Mario Balmaseda and his eighty

February 12, 2021

Recently, the great Cuban actor Mario Balmaseda turned 80 years old, a living legend of Cuban theater, cinema, and television.

In 1959, still a young man, he remained alone in Cuba. More than once he told how, with his exit from the country in hand and his family on the other side, an encounter with Eugenio Hernández Espinosa at the National Library, which he would say was anything but fortuitous, convinced him to stay here. Over time, his name appeared associated with Eugenio's as the protagonist of several important works by the Cuban playwright, with whom he also shared the same vocation for political and popular theater.

Balmaseda directed his concerns toward the whirlwind of the Revolution's first theater projects. In 1960, he was already immersed in the genesis of what would later become the Covarrubias Brigades, formations to bring scenic art to remote places on the Island. He enrolled in the Dramaturgy Workshop of the National Theater. At the end of the 60s, he was among the founders of Ocuje; with Roberto Blanco, he acted and wrote. During that time, he went to study at the Berliner Ensemble.

By then, its founder, Bertolt Brecht, had died, but his legacy was alive there, in the building located in the very center of the city of Berlin, then divided, while it had also expanded throughout the world as a vehicle for theatrical thought and language to read and express the reality of a world in full effervescence and change.

Brecht's watermark would accompany him from then on. In the founding of the Political Theater with the name of the author of Galileo Galilei, in the early 70s; in his celebrated characterization of Lenin, in The Kremlin Chimes; in the direction of Andoba and The Bakery, where he himself displayed, between difficult estrangement and clowning, a form of Brechtian acting.

That is why, when at the last Havana Theater Festival in 2019, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by the mythical German group, was presented before the audience of the Martí Theater for the first time in Cuba, the performance was undoubtedly dedicated to Balmaseda, although he could not attend for health reasons.

Cuban cinema also has him as one of its main figures. Among many other films, his presence in The Days of Water, The Man from Maisinicú, In a Certain Way, Baraguá, In Three and Two, For Rent, and In the Useless Death of My Partner Manolo, is unforgettable. As on television, In Silence It Had to Be.

On the day of his celebration, among many other people and institutions, it was published as a tribute to these eight decades with an old text from La Jiribilla, published in January 2006, regarding his receipt of the National Theater Prize, exactly three lustres ago.

In 2019, he was awarded the Television Prize, and it would also be fitting to see him receive the Film Prize. During that birthday celebration, the heartfelt messages for him from hundreds of people moved the senses. Our people, never forgetful of what is transcendent, know that this is just tribute to the eighty faces that Mario Balmaseda has given us.