The mantle of repression of the Cuban regime falls once again on critical art with the recent act of censorship by State Security and the National Council of Performing Arts of Cuba (CNAE) regarding the play Acción #14 Las Brujas Uruguay by the theatrical group El Ciervo Encantado.
The premiere of the play, directed by Nelda Castillo and with stage direction by Lázaro and César Saavedra, was scheduled for this Friday, August 2, at the venue of the theatrical collective in Vedado.
The artist Lázaro Saavedra, National Award for Plastic Arts 2014, denounced the censorship of the staging on his Facebook profile.
"Dear friends, I inform you that after going through the 'censorship commission' and days of 'back and forth', State Security, in complicity with the current leadership of the National Council of Performing Arts, has just censored the play Acción #14 Las Brujas Uruguay, which was scheduled to be staged this Friday at El Ciervo Encantado," he wrote.
The cancellation of the premiere of Acción #14 Las Brujas Uruguay was also confirmed by Mariela Brito, actress of El Ciervo Encantado.
This repressive act "adds to the covert censorship of Madres, which is still 'postponed' by the CNAE," Saavedra said in his post, referring to the indefinite "postponement" of that work by the CNAE, the Ministry of Culture, and State Security, which prevented its premiere on July 12.
The Cultural Rights Observatory (ODC), an independent organization that monitors cultural rights in Cuba, also denounced the "censorship scheme" that the CNAE applies to the theater group, which has become an uncomfortable entity for the establishment of the Cuban regime.
"Now it is about Action #14 The Witches Uruguay, whose premiere was scheduled for this Friday, August 2. 'Due to content disagreements with the institution,' refers to the Facebook profile of El Ciervo Encantado," stated the ODC in a press release on its page on the social network.
The observatory condemned “this new violation of cultural rights in Cuba,” while updating institutions and international organizations related to the protection and defense of culture about the case.
El Ciervo Encantado was also a target of coercion against freedoms of expression and artistic creation in Cuba in April 2023, when the Ministry of Culture disapproved the screening in its venue, in Vedado, of films by three Cuban filmmakers: the documentaries La Habana de Fito, by Juan Pin Vilar, and Existen, by Fernando Fraguela and Yulier Rodríguez, and the docufiction El encargado, by Ricardo Figueredo.
In another episode of censorship, the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba disauthorized a tribute to the singer Olga Guillot at the Boleros Festival in Santiago de Cuba, a proposal that had been encouraged by the event's organizer and former provincial president of UNEAC, Rodulfo Vaillant, in the middle of this month.
La Guillot –known as The queen of bolero– has been completely banned from the country's radio stations for over six decades, since her permanent departure from Cuba in 1961.
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