Raquel Revuelta Planas

Distinguished Cuban actress. National Theater Prize.

She was born in Havana in very humble circumstances and thanks to the guidance of her father, a sensitive and restless man, she learned poetry and began her training in the art of recitation. In this way, while still a teenager, she achieved success in the Supreme Court of Art and on The Scale of Fame, spaces dedicated to the search for new talent in the arts.

In 1941, the foundational moment of Popular Theater, an institution directed by director Paco Alfonso and explicitly linked to unions and the most humble sectors of the country, Raquel joined the ranks of the group and began a path of social and political commitment that she would maintain throughout her life.

Shortly after the Communist Revolutionary Union Party created Mil Diez, The People's Radio Station in 1943, the actress began her work at that station, and later also became involved with Radio Progreso.

In 1943 she performed at the Teatro Campoamor in one of the regular seasons of Eugenia Zufolli's Company. Between 1947 and 1951 she frequently participated in performances sponsored by the ADAD group: The Awakening of Our Death, by Henrik Ibsen; Joan of Lorraine, by Maxwell Anderson; Teresa, by Thomas Job, a theatrical version of Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin; Monserrat, by Emmanuelle Robles; and A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. She also performed in works by the Theater Board: The Rebellion of the Gray-Haired, by Rafael Suárez Solís; Man, Beast and Virtue, by Luigi Pirandello; and Ardèle or The Daisy, by Jean Anouilh.

In 1947 she received the Thalia Prize for Best Female Performance for her role in Nothing Less than a Man, by Miguel de Unamuno, under the direction of Luis Amado Blanco, with the Theater Board, an honor with which she was distinguished again in 1952. That year she also received the Prize from the Union of the Daily Radio-Television Chronicle (UCTRD) and the Prize from the newspapers Avance and Información, followed in 1954 by the Antillana Trophy from the Film and Theater Writers, for films made in Cuba and Mexico; the Grand Avellaneda Prize from the Associated Critics of Radio and TV as Most Valuable Actress of the Year; and, in 1956, the Prize from the Association of Theater and Film Writers as Best Actress of the Year for her notable performance in the distinctive version of Joan of Lorraine filmed by Julio García Espinosa and Vicente Revuelta, brought to the stage by the latter and which constituted the embryo of the fruitful venture that shortly after became Teatro Estudio. By these years the actress was already part of the Cultural Society Our Time which brought together the most progressive artists and intellectuals of the era.

By this time her recognized quality and her singular physical gifts, a woman of exceptional beauty and beautiful voice, with a certain air of mystery and enigma, made her a leading figure in radio and television, in which she starred in two fixed weekly programs. This popularity was wisely used by Raquel Revuelta in favor of the development of theater.

In 1958, amid a cultural environment inclined toward the commercialization of art, she created Teatro Estudio with Vicente and six other artists, a group that would become the work of her life, a paradigmatic organization of the Cuban stage to which her name will be eternally bound. She served as General Director for 36 years.

In that institution, a fertile training ground for actors, directors, playwrights, designers and technicians, and producer of much of the most important cultural events of the Cuban stage from the second half of the 20th century, she also worked as an actress and artistic director, and her singular leading roles in The Good Woman of Szechuan, Fuente Ovejuna, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Three Sisters, Saint Joan of America, and Old-Fashioned Comedy are still remembered; as well as her productions of Túpac Amaru, La Ronda, Ten Days That Shook the World —with the important Russian director Yuri Liubímov—, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Baroque Concert and Tartuffe, the production with which she inaugurated in 2003 the new Adolfo Llauradó theater, which was her last artistic project.

Her filmography began in 1950 with Seven Deaths on Installment (Manolo Alonso). She followed with To Die to Live (1954, Miguel Morayta), The White Rose (1954, Emilio Fernández), The Force of the Humble (1955, Agustín P. Delgado), And If She Returned (1956, Vicente Oroná), Cuba Dances (1960, Julio García Espinosa), Lucia (1968, Humberto Solás), That Long Night (1979, Enrique Pineda Barnet), Cecilia (1981, Humberto Solás) and A Successful Man (1986, Humberto Solás), among others.

For her important work in this medium she received the Coral Prize for her complete body of work, awarded by the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in 1997.

On television she starred, in the seventies, in the soap opera Doña Bárbara, by Rómulo Gallegos, under the direction of Roberto Garriga.

She was part of numerous juries in literary, theatrical and cinematographic competitions in Cuba and abroad.

She was Full Professor at the Superior Institute of Art where she served for a period as Dean of the Faculty of Performing Arts. In recognition of her work, that institution granted her, in 1985, the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in Arts.

She was the first President of the National Council of the Performing Arts of the Ministry of Culture after the institutional reorganization of 1988.

For years she presided over the Cuban branch of the Latin American Center for Theater Creation and Research (CELCIT), a cultural entity for artistic promotion and research that brings together numerous theater artists from Ibero-America.

Her vast career and the excellence of her work were recognized with the Distinction for National Culture awarded by the Minister of Culture, the Alejo Carpentier Medal and the Félix Varela Order of the State Council of the Republic of Cuba.

In 1999, when the National Theater Prize was established to recognize a lifetime of work, Raquel and Vicente Revuelta were the first to receive it.

Free from all pretension, from the whims of fame, withdrawn before flattery, she left behind an intense life devoted to theater and culture, an example of artistic honesty, of exigence and perpetual nonconformity. Raquel Revuelta is, without a doubt, one of the mythical figures in the contemporary history of the Cuban stage. She died in 2004.