Camagüey.– From January 22 to 27, Camagüey will host a new edition of the Villanueva Festival, dedicated to commemorating the events of January 22, 1869, at the Villanueva Theatre, when Cuban theater became a platform for national affirmation against the colonial regime.
The program, announced by Osvaldo Betancourt, president of the Provincial Council of Performing Arts, organizes spaces for memory, reflection, and theatrical practice, with particular emphasis on artistic training processes.
Activities will begin on January 22 at Café Lucem with the talk "An Afternoon with Ana," dedicated to the recently deceased actress Anaysis Rodríguez Bermúdez, and will continue on the 23rd with "Our Stage," a dialogue about theater in Camagüey, its challenges, and prospects.
The artistic centerpiece of the Festival will be the premiere of *The Weight of an Island* on January 23 at 9:00 p.m. at the Avellaneda Theatre, presented by third-year Acting students from the Academia de las Artes Vicentina de la Torre, under the direction of their professor Leonardo Leyva Fernández.
The play will have performances on January 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, and 31, becoming the central scenic focus of the event. For the second consecutive year, the Festival places its main premiere within an academic exercise, shifting away from the usual prominence of professional groups.
The production is built around a gallery of symbolic characters — Filemón Uztariz, Tato the cheerful, Ñico the irreverent, Mercedes the discontented, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, La Reina, Casandra the blind, and Juana the naïve — who together articulate a poetic and plural vision of island experience.
Lighting and costume design, as well as artistic advising throughout the process, are handled by Freddys Núñez Estenoz, who is also the author of the notes in the program booklet.
The Festival extends beyond the performances: on January 26, at the Academy headquarters (Tabloncillo 4), Freddys will lead the practical workshop “Immediate Cuban Theater,” and on January 27, the dismantling of *The Weight of an Island* will take place, a space for analysis and reflection on the creative process.
More than a century and a half after the events at the Villanueva Theatre, the Festival once again highlights theater as a public act and a space for reflection on the nation. That this gesture is now in the hands of students reinforces a contemporary reading: the memory of Cuban theater is reactivated not only through history but through the new generation that embodies it.
