The Cuban actress Beatriz Valdés starred in an extensive and emotional interview with Venezuelan journalist Luis Olavarrieta, published on YouTube, in which she offered a devastating perspective on the fate that the Cuban regime imposed on her generation.
In a striking moment, Valdés described what it meant to grow up under revolutionary indoctrination: "I was raised in a very powerful Cuba from a cultural standpoint, with extraordinary references. I grew up in a society where we were passionate about those political ideas that made us believe we were privileged in the world. That path led us as a country to a great desert, and that hurts."
The actress, born in Havana in 1963, was even more direct in describing the effect of the system on her generation: "I feel that I was part of a large herd that was pushed in one direction and has now turned into a vast desert."
Valdés trained from the age of eight at the Children's Workshop of Teatro Estudio Hubert de Blanck, under the direction of actress Raquel Revuelta, and graduated from the National School of Art in 1983.
His consecration came with "La bella del Alhambra" (1989), the last film he shot while living in Cuba, which won the Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film in 1990 and was seen by three million viewers in just over three months.
In 1992, she emigrated to Venezuela for love for a Venezuelan, with her three-and-a-half-year-old son Mauricio, and faced a television ban of approximately two to three years before Radio Caracas broke it with the telenovela "Volver a vivir" (1996), alongside Mariano Álvarez.
Regarding the migration experience, Valdés was emphatic: "The immigrant is forced to go through a painful tunnel in which they lose their skin. It is an entirely excruciating challenge."
However, he acknowledged that Venezuela gave him something fundamental: "In Caracas, I identified my ability to be reborn, to be born again. We are pieces of the places we have been, but there are two very important pieces in me that are Venezuela and Cuba, and both pieces are with me in Miami every day."
In the interview, she also talked about the monologue she recorded about Carmen Teresa Navas, the mother of the Venezuelan political prisoner Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, who died in custody on July 24, 2025, after being detained on January 1 of that year, with his death concealed by the Venezuelan state for over nine months. Carmen Teresa Navas passed away on May 18 without having obtained justice.
"Mrs. Carmen was all those mothers; she was the mother of all mothers, but she was also the mother of Venezuela. It was Venezuela that was breaking its feet trying to rescue its children," said Valdés, who confessed to having cried for ten consecutive hours to prepare that monologue.
Currently residing in Hialeah, Florida, where she arrived with a contract from Telemundo, Valdés manages artistic projects through a nonprofit foundation and maintains a constant critical stance against the Cuban dictatorship.
This is not the first time the actress has spoken out strongly about the situation on the Island.
In January 2023, she described the repression in Cuba as "demolishing" and claimed that the Cuba they left behind "disappeared, it is not even within the chimera of hope." And after the protests on July 11, 2021, she had already stated that Cuba "has the right to change."
At the end of the interview, Valdés confessed his greatest professional fear: "I’m afraid of disappearing from the stage. I’m afraid of disappearing from the profession. This trade is thankless because most of the time, it doesn't depend on us."
Filed under: