Away from the spotlight, a reality prevails marked by exodus, censorship, and an increasingly precarious resistance.
14ymedio, Havana, January 22, 2025 — Every January 22nd, the island’s official calendar marks Cuban Theater Day, a date meant to celebrate the nation’s stages, but in this 2026, we find the theaters shrouded in a gloom that extends far beyond the theatrical realm. While the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) showcases the Villanueva Awards as proof of cultural vitality, a reality marked by exodus, censorship, and an increasingly precarious resistance prevails outside the spotlight.
The origin of this commemoration is written in blood. In 1869, at Havana’s Villanueva Theater, the shouts of “Long live the land that produces sugarcane!” and “Long live Free Cuba!” from the audience during a comic play, unleashed a massacre perpetrated by the Spanish Volunteer Corps. That episode irreversibly sealed the link between Cuban theater and political freedom.
Today, 157 years later, the performing arts community no longer faces colonial bayonets, but rather a system that expels its creators, monitors every uncomfortable word, and extinguishes—literally and symbolically—the lights on its stages. Cuba is experiencing one of the deepest crises in its recent history, and the impact on the performing arts is devastating.
In this context, the 2025 Villanueva Critics’ Awards were formally presented this Wednesday at the Villena Hall of the UNEAC (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba). The jury, after evaluating just over one hundred productions—a number that pales in comparison to the exuberance of previous decades—decided to recognize those works that managed to overcome logistical shortcomings and widespread discouragement.
Behind the diplomas and speeches about ethical commitment, the crisis of Cuban theater is structural and painful.
Among the award winners were Faro, by Teatro Andante; Un rastro en las estrellas, by Teatro de Las Estaciones; and Actea, by the Lyceum Mozartiano de La Habana. Also recognized were Eclipse (Danza Espiral) and El nombre de Juana, a collaboration between the Nave Oficio Creative Community of Isla and the Mujeres, Fuente de Creación [Women, Source of Creation] project. In the international category, the awards went to Core Meu (Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo) and Gaia 2.0 (French company Bakhus).
Especially worth mentioing is the Special Recognition awarded to Un domingo llamado deseo (A Sunday Called Desire), a production by Trotamundo and Teatro El Público. The play, written and directed by Norge Espinosa, starred two legends who refuse to leave the stage: National Theater Award winners Verónica Lynn and Carlos Pérez Peña.
However, behind the diplomas and speeches about ethical commitment, the crisis in Cuban theater is structural and devastating. In a country where scheduled blackouts dictate the rhythm of daily life, sustaining a theater season borders on the absurd. Many performances are canceled due to lack of electricity, and those that do take place are held in unheated theaters, where audience and artists share the same sweat and anxiety under roofs that threaten to collapse after years of neglect.
Emigration has also emptied theater companies, fragmented collectives, and forced the constant reassembly of casts and technical teams. Directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and critics have left in successive waves, driven by paltry salaries, a lack of career prospects, and a suffocating political climate. The result is an intermittent theater scene, sustained more by personal sacrifice and sheer willpower than by a coherent and sustained cultural policy.
What ethics and what civic duty can be upheld if not that of the cry for freedom that marked the national theater in 1869?
In the provinces, where theater has always been more vulnerable, the situation is even more dire. Cancelled tours, indefinitely postponed premieres, and theaters that barely manage to open a few days a month are now part of the everyday landscape.
Far from being a relic of the past, censorship continues to operate as an everyday mechanism. And sometimes administrative silence, budget cuts, or selective exclusion are enough to discipline creativity.
Those who choose to stay walk a tightrope. Some take refuge in metaphorical language and subtext to avoid reprisals; others resign themselves to the marginalization of alternative theaters, always under the watchful eye of State Security. Few, however, betray the spirit of the Villanueva—and the old saying about the “egg-eating dog”*—to sing praises to a regime that has muzzled theater for decades.
As the award-winning artists themselves have repeatedly stated, the mission of theater is to “cultivate values”: ethics, civic responsibility, and aesthetic sensibility. But on an island where official discourse reduces culture to slogans and propaganda, that mission becomes uncomfortable. What ethics and civic responsibility can be upheld if not that of the cry for freedom that marked the national theater in 1869? If the land no longer produces even sugarcane, what, then, is the Cuba to which Cuban theater aspires today?
*Translator’s note: From the custom of putting a hot egg (freshly taken from boiling water) in the mouths of dogs that tend to eat eggs, as a lesson to them.
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