Héctor Quintero: theater, city and life

April 10, 2021

A Habanero through and through, to the point that ten years exactly since his physical passing have not managed to tarnish the almost mystical connection between the work of Héctor Quintero (1942-2011), the most successful of Cuban playwrights, and that pulsating capital he conceived for his characters.

A legacy bound to the evolution of the city in the most complex stages of the past century: the wounded and absurd Cuba prior to 1959; the harshness and grayness with which the island's twentieth century closed, especially for its perpetual protagonists, regardless of any hypothesis of glamour. Beings sculpted by challenging daily life, of absolute popular roots, but transcendent in their obsession with clinging to hope, to some precarious dream of progress that would rescue them from adversity and frustrations that befell them.

Love and compassion for characters and an environment from which he drank with frenzied avidity.

Quintero's ingenuity proved effective in extracting the most hilarious humor from tragic circumstances, that finest border between laughter and tears where some discern the keys to our Latin American identity and, it goes without saying, the classical foundations of the dramatic genre.

Heir to Cuban vernacular tradition, the author, born and raised in the neighborhood of El Cerro, gazed upon his Havana with archaeological vocation. He breathed it and felt its deep pulse.

From the misery of a pre-revolutionary peripheral settlement in the remote Luyanó of "El premio flaco," to the charm of the "centro-habanero" zones in decay toward 1958, once a refuge for the urban middle class that the proud, albeit disinherited, family of "Contigo pan y cebolla" embodies well. Along with them the accelerated city turned toward consumerism during the prosperous 80s, whose echoes permeate the humble home of the protagonist in "Sábado corto," until the modernist and aseptic El Vedado that accompanies, by contrast, the vulgarity and crisis of values that try to impose themselves in the years of the special period, so precisely portrayed in "Te sigo esperando," his most significant work of the 90s.

Nothing escaped the author's telescope in spatial or temporal terms when focusing on the intricacies of his city. Precisely the one that cannot forget now, among others, his contributions as director and actor of the Musical Theater Company of Havana, broadcaster, composer, screenwriter, audiovisual producer through the virtuoso telenovela "El año que viene," or collaborator with domestic cinema, principally from the adaptations made in the early twenty-first century of two of his best-known works, one of which he could not see finished.

To recount all of his accolades would make this tribute endless, from the Grand Prize of the International Institute of Theatre in 1968 (at merely 26 years old), to the bestowal of his National Theater Prize in 2004, a list, truly, comprehensive. Behind them the unconditional admiration of his audience, of Cuban playwrights and the entire world.

A decade after his creative vigor was suddenly extinguished on that April 6th, the master can rest in peace: this Havana remembers him.