Farewell to Magaly Muguercia

February 9, 2022

Casa de las Américas bids farewell to Cuban theater critic and researcher Magaly Muguercia, who was director of our Theater Department and its journal Conjunto between 1986 and 1992, who passed away on February 6, 2022, from a heart attack, in Santiago de Chile, where she had resided for several decades.

Cuban theater researcher and essayist Magaly Muguercia, author of various reference books for the study of theater in Cuba and Latin America, died at the age of 75.

The Latin American Center for Creation in Theater Research (CELCIT), where she was a faculty member for more than two decades, published a farewell message on its Facebook account, highlighting her vast body of work in the field of research in this artistic expression.

The center, based in Argentina and which awarded her in 1992 the Ollantay prize for her studies on Latin American theater, also recalls the books written by Muguercia, among which stand out Cuban Theater on the Eve of the Revolution, Theater and Utopia, and The Scandal of Acting.

The CELCIT text highlights her teaching work in various Latin American nations and in the United States, where she taught courses on theater and shared her knowledge. Muguercia was also director of the journal Conjunto and of the Theater Department of Casa de las Américas, was awarded a fellowship by ISTA (Denmark), and received other international prizes and recognitions.

Various personalities from culture and theater in the region have mourned the death of the prestigious researcher. Prominent Cuban playwright Nara Mansur, who has been based in Argentina for some time, considered Muguercia to be "one of our essential intellectuals."

"She accompanied many of us with her books, questions, hypotheses, and with her complicit reading of our works, taking risks, venturing the most beautiful and innovative interpretations, ruptures, continuities. She also dreamed, until the end, of a libertarian, diverse, democratic socialism. Like so many Latin American artists," Mansur wrote as a farewell.

Also from Perséfone Teatro Cuba, an independent theater project on the Island, expressions of sorrow were read: "She believed in young theater, she believed in Latin theater. Thank you for so much, for your immense generosity and everything you did for Latin American theater. Your mark lives on in the memory of our theater," according to a message published on their Facebook page.