Blanca Becerra Grela

Actress and singer.

Native of San Antonio de Vueltas, Las Villas. Daughter of a vernacular theater actor, Blanquita grew up backstage.

At the age of five, she made her debut in the town of San Diego de los Baños, Province of Pinar del Río, in the circus La Estrella, which was owned by her father, Antonio Becerra, who was her first acting teacher. There she participated in the sketches "La perla de las Antillas" and "Como son los hijos de Cuba".

At the age of fifteen, she performed in the tent-theater Edén, in the province of Santiago de Cuba, where she triumphed in the Cuban zarzuela "La mulata María" (Federico Villoch / M: Raimundo Valenzuela de León), and received singing lessons from teacher González, who greatly helped the artist in the development of her magnificent soprano voice. In 1904 she moved to the East as a member of the lyrical arts company of the Spaniard Julio Ruiz, in which she debuted in the zarzuela "El rey que rabió" (M: Rupert Chapí / L: Vital Aza and Miguel Ramos Carrión).

In 1905 she married Gustavo Carulla in the Santiago Cathedral, an impresario of prestigious Creole artists of the time. She later moved to Havana with her father's artistic company. They performed at the Martí in parodies of various Spanish zarzuelas.

In the midst of a difficult family economic situation and already separated from her husband, she accepted in 1912, not without some reservations, a contract with the Alhambra company, stigmatized for being considered a theater for men only. But, as Becerra declared in an interview published in a Bohemia weekly:

"After the first performances, I understood that, contrary to everything I had supposed, that was a theater like any other. There was nothing there that would offend the morality of any woman. Simply works with double meaning were presented. Perhaps contradicting what people might tell you about the Alhambra, I can assure you that the works presented there today seem childish".

In 1912 she debuted in the company of Regino López at the Alhambra theater. There she participated in the premieres of numerous titles from the Alhambra repertoire: La danza de los millones (1916), Delirio de automóvil (1921), La isla de las cotorras (1923), El bolero (1927), La blanca que tenía el alma negra (1927), El proceso de Mario Cubán (1929), where she played the roles of Galician woman and Black woman.

Blanca Becerra remained two decades at the Alhambra and acted in much of the most notable productions brought to that stage, embodying the naive young lady, the drunk woman, the clever Galician woman, the coarse mulatta, the different nuances of the typical Black woman character (academic, conga and sentimental), the vedette of the lavish revues and, above all, as the singer who glorified works by Federico Villoch, Agustín Rodríguez, Jorge Anckermann and other Creole authors. She recorded duets with recognized colleagues from that theater (Regino López, Julito Díaz, Adolfo Otero and Dulce María Mola) for the Columbia, Victor and Brunswick labels.

With the Alhambra collective, she also performed at the Payret and the Nacional, among other first-class theaters. She had an intense participation in radio programs, since 1922, at PWX and later at Radio Lavin, RHC-Cadena Azul, CMQ. A surgical intervention affected her soprano voice and she became a generic actress. Among her ventures in dramatic theater, it is worth noting the pieces "Sombras del solar", by Juan Domínguez Arbelo (1938), and "Sabanimar", by Paco Alfonso (1943), both presented at the Principal de la Comedia. In the early forties, she gave a memorable performance as Dolores Santa Cruz in the zarzuela "Cecilia Valdés", standing out for her interpretation of the tango-congo Po…po...po, for which she would be applauded even in her eighties.

In 1942 she made famous her radio character "María Bibijagua", created for her by Reinaldo López del Rincón and presented daily on RHC Cadena Azul.

She occasionally worked for the Teatro Cubano de Selección —Sombras del solar, by Domínguez Arbelo (1938)— and for Teatro Popular —Sabanimar, by P. Alfonso (1943)—, in which she ventured into dramatic theater.

Her last performances are still remembered, when she was over eighty years old, in her characterization of Dolores Santa Cruz in the zarzuela Cecilia Valdés, by maestro Roig, which brought her back to the front ranks of theatrical fame.

In her later years she moved her residence to Las Tunas, where she died almost a centenarian in 1985.

She appeared in the Cuban film Manuel García, el rey de los campos de Cuba (dir. Jean Angelo, 1940) and was interviewed in the documentary Cuentos del Alhambra (M. O. Gómez, 1962).