Lynn Cruz is an independent Cuban actress, writer, and producer born in 1977 in Matanzas, Cuba. She graduated from the Juan Marinello Higher Pedagogical Institute in Matanzas and is trained as a Dramatic Theater Actress.
Cruz has an established career in Cuban cinema and theater. She has worked with several Cuban theater groups and with a German theater company. She has participated in the films Corazón Azul, the documentary Nadie, ¿Eres tú, papá?, which was excluded from the 2019 International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. Other titles include Patria Blanca, El niño, Ends, Larga distancia (2010), and El lugar preciso.
In 2012, the independent project Teatro Kairós was created. It serves as an alternative to state theater, distancing itself from the censorship of art and initially financed by the budget of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). Its first production with Kairós was El Regreso, a version of La Indiana, an original work by Àngels Aymar, a Catalan author. Although the play had no political content, the decision to forgo official institutional support caused issues with Gisela González, then president of the National Council of Performing Arts (CNAE), who referred to Lynn herself as a dissident and removed it from the Adolfo Llauradó theater, where it was scheduled to premiere.
In 2015, she was nominated for Best Actress at the Los Angeles Film Festival for the short film Finales. In 2016, she won the David Suárez Award for Best Actress in Venezuela and that same year, the award from the Le Cayenne Festival in New York, both for her leading role in the short film El Niño.
Cruz has opted to create a theater with a political and resistance focus that openly challenges the Cuban regime.
In 2016, Lynn participated in the documentary "Nadie" by Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula, a censored artist with whom she has collaborated on several occasions. This film received the award for Best Documentary at the X Dominican Global Film Festival (FCGD) and was screened in a cycle of Censored Cuban Cinema at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018. The film narrates the story of the censored Cuban poet Rafael Alcides, who engages in dialogue with the specter of Fidel Castro, using original narrations and images, and addresses the shift of the Cuban revolution from a utopia embraced by thousands to the subsequent disappointment of living in a great lie.
The documentary was censored and subjected to a police raid in Havana when an attempt was made to screen it in a private gallery. Since then, Lynn has faced censorship and police repression against the works that she has created or participated in.
In 2017, with Kairós, she performed The Enemies of the People, in which the actress kills Fidel Castro in his bed and recalls the crime of the tugboat 13 de Marzo. One of her presentations was blocked by state security and the police, who prevented guests from arriving at the play's premiere at the Casa Galería "El Círculo."
In 2018, she launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Verkami platform to finance the work Patriotismo 36-77, part of her scenic project Kairós. The narrative of Patriotismo 36-77 presents three prisoners of conscience: a critical painter, a human rights activist, and a humanities student, the daughter of a dissident. This representation is inspired by the testimonies of individuals who suffered persecution or political imprisonment in Cuba since 1959. Ultimately, the work premiered in November of that year, set against the backdrop of the ruins of the Cubanacán Art Schools in Havana. Lynn herself, who announced the premiere on Facebook and noted that everything had been planned with utmost discretion, remarked that "one of the two drivers responsible for transporting the audience disappeared."
In 2018, Cruz was expelled from the state employment agency ACTUAR, to which she belonged, with her contract being suspended without prior notice. She was also banned from entering the International Film School of San Antonio de los Baños, where she had been working since 2012 in a workshop conducted by the Argentine professor Norma Angeleri.
Lynn is considered by the Cuban State Security, along with Coyula, as an artist "controlled by us" and "who does not have an attitude towards the Revolution," and any connection with the two filmmakers is seen as a crime. This was confirmed by the Cuban visual artist Javier Caso, who was detained and interrogated upon his arrival on the island in January 2020 regarding his relationship with the two filmmakers, and whose conversation was recorded and published by Caso himself.
In 2020, she was awarded the Impact Documentary Producers Fund, which provides around $1,000. These international organizations are dedicated to supporting audiovisual producers around the world. Lynn expressed that she would use the award to produce a documentary about the censorship she has faced in recent years on the Island, which could be titled 'Desaparecida'.
In January 2021, she presented Terminal, the actress's first novel published by Hypermedia, the responsible publisher. Although it had not been published until now, "Terminal" received an honorable mention at the Franz Kafka Prize in 2018.
