“If you’re looking for a key word for what you’ve seen, don’t worry, here it is: miserable,” says one specialist.
14ymedio, Havana, 7 July 2025 — La Colmenita [The Little Beehive] a well-known Cuban children’s theater company, presented its latest show last Friday, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nonagenarian Raúl Castro Ruz—present at the premiere—received more applause than the children themselves, perhaps because the venue chosen for the performance was the universal hall of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. The theater was packed, yes: with olive-green uniforms, diplomatic ties, and the guayaberas of the bureaucracy.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel also attended the premiere of Una colmena cerrado [A Closed Beehive], and the play closed the annual meeting of Cuban diplomatic mission heads abroad. But it didn’t end there. This Sunday, the production was broadcast on Cubavisión, sparking an avalanche of negative reactions among viewers.
The play is about sick children who blame the imperialist “blockade” for all their misfortunes.
The synopsis: sick children who blame the imperialist “blockade” for all their misfortunes. “Shocking” was the word used by the official press about the piece. The opinions of critics and experts, however, have been quite different.
“Is this art?” critic and researcher Yasmani Castro Caballero asked on social media. “The work I saw yesterday by La Colmenita is a clear example of when art becomes political propaganda and not political art,” he emphasized.
“It’s a shame. To say it’s mediocre is a very high assessment.”
The young critic also questioned the loss of artistic flair that, according to him, the company had displayed in previous productions. “It’s a shame. To say it’s mediocre is a very high epithet,” he added. “Teresita Fernández must be turning in her grave for using her highly poetic music in this attempt at a theatrical production.”
The artistic and general direction was by Carlos Alberto Tin Cremata Malberti. However, the libretto was not written by any renowned revolutionary poet or playwright, but by an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On this occasion, Pedro Pablo Prada Quintero combined his skills as an improvised screenwriter and as Cuban ambassador to Argentina. It is true that he studied philology in the former Soviet Union and collaborated as a journalist for the magazine Verde Olivo [Olive Green], although since 1994 he has dedicated himself entirely to official diplomacy.
The company itself, perhaps aware of the show’s artistic shortcomings, was quick to clarify that “it is not a play, at least not in the traditional sense.” Instead, they proclaimed that it was “an action for justice and life.”
“In this mock staging, there was an excess of what theater should not allow itself: being boring and obvious.”
Playwright and professor at the University of the Arts, Roberto Viña, agreed that the production had nothing to do with theater: “The reek of slogans and flat rhetoric destroyed the class and disintegrated the classroom. It’s true, that wasn’t theater. It can’t be when the sense of victimhood and begging overrides all ethics and creative responsibility. In that simulated staging, there was an excess of what theater shouldn’t allow itself to be: boring and obvious.”
Viña’s criticism went beyond the stage: “State negligence and ineptitude cannot be attributed to a policy of foreign interference.” His opinion was shared and applauded by numerous colleagues across the country. Even people outside the performing arts pointed out that it was “in very poor taste to use sick children for the state’s political propaganda.”
But Viña was even more incisive: “If you’re looking for an essential word for what we saw, don’t worry, here it is: miserable. Because the legitimacy of the pain, loss, and trauma behind these ’everyday stories’ doesn’t excuse the miserable way in which they appropriate that narrative for ideological advertising.”
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