René de la Cruz Solares

Popular actor of film, radio, television, and theater.

He was born in the small town of Banao, in Sancti Spíritus, the former province of Las Villas, in a humble peasant family. He was orphaned of his mother at only one year of age and his father died five years later, so he was raised by an older sister.

Like many young peasants of the time, he emigrated to La Habana in search of a better future. Already in the capital he found work in a dry cleaning shop and in a short time learned the hot trade of pressing clothes. One night, the brother of the shop owner, who was a radio actor, invited him to come along to see how a program was made at the COCO station where he worked. From that day on he understood that his vocation was acting.

By chance, the following week, at the radio station itself, an actor was missing and the director of the program "Secrets from Here and There" asked him to study the script and memorize those small "bits". With only a second-grade education that he had barely passed in a humble little rural school, one of those that almost never had permanent teachers, and barely able to read or write, he memorized what he had to say, and in the end they even congratulated him and offered him a permanent role in that program.

He began his artistic career in radio and television in the 1950s. He worked in almost all the existing radio and television stations of the time. After the triumph of the Revolution he ventured into theater and film. In theater he acted on the stage of the Artística Gallega, at the Palace of Fine Arts, at the Third World Theater, at the Bertolt Bretch, at the Irrumpe and at the National Dramatic Ensemble.

Memorable are his performances in the works Andoba, the Kremlin Carillon, Requiem for Yarini, The Barbecue and Cañaveral, among many others.

In Cuban cinema he also leaves his mark, in the films Memories of Underdevelopment, The Brigadista, The Heart on the Earth, Baraguá, Realengo 18, Papers are Papers and Our Man in La Habana, among others.

On TV he acted in Adventures, in various telenovelas and in the anthology "In Silence It Had to Be", with a performance of such quality that the screenwriter and director proposed him for a leading role in its second part playing "Julito the Fisherman", in which he shares moving scenes with actress Consuelito Vidal. To embody this character, an undercover agent of the State Security organs, he had to train himself in the Havana town of Santa Cruz del Norte with Leonilo Juan Saíz Hernández, the real-life character, who taught him the arts of fishing.

René de la Cruz himself recalls a morning when they went out together to navigate, and a shark happened to grab his hook, and he, frightened, shouts: "Buddy, get this out of the boat, it's a shark…!" The real Julito, calmly sitting in the stern of the small boat, responds to him with all the naturalness in the world: "Hey, Buddy, now you're Julito, so figure it out however you can…!"

He was awarded in his lifetime the Best Actor Prize at the Festival of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1990; the Distinction for National Culture; the National Television Prize, for a lifetime of work, in 2006 and the National Theater Prize, in 2007.

He died in La Habana on June 26, 2007.