Sonya Schubert is the only woman in the crew setting up of the stage where the Rolling Stones will perform in Havana, Cuba, on March 25.
Schubert, German, doesn’t seem to care about the sun that burns her tattoos. She and a team that includes people from different countries have been working for several days, since the early morning until very late at night at a sports ground known as Ciudad Deportiva, where the concert is to take place.
“The stage will be ready in a couple of days,” she told OnCuba. “Then the production team will come to install the lights, something that could take some four days.”
There are 25 construction workers from Stage Crew, her employer, in Cuba, plus the staff taking care of catering, and the organizers of the show. The production team, some 50 people, will join them soon. There will be a total of 70 people working on the preparations.
“There are no Cubans involved in the construction works, just the catering. The food is amazing,” she said.
Schubert has built stages in many other parts of the world, for the Rolling Stones, and also for bands like U2, and Madonna.
About her experience in Cuba, she said that despite the heat, she has enjoyed coming to Cuba to set up the stage. “Everybody is very friendly. I haven’t seen much of Havana because we spend all day working, and I would have to move to the center of the city to see the sights. We’ll have a few days off at the end to travel to other parts of the country.”
When we asked her if she will be attending the concert, she said that she’d prefer not to. “It’s my day off, and I’d like to relax a little. But I still don’t know if I’ll have to be here or not. I think there will be loads of work, because it is going to be a massive concert.”
Official sources recently told Granma newspaper that they expect 400,000 people to attend, but one of the builders, Italian Velentino Demonte, said that it will be much more than that. He thinks attendance could be as high as one million people, and he said that there’s no doubt it is going to be a historic concert.
“I think there’s enough space. We normally throw concerts in stadiums, but this one will be in an open space, because there’s not enough space inside the stadium to accommodate all the people attending,” he said.
If his forecast is fulfilled, the 2 hour and 15 minute concert in Havana could come to compete with the Rolling Stones concert in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, attended by 1.3 million people.
Demonte said that the work is split among different companies taking care of different aspects of the job. He’s working on the construction of the stage, an 80m x 56 m platform.
Another company is setting up the security barriers, another one, the lights, another one, the sound. At the end, they will have to pack everything and leave the place as they found it.
