Written by Deborah Kapchan, in collaboration with Frank London

Havana January 4, 2017

When I landed in the Havana airport on January 4th 2017, the air embraced me like a warm sea, the boundaries of my skin loosening in the heat. The airport was teeming with taxi drivers holding signs as well as tourists looking for their ride. I searched for my name to no avail. My driver had not come. So I tried to get Cuban money from a Citibank ATM – in case I needed to get my own taxi – until I noticed the words “for deposit only” above the machine. At that point I went outside to wait, breathing in the tobacco smoke that filled the humid air.

About 15 minutes later I saw a grey-haired man approach the front door of the airport with a piece of cardboard scrawled with a misspelling of my name: “Debora.” I walked up to him. His English was scant but he identified me. We got in a dilapidated van – the seats ripped, the floor punctured – and set off, carbon-monoxide in our nose and lungs.

The ride from the airport took about 30 minutes. We passed small urban outposts of pastel-colored concrete. I snapped pictures of cars from the 1930s and 40s that were driving with us like a school of huge colorful fish toward Havana – hot pink, chrome blue, sea green. We passed the Ministry of the Interior, with its large bas relief of Che Guavara gracing the front. My phone camera clicked.

I knew I was staying in the more bourgeois section of town – Vedado. So I was not surprised when the driver pulled up to a grey stone villa. It had clearly seen better days however. Behind the iron gate the plants were dry and unkempt. The villa had been subdivided and there were two doors. We rang at both and eventually someone answered one. It was Luisa. She did not speak English, but recognized my name, welcomed me in and showed me to a high-ceilinged room with ceramic-tile floors and a ceiling fan. I knew Frank London – the composer of the Opera Hatuey that I was here to document – was arriving the next day. But this evening I was slated to meet Valerie Naranjo and Barry Olson at a club in Central Havana to see the famous Cuban jazz group, Septeto Habanero. I had an hour before I set off.

I had already printed a map of the city, with the route to the club marked out. I set off through the streets of Havana, past the large Havana Libra Hotel, past the university, and then down the hill towards Central Havana. I asked directions of a middle-aged couple in my broken Spanish, and they pointed me in the right direction. It was much farther than I thought. I passed a building vibrating with the sounds of ritual drums, but I did not linger. Deeper into Central Havana, leaving the brightly painted colonial architecture behind, I walked for a few kilometers past buildings that were in severe disrepair. Televisions blared behind half-open doors as people sat at rickety tables or in dilapidated upholstered chairs waiting for the heat of the late afternoon to pass.

I asked again for the Palacio de Rumba, and found it across from a park. Valerie and Barry had not arrived, so I sat on a bench waiting and taking in the sites. Within ten minutes a taxi pulled up and a couple got out. The man had long grey hair in a ponytail (not Cuban, I thought to myself), though the woman might have been Latin American with her long black hair. I hesitantly approached, and before I could extend my hand Barry saw me and gave me a big hug.

Deborah?

Barry?

Then Valerie hugged me as well, smiling warmly.

We had never met, but we were in this adventure together from the start.

We entered the club, paying 10 CUC each (about ten dollars) instead of the 4 pesos that the Cubans paid – that is, we paid more than ten times the price. But that was normal. We had much more money than the locals. Barry was very excited. He was a horn player and had been playing Cuban jazz professionally all his life. He knew this music inside and out. So did Valerie. She was a specialist in African percussion – particularly the gyil, a kind of marimba – but as an accomplished musician and percussion teacher, she knew this music too. They were a team of professional musicians, who also happened to be married for more than twenty years.

Septeto Habanero has been around since the 1920s (when it was Sexteto Habanero) and many of the classic Cuban jazz standards that we recognize in North America were made famous by them. The group’s members have changed over the years, but the institution has remained.

The next morning I woke to the sound of a pick-up truck revving its engine outside my window, and to the smell of diesel fuel emissions – a smell I would come to associate with moving through the large city of Havana. Frank London was due to arrive in the afternoon, so I went to discover the city. When I got back to the casa several hours later, Frank was there. The door of his room was open, and I popped my head in, introducing myself. We had never met. After a short rest, we headed out, hailing a taxi to look for a music club in downtown Havana. Driving along the Malecon, the Havana coastline, Frank was animated. He had been to Cuba before to meet the opera director and discuss the production, but he had not yet attended a rehearsal. Frank made conversation with the taxi driver, asking him if he knew a club called Casa de Tango in Old Havana. The driver said he would drop us nearby, and we could ask a local. Then Frank settled back against the cracked leather seat of the 1947 Chevrolet, turned to me and told me the story of his opera.

“It’s based on a poem written by Oscar Pinis, a Russian émigré to Cuba,” he told me. “Having survived the pogroms in Eastern Europe and having witnessed extreme violence in his childhood (including the beheading of his 8 year old friend and neighbor by a Cossack, who mounted her head on a stick and paraded it through the town), Pinis escaped with his life and came to Cuba with his parents in 1924 by booking passage on a cargo boat. Because there were quotas, however, his family could not get into the United States, so they went to Havana. Pinis grew up in Cuba, studying civil engineering, but he was always very involved in Yiddish letters and was a founder of the first Cuban Yiddish newspaper, Havana Lebn, Havana Life.

“Pinis wrote poems and articles for the newspaper and was generally a man on the scene,” Frank told me. He was indeed a polymath.

Some years later, Pinis (who had by then taken the pen name of Ascher Penn) wrote a poem in Yiddish about the Spanish conquest of Cuba when only the Taino people were on the island. The poem tells the story of the extreme violence of the Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, a violence similar to that Pinis had witnessed in his own youth by the Cossacks.”

The poem was about Hatuey, a Taino chief who tried to warn his people about the Spanish invasion and was consequently burned at the stake at a place called Yara. There is a painting in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes that depicts Hatuey in a loin cloth his hands tied to a pole behind his back, with Spanish soldiers and Catholic clergy surrounding him, asking him to convert. He refused and was burned alive. “If there are Whites in heaven, he is reputed as saying, “I prefer to go to hell.” Every year it is said that the “lights of Yara” – that is, the lights of his pyre – can still be seen on the anniversary of his death.

Penn wrote the poem in the early 1930s and it was translated and published almost immediately in Spanish by the poet De les Piedras. Many Cubans and Domincans know this poem in Spanish. It is even taught in schools, but the original Yiddish poem is little known. The historical story takes place in 1512. We know this because a priest from Spain, kept diaries of his trips to Cuba at this time.

Penn of course brought his poem to New York City when he emigrated there as a young man in the 1930s. There, Oscar Pinis – now Ascher Penn – worked as an architect, but was also an editor and writer at the Yiddish Forward. At this time he wrote a book called Yiddishkeit in America.

Frank learned about the poem in a conversation with Penn’s daughter, Eileen Posnick. They were both attending a funeral (for Jonathan Walker of Pilobolus). Indeed Frank was playing music at the funeral. Later he went out with Walker’s dramaturg, Michael Posner, Eileen’s husband. When Posner mentioned that his wife’s father was a Yiddish poet, Frank was curious. When he subsequently read the poem, Frank said he “realized it was a heroic text meant for the opera.” Frank’s first thought was to write a Yiddish opera to keep the language and culture alive. However, “at a certain point,” Frank said, “it became very obvious that writing an opera where a bunch of Taino and Spanish run around singing Yiddish was like a bad Mel Brooks’ movie.” This led to years of composing the score in the spare hours between tours and gigs and other composing projects. London worked with others[1] to translate the poem from Yiddish into English. From there, he engaged two others to translate the English version into Spanish.[2] Elise Thoron – a celebrated playwright, director, and Slavicist – wrote the libretto, which is about 65% Penn’s poem, and 35% frame story based on Penn’s immigration to the United States. She situated the telling of the tale in a Cuban nightclub, where Penn is writing his poem about the Taino while simultaneously becoming involved in the Cuban resistance. Frank scored the opera for a nightclub orchestra – percussion, violin, cello, flute, woodwinds and a horn section. However given the expertise on the ground, he re-scored it for drums, keyboard and bass, as well as voices of course.

According to Frank London, Aquino said, ‘You can’t do this in Yiddish because I want the audience to understand it!’

“And in fact,” London told me, “doing the opera in Cuba takes precedence over writing it in Yiddish. Though we might be able to do it in New York [someday] in Yiddish. Once you contextualize the story, it makes absolute sense that it’s a Yiddish opera. But for now it’s a Spanish opera with a bit of Yiddish.”

Each character in the play has a double identity – one identity in the frame story (which takes place in a nightclub), the other in the world of the Tainos.

“Cubans know this story, “ Frank explained. “They know Hatuey, the leader of Piscas where his family had been slaughtered by the Spanish. Hatuey then went to the east of Cuba to warn the other Taino, and to encourage them to resist. And they did resist. But after three days, the Spanish had killed them all and Hatuey was burned at the stake at Yara. Ascher Penn dedicated the poem to Cuba, “my second fatherland that took me in when I was a refugee.”

Sky and water and stillness in blue,

The stillest sea is not still. 

A sturdy canoe steadily sails, 

Its movement swift and smooth.

He sits in a boat, not saying a word,

Frozen, turned to stone, 

His neck bent deep in thought.

We have been, so good. So good –

O Whites – why? 

For what reason our blood?

Frank met Ulises Aquino through the introduction of anthropologist Ruth Behar. Ruth has written several works about her early youth in Cuba as a daughter of Russian emigrés to Cuba. She has also been actively cultivating Jewish culture in Havana, the city of her birth, organizing the first ever Celebration of Jewish Culture in Havana. Behar put Thoron and London in touch with Ulisses Aquila, the director of the Calle de la Opera.

The next day Frank and I hailed a 1947 Chevy taxi to the theater. We found the singers seated on chairs in a semi-circle on stage, rehearsing a section of the opera with lead singer, Rasec Peña. Their voices filled the auditorium with London’s haunting harmonies. We immediately entered another space and time.

After the rehearsal I spoke with some of the company members, mostly young people with tons of enthusiasm and energy. Some, like Mawny Mayasa Caldéron Pareira, had studied lyrical theater at the National Conservatory of Cuba. Twenty-four years old, a soprano, she hoped not only to sing in operas (she had, she said, already sang in productions of Madame Butterfly and La Traviata) but in musical theater productions like Cats or Jesus Christ Superstar. She dreamed of performing in places like the Metropolitan Opera or L’Escala so that she could grow as an artist. Others, like Dayenne do los Angeles Caballero Martinez, had only had private lessons with one of the company members– Wilmar Cumberbatch. After studying assiduously for a year, she tried out for Opera de la Calle and got in.

“It’s my first experience singing and dancing in the theater,” she said. “I love the mix of everything. For me, acting, singing and dancing was at first very complicated, but I continue to work hard and practice often so that I can become a great artist.”

Dayanna hopes to try out for the conservatory next year.

Renier Falcón Suárez took another path to the Opera. He has a degree from the Escuela de Instructorer de Arte, a teacher-training school that forms educators in the arts at the elementary school level. Renier is a composer and a singer, but at the EIA he studied plastic arts. At the moment, the company’s director, Ulises Aquino, is helping him realize a dream by recording one of his compositions with the Opera’s choir. Renier said that he’d like to use his skills at painting to do scenography one day, though there is already a scenography enterprise that services all of Cuba.

Wilmar Cumberbatch is one of the most gregarious members of the company. Multi-lingual (he speaks fluent English, some German, and studies French at the Alliance Française), Wilmar is a baritone playing the part of Behíque in Frank London’s opera. Though Wilmar does not appear much older than most of the others, he is in fact forty-six. He has worked as a chemical engineer for much of his life – his day job – but he has studied singing all his life, taking private lessons with the former director of the National Choir.

“I never had the time to go to [art] school,” Wilmar told me. “But we have to study. So I paid a teacher. When I began [working], my salary was 138 pesos. 138 pesos a month! I pad my singing teacher 120. At that time we didn’t have time to go to [art] school, so I paid to learn.

“I continued working and working. Now I’m forty-six. Now I have time for school. [At this point] school is not going to teach me anything, but it’s important to have the piece of paper.”

At this point, Ulises interrupted to say that he was afraid Wilmar was not going to be admitted to the conservatory because he already knows too much.

“A lifetime is not enough,” Wilmar added. “I’d like to be a photographer (as well) but I don’t have a camera. I don’t have a laptop. I want to go to Venice because Venice is one of the most artistic cities in the world. I’d like to go to China, to Japan. I love ancient civilizations. {but] I go step by step.”

Forget your sadness for a while -

This is Cuba - your land, You are my son, Hatuey.

Wilmar praised his mother and sisters, who supported him for years while he spent the better part of his income on singing lessons. He was no stranger to sacrificing for his art.

Having such dreams was a common theme among the artists in the company, all of them culturally sophisticated with a global view to their artistic trajectories. The frustration at not being mobile – in terms of travel, but also in terms of employment – was a shared concern.

Ulises Aquina used to have another theater -- El Cabildo – that was closed down by the authorities, a result of local politics.[3] Now the Opera de la Calle is half-private and half-public. Ulises invested his own money. He replaced the plywood stage with 4x4s, he installed new chairs. He mended the leaks in the ceiling. What’s more, Ulises has no hope of getting his investment money back, as the state mandates that he can only charge one CUC (Cuban Convertible Peso) per person per performance. On the one hand, the state encourages private investment in local artistic ventures such as his; on the other, they make it difficult for such ventures to succeed.

Ulises told me that he is nonetheless committed to his artists. He said that the Opera de la Calle is not only dedicated to bringing opera to the people (in street performances, in community centers) but is dedicated to enlist the people, the pueblo, in the art of opera, taking people like Dayanna from the street, training them in singing, dancing and acting and putting them on the stage. His is a pedagogical mission.

Beginning with only 16 members, the Opera de la Calle now has sixty singers and instrumentalists, as well as sixteen stage technicians.

“There are eighty-six in all,” Ulises told me. “Some have trained at the conservatory, but for many it is their first experience in the performing arts, before even auditioning for the Conservatory or venturing into an avocation in performance.” This was the case with Wilmar Cumberbatch, someone who was there because of his deep love and devotion to his art.

With his 22 year-old son, Ulises Jr. who was visiting from Spain where he lives, Ulises Sr. took me to see the new outdoor theater that he is currently finishing. We jumped in his little car, and drove by his house to pick up his youngest son, who is only ten. (Despite having a house and garden in a bourgeois section of Vedado, Ulises’ car stalled every time he slowed down for a stop sign. “A new Kia would cost about 80,000 dollars,” his oldest son told me, while “an old used car from the 1950s costs about 25,000 dollars. Having a car in Cuba is very expensive! We have to make due with what we have!”) When we arrived at the theater, Ulises opened a villa gate in a residential neighborhood, and we entered a large garden that had been cleared of shrubs and trees, and replaced with an outdoor stage and a large open space for seating. There was also an indoor restaurant that backed up to the river. Ulises Jr. told me they had plans to repair a large quai on the waterfront, and to eventually have music and dancing on the river’s edge. Despite setbacks, Ulises Aquino will not relinquish his vision for an outdoor performance space equipped with dining services.

March 3rd, 2017 Opening Night

When I arrived at the Havana airport the second time I was a bit more savvy. I had booked an Airbnb less than a block away from the theater – a small studio with a comfortable bed, a working kitchen, a roof terrace and – yes! – wonderful water pressure in the shower. There were many people arriving in Havana that day for the opening. Frank London had rented rooms in a large and luxurious (by Havana standards) villa. He, his wife, artist Tine Kinderman, the co-producer Michael Posner (son-in-law of the late poet Asher Penn), as well as musicians and friends were all staying in the villa, while librettist Elise Thoron and her husband Oz, were staying in another house not far away. Co-producer Diane Wondisford and her partner Linda were there, and Ruth Behar had brought down a group from the United States on a Jewish Cultural Tour. A piece had appeared in the New York Times announcing the first theater collaboration between New-York-based artists and Cuban artists.[4] There was an electric buzz in the air.

I settled in to my lodging then walked over to the Arenal. This time the guardian who sat in front of the theater recognized and welcomed me. I went from the warm air of Havana to the cool dark of the theater where the cast – in costume – was rehearsing. Ulises Aquino was directing, and although this was a pre-performance run, he nonetheless interrupted often, getting on stage and demonstrating the way he wanted parts to be played. Tension was high. Frank and Elise were in the balcony. And Will Grant, the BBC correspondent in Havana, was there as well, tape-recorder in hand.

When the dress-rehearsal was finished, the actors dispersed. And slowly, the American crew made their way to the patio of the restaurant next door (the actors were exhausted from a day’s rehearsing and went home to rest for opening night). I found myself at a table with Yiddish singer, Sarah Gordon, and accordionist Zoe Chistiansen. They were going to play at the Celebration of Jewish Culture that Ruth Behar had organized to coincide with the opening of the opera.[5] Isabelle Deconinck was also sitting with us. Isabelle was a writer, and had already written about the opera for the New York Times.

The Opera de la Calle performs in an art-deco theater called Teatro Arenal. Built in 1945, it now has a renovated neon marquis that says Arenal in colors that change from blue to green to purple to red throughout the night. The Arenal is located in the Mirador neighborhood, on Calle 31 Between 42nd and 44th Streets.

On the morning of opening night I walked past the theater. The guardian was there, but no one else. The cast had until 7 that evening to relax before coming to get dressed and put on their make up. The show was to begin at nine.

At 8:30 I walked over to the theater. The sun had almost set, but there was still an orange glow above the rooftops across the street. Men in suit jackets and women in dresses and high heels mingled outside. The Cuban Minister of Culture, whose office had supported the project, was rumored to be coming. There were dignitaries and people from Havana art worlds, though I knew none of them. I scanned the crowd for a face I did know. Frank London was standing with Elise Thoron and Ulises Aquino, but I did not approach. Instead I showed my ticket to the person at the door and entered the lobby. There I met Michael Posner and his friend Jack Klebanow, who had come to Havana for the opening. Michael’s extended family was there as well – his two sisters had come in, as well as other friends. This was an historic event for the family, as it was Michael’s father-in-law, Asher Penn, who wrote the poem on which the entire opera was based. This was a return – of the poem to Havana, of Yiddish theater to Cuba, of Jewish Culture to an island which had provided it a refuge in the first half of the twentieth century.

Michael, Jack and I found seats. The theater was relatively cool compared to the heat outside. We watched as Ruth Behar and her husband sat down a few rows in front of us. Ruth was conversing with others finding their seats – Cuban Jews she had brought down from the United States, friends in the Jewish community in Havana and local community members. Everyone was dressed in their finest.

The lights went down.

The audience became silent.

And then he curtain rose on a 1931 night club scene. A singer, dressed in sequined flapper clothes, began singing while cast members, similarly dressed from the time period, streamed down the aisles to sit at tables set up below and on the stage.

At one of these tables sat the lead character, Oscar (Pinis), concentrating deeply on writing his Hatuey poem, but also looking up with desire at the singer who (with the chorus) was singing about the light of Yara, the light that symbolizes the death of Hatuey:

I am the light... The Light of Yara I am the light... The Light of Yara

Shining from Bani to Camaguey... Pinar del Rio to Mantanzas... I am the light The Light of Yara –

CHORUS

I am the light... The Light of Yara I am the light... The Light of Yara

I am the light, the Light of Yara I am the light, the Light of Yara I am the light The Light of Yara --

Shining from Santiago de Cuba... To the “El Dorado” aqui... Never extingushed, until we are free –

I am the light, the Light of Yara I am the light, the Light of Yara

As the chorus sang softly, Tinima introduced the theme of the play:

On the anniversary of his death, when the fire that burned him at the stake four hundred years ago burns again in us... A song in honor of Cuba’s first hero and native son...

Yo soy Hatuey Y yo soy Siboney Yo morir en el fuego Hatuey

Ahora morir – que dulce Y me mori por ti

Yo soy Hatuey Y yo soy Siboney Yo morir en el fuego Hatuey

I am Hatuey I am Siboney[6] I died in the fire Hatuey

Time to die – how sweet -- since I die for you

I am Hatuey I am Siboney died in the fire Hatuey

The play continued with drama and song, and ended to a standing ovation. We all wandered out of the theater euphoric.

When the cast filtered out, I took pictures of some of them, smiling, with friends, with family. I know they all hoped that this would be their big break – that the play would tour in the United States and they would see places other than Havana. Perhaps New York, Los Angeles, or at the very least Miami.

A Yiddish opera in Spanish is a hard sell however, at least in the U.S. Production costs are high. It’s difficult to find backers.

But for the moment, the actors in Opera de la Calle have the consolation of being the first troupe to participate equally in a collaboration between the two countries. Much has changed since Oscar Pinis wrote his poem in Yiddish. But in many ways, we need to hear Hatuey’s warning more than ever. The lights of Yara still burn.

[1] Achey Obejas and Maggie Bofill

[2] Judith Kristen Lang Hilgartner (a student of poet José Poser)

[3] NPR: Opera Unfold When A Cuben Caberat Is Shut Down

[4] The New York Times: A Yiddish-Cuban Opera to Have It’s Premiere in Havana in March

[5] Festival of Jewish Culture in Cuba

[6] A Taino tribe on Cuba.

Inspiración del Rítmo

Hatuey: A Memory of Fire: Translating an Opera across Time, Space, Culture and Language