Afro-Cuban Voices by Pérez Sarduy Pedro;Stubbs Jean;

Author:Pérez Sarduy, Pedro;Stubbs, Jean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2020-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

6

Todo en Sepia

An All-Black Theater Project

Elvira Cervera

Her full name is Tita Elvira Cervera Batte, but she is known simply as Elvira Cervera, radio, television, and film actress. She was born 4 January 1923 in Sagua la Grande, only three months after radio was first heard in Cuba on the afternoon of 10 October 1922. Consequently, the radio receiver was part and parcel of Elvira’s childhood. She still remembers the family listening to the fights of the legendary black Cuban boxer, “Kid” Chocolate. When I first met her in the Havana winter of 1995, she described what had drawn her into the performing arts. Her father, a construction worker, would rub cooking oil on his hands and arms to loosen the lime before bathing. While he was doing this, he would have his daughters read to him, maybe one of Aesop’s fables. Then they would reflect on the moral of the story. Thus Elvira formed the habit of spending her free time reading out loud. She realized she had potential, took part in a competition, and won. She remembers with irony how the studio broke out in laughter because “the negrita [little black girl] had won a perm,” but she decided right there and then she’d be a radio actress. In 1995, when this interview was conducted, the seventy-two-year-old veteran black actress had just launched Todo en Sepia (All in Sepia), an all-black drama project designed “to break the apartheid that prevents the black actor from taking on roles of world theater,” proposing “to create a show for actors . . . to document, analyze, denounce and reject the evident limitations on the dark-skinned actor professionally on the Cuban stage (theater, cinema and television), with casts of only black actors.” That evening in her Havana home, she reflected on what had led her to take this step. (PPS)

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