas (foreigners) like her. Pedro Franco finds the yuma attractive, it contributes to him, as it does for everyone, but he doesn’t sell, at least not yet.
“I never decided I was going to leave Cuba permanently… They would have to kick me out, explicitly and tacitly, although I never thought I was the kind of person who would be subjected to exile, you know? I don’t think I deserve such a punishment, I haven’t done anything to deserve that,” Pedro says sarcastically. “So, I have a responsibility, I took it on a long time ago, that has to do with my patriotic education, and that’s something I’ve known for a long time: it’s not me, it’s my grandmother. My usefulness, my destiny (I am religious), they are in Cuba.”
“While I was in Mexico, I was afraid of losing my connection to Cuban reality, and that was one of the most important incentives for me to return. Analyzing the crisis from there, which is in one of its toughest spots, I said: Well, I’m going to see what it is, what it’s about.”
And he returned, to the surprise of many or a few. He returned to work here, to live here, to continue dreaming:
“What I found was… Before I say that, I’ll tell you I don’t usually romanticize the past, because I think that’s a trap of memory. I like to always place myself in the present with a projection to the future. Now I am working to restore certain inner fabrics within the group, certain ways or procedures, I’m doing what needs to be done now, without thinking about what we had in the past.
“But I tell you that now everything is more hostile. Today, I was walking to work and thinking that we are no longer characterized by joy. It’s not that we’ve stopped being joyful, we still are. The weekend, for example, is a big party here at El Biscuit. But that’s no longer what characterizes us, and it did characterize Cubans at some point. That’s perhaps the hardest part, because I’ve found a sad society, a depressed society, with very little ability to resist precisely because of its depression, because it has no incentives, no areté (excellence). Joy used to be a great weeder of weeds; not anymore.
“In these new circumstances, continuing to do theater is a blessing. Theater is the child of crisis. It’s very difficult, it’s a great sacrifice. It’s almost an absurdity. But the way I’m taking it on is as a blessing, really. As a creator who is about to turn 40 and enter my creative maturity zone, if God permits, I can nourish myself from this context to activate my artistic springs, to channel my worldview, to try to modify, from my craft, the reality or attitude of others.”
“Calling for rehearsal, calling for a performance, calling for an audience and having that relationship occur while everything outside seems dystopian, I think it’s a very unique space in the history we are living, and I’m enjoying it to the fullest, trying to make it worthwhile for me and for those around me.”
The dystopia he talks about is the one we all know: power outages, cooking with charcoal, lack of food and transportation, prices of everything, the dollars, the poor government management, the end of humanitarian parole, and the possibility of escaping through that legal and direct route. Inside, in El Biscuit, an actress recites her 15 reasons for continuing to build her own house, which is everyone’s house. Then, they propose to hold new elections. They call to choose between Antonio Guiteras, Julio Antonio Mella, and Rubén Martínez Villena. The crosses on the ballots mark the preference for Guiteras, perhaps because we are in Matanzas, or more likely because it is the name most mentioned these months regarding broken thermoelectric plants. Then there is a parade of heroes. Pure Cuban joking. There’s no other way.
“Towards the end of the 80s, when they used to say that Cuba was laughing, there was a great effervescence of theater projects in Cuba. In 1990, all that stopped suddenly, it stopped abruptly, no more of this, no more of that, and there was a great exodus, and my teachers remained. Therefore, when I arrived at the National School of Art in 1999, they had already been hardened by a decade of much work and great need. They had poetics formed and consolidated in that crisis. Carlos Díaz, Carlos Celdran, and Ruben Dario Salazar are the three people who have a real influence on my thinking and on my theatrical attitude. When I have a difficult situation, I think, what would they do, how would they solve it? That’s why I coined a phrase: My teachers were forged in the crisis. Their legacy to me was their capacity for resistance, resilience, their ability to not let themselves be defeated.”
The mother, the girlfriend, and the hero from the fiction of La República Light present their points of view in monologues. Why so much suffering, for whom, for which ideal? Would the sacrifice of one person change anything?
“I took a workshop with Eugenio Barba, and he said that theater has the responsibility to survive, that at the moment any form of power dismantles a theatrical nucleus, that theatrical nucleus has already lost because it couldn’t guarantee its usefulness. So, what I find incredible about my teachers is that they are creators with 30, with 40 years of uninterrupted work, and they haven’t been able to dismantle them, they haven’t been able to kill their hope or the sublime, the most sublime gesture of making theater.”
“For me, theater is usefulness. I am always Marti follower: the utility of virtue. If not, what’s the point of virtue? To revel in virtue? We, theater makers, are not productive in terms of the value chain. It’s not that we can feed the people. The real productive value of theater, one of them, is that it is a simulator of reality. In recent years, I have developed a poetics in which the individual can feel free for a fragment of time. They can enter into communion with a group of people and feel that they are, that we are, free in this moment of the play, even though outside the same circumstances of hostility prevail. And I believe that this simulator of reality, without perhaps having real consequences on the individual, is an important productive value. Based on that, I do theater, in order for it to be useful to society or to the audience it impacts.”
With her rifle at the ready, the militia woman with a pink wig, that fluid-gender actor, dressed for the occasion in a corset and olive-green shorts, passed through the scene. With her rifle in her arms and the lamp from the literacy campaign, the eternal lantern of our peasants. She was searching in verses for the gallant gentleman, the gentleman without flaw and without fear. Her fear was that the gentleman had forgotten the good proletarian, that he was growing fat under the traitorous shelter of certain round tables.
“I resumed CCPC, La República Light because… well… First, as long as there’s Portazo, there will be cabaret. That’s a sentence. And CCPC, I think, is an important tone. I’d like, every time we have to start doing something, to start it from there. It’s like a rod, like a measuring stick. If we manage to connect an audience with this CCPC, fine, let the next thing come. But it’s a way of stabilizing the group, saying ‘we’re here’ and projecting ourselves into the future. That’s why this show returns, beyond the need for discourse. Although it’s curious that the discourse of this CCPC hasn’t died, because Cuban society remains in this constant historical loop.”
“The other thing is that one romanticizes moments. Theater is such an ephemeral art that it immediately fades from memory. What happens today won’t be remembered tomorrow. It doesn’t have to be remembered. It’s not like film. An filmed shot stays in memory and on a real physical medium… In theater, you have to come back, repeat it every day. So, besides romanticizing moments, one romanticizes the casts, romanticizes the audiences. I think that from the decade of 2012 to 2022, our casts reached a level of technical progression. I left the group in charge of William, who I believe did an excellent, wonderful job of survival. It was very unlikely that El Portazo would survive in my absence, and William was the person who could do it, there was no one else in the world who could do it, mainly because of his authority.”
In his absence, William Quintana gathered a new cast and directed Tango Patéticus. From the ceiling of El Biscuit, old shoes still hang as part of the set. He also started staging El Baracutey, a Cuban farce, the piece they’re currently working on, once again under Pedro’s direction:
“Meeting new actors, showing myself to them is always a party and a discovery for me. It’s also difficult. These are people I didn’t know, that we’re just now getting to know, we’re having our first marital contract with the exits of CCPC. It’s their first show under my direction.”
“But the difficult part is not who they are, it’s not their individualities. The difficult part is the generations. It has to do with the year they were born, with the influences they have, with what they were in contact with, what their formation is. And that’s something that will accompany me all my life while I keep this job. That is to say, now I’m working with people born in the early 2000s. I imagine that in 25 years, I’ll be working with people who were born today. That’s also an incentive, by the way, because you never get tired.”
The little grade school dancer, the mulatta, the Chinese woman, the Galician man, the female militia, the homeland that wielded its shining sickle and hammer, the mother and the girlfriend finally leave the stage. The fiery applause must be heard beyond the park, on the three corners. It’s the same sound as always, coming from the hands of young people who had never been to El Biscuit before.
“Our historical audience is in Miami, along with our old cast. The only one not there is me. When we see the views of the El Portazo Instagram account, we have more reach in Miami than in Matanzas. We have more reach in Madrid than in Santiago. That means there’s been a displacement of the audience, that’s no secret to anyone, we saw them leave just as they saw us leave. We were in Mexico and Cuban theater paraded over there, even the audiences.”
“So, when you talk to these kids who are coming now about Mella, when you talk to them about Guiteras, Martí, Villena, I think they don’t really get it. They weren’t taught that kind of history the same way we were. The CCPC show uses elements of the patriotic background from certain parts of childhood and adolescence, and apparently that’s not their own background. They relate to history in a disconnected way, it doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s like teaching them about a Discman.”
“But the show is working even with them. I’m not going to make it lighter, I’m not going to water it down. There are people encountering their first CCPC in their lives. Sometimes their eyes go wide. Sometimes they don’t understand. They don’t know where to clap. They don’t know that you clap at the end of the show. They don’t know the actor can talk to you, that they’re a person… But when it comes down to it, they enjoy it, because the anthropological survival of theater, over the thousands of years it’s been alive, regardless of which young person has been sitting there, is the possibility of community. And the human being remains the human being, still reacting to the same stimuli and the same methods as long as they’re well placed.”
“And considering the success of this third season, I can announce, as a preview, that we’re going to release a fourth season. That’s to say, during this year, this cast will have its own CCPC, where we’ll merge the CCPC from 2015, 2018, and 2022. We’ll see what happens.”
Pedro Franco is a leader who knows what he wants and knows how to achieve it. He lives for theater with a passion that no longer seems to belong to this era.
“After being a theater-maker, the most important thing that’s happened to me is crowning Obbatalá. I think it’s… a communion, a perfect balance. I think it’s justice and harmony. I think I needed it. Of course, He came to me, right? And yes, it’s been very important for my creative career. Faith, I mean. There’s a theater term called Faith and Sense of Truth. I’m very grateful to be a human being who found faith, which is a high concept. It’s a daily change. I wouldn’t know how to explain it.”
First published in Spanish by La Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.