Laura Becquer – Translating Cuba

Acosta Dance, the Company of Cuban Dancer Carlos Acosta, Celebrates Ten Years of ‘Dedication’ Onstage

‘A Decade in Motion,’ taking place in Havana this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

Dancers of the company Acosta Dance, pictured on August 27 during rehearsals for a show in Havana. / EFE/Ernesto Mastrascusa

EFE (via 14ymedio), Laura Bécquer, Havana, 5 September 2025 — Acosta Dance Company, under the direction of prestigious Cuban dancer/choreographer Carlos Acosta, celebrates, this weekend in Havana, a decade of “sacrifice and dedication” onstage, with its fusion of classical and contemporary dance technique.

“It’s been ten years of sacrifice, of dedication, of working alongside Carlos and making his dreams become a reality. We’re very happy with what we’ve achieved”, remarks the company’s artistic director Yaday Ponce in an interview with EFE.

Acosta (born in Havana, 1973) founded the company at the end of 2015, although it actually had its artistic debut in April 2016 during the course of a new cultural boom in Havana which was seeing a new closeness develop between Cuba and the United States.

For Ponce, “it was very difficult to begin with: getting the public to understand Carlos’s intentions – here was a classically trained dancer, forming a contemporary dance company”.

“This took quite a bit of work, but I think we managed it”, she says, from the headquarters of Acosta Dance in the Havana district of Vedado, during final rehearsals before the launch of a commemorative season, entitled ’A decade in movement’, marking the anniversary which takes place in Havana this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Acosta, the current director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, is considered by critics to be one one of the foremost dance practitioners in the world

Acosta, the current director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, is considered by critics to be one one of the foremost dance practitioners in the world .

Trained at Havana’s National Ballet School, he consolidated, from a very young age, a career which was endorsed by numerous honours, including the Prix De Lausanne in 1990. He retired from performing in 2016 after 28 years as a professional dancer with prestigeous companies, both in Cuba and internationally.

It was at that point that he formed his own company, giving life to a personal project in which the classical ballet techniques in which he dominated were combined, with ease and imagination, with the liberty of movement of contemporary dance. continue reading

Ponce, who has accompanied the prestigeous dancer from the beginning, highlights that “he is a director who is always present”, even now when he resides in the United Kingdom.

“He’s a role model for me, not just as a dancer but as a director too. He’s very demanding: with the dancers’ precision, with the repertoire itself… everything. He’s in constant communication, present with us at all times, although he’s not actually physically present”, she explains.

Each one of the 14 dancers who make up the current Acosta Dance company – all young dancers trained in his own academy – transmits an energy and a passion to the rehearsals for the four pieces which will celebrate the ten year anniversary.

The evening includes: an interpretation of Spanish-Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos’s ’98 Days’, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s visit to Cuba in 1929-30; ’The Equation’, by the Cuban Georges Céspedes; and ’The Calling’, with choreography by Goyo Montero.

The evening includes: an interpretation of Spanish-Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos’s ’98 Days’, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s visit to Cuba in 1929-30

The show closes with ’From End to End’, by Ponce herself, based on the original piece by Cuban choreographer Alexis Fernández, a work nominated in 2022 for the Laurence Olivier prize in the UK.

On the subject of this final piece in particular, the young dancer explains to EFE that it has formed part of the repertory “since the company was founded, and it’s a reflection of the Cubans, a representation of what Cuba is, and of how Cubans feel, of their way of moving”.

“It’s a very integrated work because it includes dancers, musicians and audiovisual material. It’s what Carlos envisioned when he created the company in Cuba: that all the artistic elements of the show were to be integrated, to bring all this Cuban talent to the world’s attention”, she explains.

The company’s work has been endorsed through many diverse awards, among them the UK National Dance Prize (2025) for Best Medium Scale Dance Company.

For Ponce, her own “greatest personal achievement” has been in the training of her own dancers: “to be an artist-teacher for the company and for young dancers from all over Cuba”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Spanish Director Benito Zambrano Supports the New Cuban Independent Cinema in Havana

Benito Zambrano in Havana, during the International Film Festival, which ends this Sunday. / EFE

EFE, Laura Bécquer (via 14ymedio), Havana, 12 December 2024 — /Spanish filmmaker Benito Zambrano defended in an interview with EFE the new generation of young independent filmmakers that has emerged in Cuba, a collective favored, in his opinion, by the arrival of new technologies.

“There is a whole group of filmmakers very well-trained and capable of creating and making cinema without the need for Cuban television or the Icaic (Cuban State Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry),” said the Sevillian director, after giving a talk in the context of the New Latin American Film Festival of Havana.

The winner of several Goya awards for the films Solas and Intemperie pointed out that “the Cuba of Habana Blues (his second film project and a great success on the Island and in Spain) of the years 2003-2004 is not the same, cinematographically speaking.”

“The technology has allowed many more people to make movies and to be creatively more daring,” said Zambrano, who came to Cuba this time invited by the Transculture Program of UNESCO and the European Union to participate in meetings at the International School of Film and Television (Eictv), the Higher Institute of Art and the Havana Film Festival.

The Spanish filmmaker, who premiered his latest film El Salto in April of this year, also acknowledged that “it is not easy to raise a (cinematographic) project from here (in Cuba),” especially because “the Cuban film industry is very small and dependent on money and external financing”

The director of other films such as La voz dormida, Padre coraje and Pan de limón con semillas de poppy, also confessed his close relationship with the Island, where he grew up as a filmmaker. “Cuba is always part of me,” he confessed.

Zambrano was trained at Eictv, a multinational project created in 1986 and supported by figures such as the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The Island has been a constant in his artistic creation, as he has stated on several occasions.

The 45th edition of the New Latin American Cinema Festival of Havana, which began on December 5 and lasts until this Sunday, has 110 films in competition – 89 fewer than last year – from 42 countries, among which Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Spain stand out.

Titles such as Ella se queda (Mexico), Fenómenos naturales (Cuba, Argentina and France) and Los capítulos perdidos (Venezuela) are part of the selection within fiction feature films.

However, media attention has focused this year on the international premiere of the first two chapters of the new Netflix series, based on the famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian Nobel Gabriel García Márquez.

The names of the winners of the Coral awards are scheduled to be announced this Friday.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The Crisis Fuels a Fervor for Afro-Cuban Religions on the Island

Many Cubans look to the orishas for answers to their problems or ask them to help them emigrate

The link between crisis and religion is not new in Cuba / Yoruba Cultural Association

14ymedio, Laura Bécquer/EFE, 15 June 2024 — When a Cuban woman, Elvira García, knocked on the door of the babalao (Ifá priest) she did so looking for answers to her despair in the Afro-Cuban religion. The retired teacher was at her limit. Because of her difficulties in putting food on the table with the problems of shortages and inflation in Cuba, but also because of her daughter’s illness and the lack of medicines.

She also sought, she acknowledges, to reunite with her family – who had emigrated to the United States – and a spiritual refuge in the face of loneliness and difficulties. “I never professed any religion, but when my daughter had to have throat surgery and she was very ill, I looked to the orishas for the answers that could not be found on the earthly plane,” she explains.

It was then that she arrived at the house of babalao Daniel Oliva, who says that García is no exception. This 46-year-old Yoruba oracle scholar claims that he has seen a “religious explosion with the growth of believers due to the economic crisis in recent years.” This opinion is shared by experts and people linked to different religions on the Island. In the case of these traditional beliefs – which may be practiced by one in three Cubans, according to some studies – it is even more complex, because they are often mixed with Christianity. continue reading

“People are looking for a dream and see in religious places the possibility of helping them achieve it”

“People are looking for a dream and see in religious places the possibility of helping them achieve it,” explains Oliva from his house-temple in Havana. The link between crisis and religion, he says, is not new in Cuba. In the so-called Special Period, he remembers, something similar happened. “Many people turned to religion regardless of denomination – Yoruba, Christian, even Muslim – during the crisis of the 90s when things got bad,” he points out. In Havana, for example, it is common for groups of practitioners to meet on the shore of the sea or some rivers and, dressed completely in white, perform rituals.

Cuba is going through a harsh crisis that is reflected in frequent and prolonged blackouts, shortages of food, medicine and fuel, rampant inflation and a growing dollarization of the economy. The combination of the pandemic, the tightening of US sanctions and failed economic and monetary policies have aggravated the situation even further.

This scenario – and the lack of expectations for a medium-term recovery – has unleashed an unprecedented exodus in the last three years. According to different unofficial calculations, around 7% of the Cuban population has emigrated. Since 2021, some 650,000 have left for the United States and another 100,000 for Mexico. The numbers are even higher if those who have gone to Europe or other Latin American countries are counted.

The desire to leave their country in search of a better life is a recurring theme among those who consult Oliva

The desire to leave their country in search of a better life is a recurring theme among those who consult Oliva. “Ifá (father or guardian of secrets) has been listening to people’s prayers for years. The majority come because they want to live a little better and for that they have to emigrate,” explains the Cuban babalao.

Leaving Cuba “to improve economically” was precisely the reason that led Cuban chef Vladimir Blanes to “ask Orula” (the orisha who owns the Ifá board and divination). “I had several difficulties in achieving my dream, so I saw my last opportunity in religion,” explains the 36-year-old.

Oliva, however, is concerned because “these are times when deception, falsehood and lies increase in the face of people’s suffering.” However, he tells “all Cubans not to lose faith and to continue searching for “el aché ” (luck or blessing) despite the crisis.

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Cristina Vives, Independent Art Curator in Cuba: ‘What We Do Is Seen With Suspicion’

Vives reports that in 2014 they realized that they had to be more “aggressive” publicly and decided to position themselves on social networks. (EFE)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Laura Becquer, Havana, 16 July 2023 — – Promoting art independently and privately in Cuba continues to be seen with “suspicion” and leaves those who are dedicated to that activity in a certain situation of “vulnerability,” says curator Cristina Vives, with 30 years of experience in the sector, speaking in an interview with EFE.

“Thirty years after being independent and successful, what we do is viewed with suspicion, and that is directly proportional to being controlled, observed and questioned all the time,” says Vives from her studio in Havana, a magnet in the country’s art world.

This family project, which began with Vives and her husband, the renowned Cuban photographer José Alberto Figueroa, arose in the midst of the deep crisis of the Special Period of the 90s in Cuba. Now it also includes their daughter, Cristina Figueroa.

For Vives, going beyond the framework of state institutions at that time, with the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the economic, political and social bewilderment that it meant for Cuba, was a “suicidal leap.” But she has “never” regretted the decision.

“Since the end of the 80s there was a galloping crisis of cultural institutions in which many of the most prominent artists left the country looking for other paths, avoiding censorship and creative limitations. Everything was in decline,” she recalls. continue reading

It is in that panorama that Vives and Figueroa set up a studio in their apartment in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado, an initiative that is currently a benchmark for the private management of contemporary art on the Island.

“We surround ourselves with the most outstanding, novel, groundbreaking and curious of Cuban art of the 90s, and we fill the space with works of young creators such as Tania Bruguera, Belkys Ayón and Raúl Cordero, among others, who left the Art Institute between 1992 and 1994,” Vives says.

She emphasizes that the studio, later named Figueroa-Vives, also arose from the “frustration of a great attempt to collaborate with the cultural institutions. That’s when we said, ’no more’.”

“The years have passed, and it’s no surprise how we think and act. We can be uncomfortable, but now they’re used to it; there is more tolerance,” she continues.

Her trajectory, with a dozen exhibitions in Cuba and other countries, several explorations and a network of collaborators, does not guarantee anything. “We continue to walk a tightrope,” says this Cuban curator.

“We will always be vulnerable, as long as we are not a recognized, legally respected and supported institution,” laments Vives, who, even so, specifies that “if there is something to defend, it is the ability not to be afraid.”

Despite the three decades that have passed, Vives establishes comparisons between the current situation and that of its beginnings. Now, she points out, there are “sensitive loopholes in cultural leadership and in the strength of the institutions,” something that, together with the “almost massive exodus of a lot of artistic talent,” reminds her of the Special Period.

“Second acts (of a crisis) are impossible to resist,” comments the curator, who talks about the need to reinvent herself and the feeling of continuing to move in a “space of vulnerability.”

Vives feels that now “it is easier” for them to dialogue with the new generations who run some cultural institutions of the Cuban State because “they come with a spirit where ideological guilt does not touch them.”

They are not so contaminated,” says her daughter, who is in charge of the online shows of the family art studio.

In 2014 they realized that they had to be more “aggressive” publicly and decided to position themselves on social networks and manage a website so that their message reached many more people and could connect with more galleries on and off the Island.

“If you believe in art, you support it. And we have done that by trying to unite our ability to curate exhibitions with the help of entities like the Embassy of Norway and that of Spain, which have supported us a lot,” she explains.

This collaboration has allowed them to achieve visibility even outside Cuba and also to maintain the projects, says Figueroa, who points out the recent joint exhibitions between artists from the Island and the Spanish studio Nave Oporto.

Both have a very clear purpose 30 years after throwing themselves into this “suicide”: “To get the (artists) who are (in Cuba) to breathe and produce, and those who have left to return.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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