I always come back, but it never becomes a routine. The mystery of the city remains intact for me. It continues to be the beautiful place that embraces me with its rivers, its history, its people and its putrid lichens. The Matanzas that I know is the one I have discovered through the theater. Before that I had gone to Varadero with my parents, when there were incentives for vanguard workers. My parents continued to be exemplary, but the freebies ended and I spent more than ten years without returning to the blue beach. If I had to choose between a hotel in Varadero and the theaters in Matanzas, I prefer the latter.
My first trip with the theater as a pretext was in 2007, two years after I began my degree in Theater Studies. We went to a Cuban Playwriting Day organized by La Casa de la Memoria Escénica. It was a very important trip in my life. Professor Eberto took the whole group and that week we created very strong ties between us, with the theater and with the city. Everything seemed grand, deep, transcendent. Everything was important, from the lectures by the renowned theater artists to lying on the coast in front of Guanímar. My classmates, with whom I shared that trip, are now my lifelong friends. Eberto is still my teacher. The theater in Matanzas that I knew then, continues to be one of my great inspirations.
According to the tales of old theater artists, there has been no stopping the people of Matanzas; they are tireless creators, enthusiastic and self-sacrificing people. They say that, in the beginning, each one went their own way. The theatre groups had their own exclusive cast and there was not much mixing. Each group had a different aesthetic and style and there are even rumors that there were quarrels between them. When I was 18 and new to the world of theatre, I thought that the groups from Matanzas did not get along. Until one day I saw the young actors from each group dancing and having fun together at a party. Then a young man dreamed of doing a play to unite all the young people from those other established groups. Something like a party, but seriously; a generational trench that would allow the young people to do the theatre they wanted and meet again in a new space without borders. That young man is called Pedrito Franco. He created a group called Teatro El Portazo in 2011 and that wish to unite the young people became a reality.
El Portazo’s premieres were theater events and surely many people outside the guild remember the CCPC, a kind of cabaret that shook the city, won a lot of awards and traveled all over Cuba.
Surely what I have just told did not happen like that, the theater critics will have a more scientific version, but that is what is in my emotional memory.
I think that El Portazo changed Matanzas’ theater reality. After that, young actors work with various groups, to support each other and defend together the legacy of the old masters.
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One of my greatest creative links with the city is through CCPC, La República Light. One day Pedrito wrote to me to ask me to make a list with the theme “construction.” It was the first time that one of my texts was said by actors on stage. It was surprising to have seen that group come into being when I was a young girl and years later to be able to serve them from what I like to do most: write.
List of reasons to build
- Because building here, on this island, is an act of courage, of nonconformity, the most genuine expression of tropical surrealism.
- Because if I don’t build, my roof will fall down, my igloo will melt, my guano will fly away, my prefabricated material will leak, my rebar will explode, my slab will crack, my floor will sink, my plasterboard will split, mice will sneak into my kitchen.
- We have to build because there are too many people out there dedicating themselves to destroying.
- If I am my own investor and my workforce and my supervisor and my central level, no one can steal a bag of cement from me.
- Because this propped up Old House can’t take another blow.
- Because building is in fashion: website under construction, dance under construction, socialism under construction, system under construction, answers under construction, solutions under construction, aspirations…that cannot be built because there are not enough materials.
- This town cannot withstand another collapsed building, we are still collecting the rubble from “that collapse”.
- I want to build, I do not want to repair, I do not want to mend, I do not want to rectify, I want to move forward and upward, not put a patch on every hole in this heart.
- Because I do not want to wait for a cyclone to sweep through.
- I do not believe in miracles and my saint tells me not to walk under balconies. That is why I walk, without fear, through the middle of the street, because I prefer to go against the traffic than to die crushed trusting in the Miraculous Static.
- Because building is also founding, planning, dreaming, giving birth…and I deserve to do all that and do it here, in my little piece.
- Because I don’t want to stay and live in the neighbor’s house.
- Because in my DNA, along with adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, there is brick, cement and sand.
- I don’t want to hang a piece of cardboard with a license number, because my constructive work is bigger and purer. I am ____________ ____________, _____ years old, born in Cuba after the collapse of my home, that is my license.
- I want to raise my columns, even if there is no office where they give the subsidies to build, through my own efforts, a new country.
My second creative link with the city has to do with Teatro de Las Estaciones. Since I was a student, I have gone to Matanzas many times to the International Puppet Workshop and to see premieres of the group, which is undoubtedly one of the most important in the history of Cuban theater. This year I have gone five times because we have been making a documentary to pay tribute to the 30th anniversary of the group. Contact with Rubén Darío and Zenén Calero, both National Theater Prize winners, has made me fall in love with Matanzas even more. Today I have new visions of the city that add to those that have been with me for years.
The Matanzas that I carry in my heart is the one that Milanés’ scholars told me about, the one in the music of Dámaso Pérez Prado that I have heard as production soundtracks, and the one in Estorino’s works. This diverse Matanzas has the accent of Icarón’s works, of the images of Teatro D’Sur created by Pedro Vera, of the choreographies of Liliam Padrón and of the books of Ulises Rodríguez Febles, of whom I have been a fan since I was young. This city to which I always return has the street magic of El Mirón Cubano with Pancho rowing towards his swordfish. It has the history and perseverance of Papalote and René Fernández Santana, master of masters, playwright, designer and puppet director who at 80 continues to put on works on Daoiz Street. It has the drive, the courage and the youth of María Laura Germán and her “I Want.”
My Matanzas of theaters has other faces close to the stage that invite me to return. They can be as varied as the poems of Laura Ruíz and José Manuel Espino, the wooden sculptures of Adán Rodríguez, the books of Vigía or a swim at the Tenis beach at 6 in the evening any day of the year.
My children have grown up visiting that city of theater people. But there is another unknown city for me that I wanted to discover with them. From my Matanzas of theaters, we set out, as a family, towards other sides of the prism. I gave my children, aged 4 and 13, an atypical and amazing vacation. I know that they will always remember the walks along Calle del Medio and the San Juan River bridges and the stay in San Miguel de los Baños, El Hormiguero, Perico and Indio Hatuey. Maybe, when they grow up, they will prefer that Matanzas to a hotel in Varadero.
Meanwhile, I am still in love. And I will continue committed to the people of Matanzas. With the theatre people who have given me so much and with the people of the countryside who filled my hands with flowers, fruit and morning coffees.
Author
Isabel Cristina
