The Interactivo group, led by Roberto Carcassés, closed this saturday the festival CubaCulture, which for nine years has been taking place in Trigueros, in the Spanish province of Huelva. Its tenth edition, inaugurated on August 22 and dedicated to Cuban music, included performances by singer-songwriter Carlos Varela and pianist Ernan Lopez-Nussain addition to other activities, such as the screening of the documentary The sea in Madridby actor and director Vladimir Cruz, and the collective exhibition I See Islands, made up of 50 Cuban plastic artists.
Carcassés, together with the singers William Vivanco and Melanie González, the bassist José Raúl Machado and the percussionist Inor Sotolongo, made almost the entire audience dance. The explosion of Afro-Cuban jazz, rumba and son in the garden of the Art Center Flour from another costwhich last night was attended by some two hundred people, contrasted with the silence and dim lighting of the town, whose houses, balconies and ironwork could well be –except for their immaculate whiteness– those of a colonial landscape on the Island. Not in vain very close Palos de la Frontera is from here, from where the three ships departed, unknowingly heading to the new continent.
Something of that spirit of encounter breathes CubaCultura, an initiative of the Cuban actress Laura de la Uz, her husband, the photographer Héctor Garrido, originally from Huelva, and the couple formed by the painter Juan Manuel Seisdedos, born in Trigueros, and Lourdes Santos . The renowned Andalusian artist and his wife were already catalysts of culture in the municipality since in 2011 they converted an old flour factory not only into his home but also into the flour center of another matter.
“It was love at first sight,” he tells 14 intervene Laura de la Uz from when she met her husband’s friends. They immediately set out to carry out the festival. The initial idea was to bring Cuban artists to perform with Spanish artists, something they have sometimes achieved, says De la Uz, but it is very difficult to achieve due to the impossibility of rehearsing together beforehand.
The actress is surprised by the growth of CubaCultura, which when it started, in 2014, only offered a concert. “We don’t believe it, because we never thought about it.” Little by little he became stronger in performances and public attendance. Throughout these years, for example, the musicians Haydée Milanés, Kelvis Ochoa and Javier Ruibal have participated, as well as the writer Leonardo Padurawho in 2022 spent a whole week in Trigueros.
At first, it was paid by the four partners. “We spent more than three years losing money,” says De la Uz, until over time the Diputación de Huelva and the Trigueros City Council, sponsors to date, began to finance the event, as can be seen on the advertising poster.
In it, the family businesses Volumen Huelva (which manages Harina de otro costal) and ARTeHOTEL Calle2 (the hotel-boutique that De la Uz and Garrido have in Havana, next to the Fidel Castro Center, in the heart of Vedado). Figuratively, it also appears that the Cuban Embassy in Spain and ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) “collaborate”.
“It’s never enough, really,” says the actress, “because bringing these groups in is very difficult, but we do it for the love of art, for the love of Cuba.” To the question of what awaits her on the Island, whose number of artists decreases year after year due to emigration or exile, she answers: “I don’t know.” It does not seem that she is going to choose that route, at least for the moment. “It’s not easy to be uprooted, is it? It’s a tough decision when you’ve never thought of leaving.”
Pilar Zúmel, founder of the extinct bar Yemaya in Madrid and protagonist of the documentary by Vladimir Cruz, who has been attentive to the conversation, intervenes: “You also have to have the opportunity to do something here, because starting here is not easy.” She knows what she’s talking about. Her place, “more than a bar, it was like a house” for all the Cubans who arrived at the beginning of this century to the Spanish capital and became, as highlighted in a song by the musician Julio Fowler, the “model of the Island in freedom”.
It was a place “very inclusive, very tolerant, the same came from Cuba, from Miami, from Spain,” Vladimir Cruz himself refers to 14 intervene.
The actor and director put all the “scattered” and “chaotic” material that was on the bar in order, at the request of Zúmel, who did not want all that, which “meant a lot”, to be lost. The film premiered last December, at the Havana International Festival, and since then he has presented it in small places like this one in Trigueros.
Cruz, who has lived in Spain since the film Strawberry and Chocolate, by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, made him famous, he says that he does not have much to do with all the artists who have come to Madrid in recent years, although sometimes he does see them “one by one”. “There is also a lack of meeting points, which was what the Yemayá meant at the time,” he laments.
Regarding the current situation in Cuba, he says: “It is a very hard time and I don’t have the solution, if I did… What I try is to do as many things as possible and do my job well, where Cuba is always present The suffering and concern of the Cuban people are also my suffering, and I try to reflect it through the best I know how to do, which is my work. I am not a politician, I am an artist. You have to be better at what we do to be better Cubans and that in the end helps to be a better Cuba”.
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