Iraida Malberti Cabrera

She began dancing at age 3 when her mother took her to ballet. She went through the Supreme Court of Art. She graduated with a Doctorate in Pedagogy. She was Director of the Children's Ballet of Cuban Television, Professor of Ballet and Folkloric Dances (graduated from an emergency course organized by Ramona de Saá (Chely). Television director.

She began working in Cuban television in 1960 thanks to her sister—who had been an actress since childhood—as a choreographer for the first children's program made after 1959 called "El mundo de los niños" (The World of Children), with Carmen Solar and Edwin Fernández.

Iraida Malberti directed until her death the Children's Ballet of Cuban Television from 1962 and is one of the most passionate and captivating creators of the medium, belonging to a lineage of selfless, powerful, critical, and loyal individuals, which today threatens to become completely extinct. The ballet initially was made up of 30 children, they did it in a hallway, then it grew to just over 100, it's not very large. But it doesn't change much, because as soon as they learn a little bit they take exams for the art schools and leave. Her productive and solid career has nourished a unique and necessary cultural project on the Island, La Colmenita, whose director is her son, Carlos Alberto Cremata.

She married Carlos Cremata Trujillo, who died in 1976 as a victim of the attack on the civilian plane traveling from Barbados to Cuba, from which marriage three children were born: Carlos Alberto, Juan Carlos, and José Carlos.

Her life was basically linked to Television, some of the programs where she worked were:

Caritas (aired on Mondays on channel 6)
Amigos y sus amiguitos (aired on Tuesdays on channel 6)
Variedades infantiles (aired on Wednesdays on channel 6) with Gina Cabrera and Manolo Ortega.
Tía Tata cuenta cuentos, performs choreography work with puppets (aired on Wednesdays on channel 6)
El Circo
Juguete
Y dice una mariposa
Cuando yo sea grande

She began making Cuando yo sea grande with Juan Carlos Cremata—film and theater director—and later, in the third installment, José Carlos Cremata was the screenwriter. It is a program that we dedicated to professions and occupations, because if a doctor is important, if a pilot is important, then a house painter is very important too. Can you imagine a city without house painters? It would be gray, it would be horrible, the painter is very important so that the city has color and so many other occupations. I remember that the first program was about a pilot.

The second stage we dedicated to the classics, we made Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote. It is not the right age for them to understand the works, but it is the right age to introduce them to them. I remember that as a child I had a very thick book that was El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, at that age I was not going to read that, but I knew it existed and later I became interested in discovering what was written there. If you tell them the stories, you interest them in reading, later they go in search of the book in the future, you awaken their curiosity, you create their cultural heritage. That is what you have to do, because children get to know elements that they later develop.

In 2015 she co-directed for film the multi-award-winning Cuban film Viva Cuba (2005) which at the Moscow Latin American Film Festival (2008), was chosen on the official festival website by viewers as the best film of the program.

"I never tried to do anything that wasn't with children...," expressed Iraida Malberti who has been the choreographer of almost all the programs in Cuban television's children's programming.