Iraida Malberti, Director of Children’s Programs Dies at 82

Iraida Malberti with her son Juan Carlos Cremata, a film and theater director. (Courtesy)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 17 June 2018 — The outstanding artist Iraida Malberti Cabrera, born in 1936, died in the early hours of Saturday morning, 17 June, according to the Buenos Días program on Cuban Television.

During her long career she worked in many children’s projects and especially in La Colmenita (The Little Beehive), which her son, Carlos Alberto Cremata, directed. With the help of Juan Carlos Cremata, another of her sons, she co-directed the movie Viva Cuba in 2015. She was also director of the Cuban Television Children’s Ballet, and a screenwriter and director for radio, film and television.

Among the television series she has directed, among the memorable are Aunt Tata Tells Short StoriesAnd a Butterfly Says… and When I Grow Up. She began working in television in 1960 as choreographer for the program The World of Children, together with Carmen Solar and Edwin Fernández. She earned a doctorate in Pedagogy in 1962.

She was widowed by the explosion in mid-flight of a Cubana de Aviación flight in Barbados, on which her husband Carlos Cremata Trujillo, who worked for the state airline, was traveling.

Malberti was a discreet figure who avoided talking about her work, but in a recent interview she said that she hopes that the projects she participated would be “fun and educational” for the children, especially those who wanted to develop an artistic career. This “is a very attractive job, so dangerously attractive that children find it difficult to start and not continue,” she said.

Her remains will be cremated after a wake at the Calzada and K Street Funeral Home.

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