Cuba’s first-ever theater performance was carried out during areitos (Indo-Cuban celebrations with a mixture of poetry, music and dancing with magic and religion. These celebrations were held long before all native islanders were killed off by the Spanish settlers.During the colonial rule, the first theatrical heard-of performance occurred in 1520 in Santiago de Cuba. In this spectacle a man allegedly called Pedro de Santiago was paid to perform a canvass-and-loop dance, a manifestation that ranks the island among the first American nations in Corpus performances.Scene-mounting elements were likewise commonplace in parties and rites held by African slaves. Santiago Pita y Borroto, a man who lived sometime between the 17th and 18th Centuries, is considered the island’s first-ever playwright for his work entitled El príncipe jardinero y fingido cloridano, a comedy published circa 1730 and 1733 in Seville. Nonetheless, Francisco Covarrubias (1755-1850) was the one forerunner of Cuba’s theater, the man who put Cuban quirks and puns onstage for the first time.Among his many contributions, the creation of such characters as el negrito (the little Black man), el chino (the Chinese man) and el gallego (Galician man, though traditionally used in Cuba to name all Spaniards regardless of their origins) were monumental in the development of Cuba’s vernacular theater. In the 1980s, Havana’s Theater Festival is officially instituted, and from that moment on, some important foreign companies have visited Cuba. Local groups and companies also trade on this exchange opportunity to roam the world and bring back home prizes and awards.Cuban theater is marked by an endless, deep and reflexive experimentation, always critical of national problems, making room for a debate with a demanding and knowledgeable public, formed by a Revolution that has also built countless schools of arts and theater academies all over the country. In the same breath, the Revolution has fostered and developed an amateur movement in the whole country.
