Tin Cremata Remembers Fidel at UNEAC's Arte Fiel Campaign

Story after story — each one as compelling as the last — shaped an afternoon filled with allegory and longing, moving through astonishment, humor, and the most cherished of memories.

As part of the Arte Fiel campaign commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) in the year of Fidel Castro's centenary (1926–2016), and within the framework of celebrations for World Theater Day, the Association of Performing Artists held a special gathering on Wednesday with Carlos Alberto "Tin" Cremata, director of La Colmenita.

Journalist Magda Resik, first vice president of the organization, moderated the anecdote-driven dialogue in the Villena Hall. The conversation centered on the relationship between Cuba's eternal revolutionary leader and the children's theater company, as well as its significance for national culture.

Cremata — Hero of Labor of the Republic of Cuba, member of UNEAC's National Council, and Master of Youth — spoke with deep emotion. He recalled the first time the leader personally reached out to him following the spectacular closing performance of the Second Pioneer Congress in 1996, where La Colmenita joined deaf-mute children in singing "En aras de vivir" by Rosa Campo.

Moved by that singular artistic expression, Fidel summoned him and asked: "Young man, how can you do what you do?" To which Cremata replied: "Commander, it is because I was born in 1959."

He recalled the nervousness he always felt when interacting with him — as though standing before his own father. "He was like the sun," he reflected. "The same light that illuminated also burned."

Barbados carried a sorrowful memory that connects the director to his biological father — a wound from which he has never fully recovered. It was there that Fidel, without even intending to, came to represent a kind of surrogate paternal figure. During the 2005 CARICOM Summit, held at the Barbados monument honoring the site where a sabotaged aircraft crashed and killed 73 people — including his father, crew member Carlos Cremata Trujillo — Tin was unexpectedly invited by Fidel to participate, a gesture that affirmed the closeness and affection between them.

Two visions united by the soul of a consummate educator emerged in the figures of José Martí and his successor Fidel Castro — not only the man who inspired him, but also the one who followed and encouraged him to develop a dream that, 35 years later, has shaped children in the most authentic of values: those of Martí and of Fidel.

"If it had not been in Cuba, in the Revolution, with Fidel at the forefront, La Colmenita would not have existed," Cremata explained. Unlike other internationally recognized companies, La Colmenita operates without financial compensation and without commercial motives. The children do not perform what adults want — quite the opposite. They go out to play rather than to act or play a role, in the spirit of what Martí wrote in La Edad de Oro: that children should gather at least once a week to see whom they could help, all together.

The conversation also touched on encounters with Army General Raúl Castro, and on the adventures alongside young Federico, an Argentine child whose ease and spontaneity so impressed Cremata that he told him: "If La Colmenita were the Granma, you would be Che Guevara."

Wisdom, joy, and the certainty that the Revolution is also built with and for children marked the close of an evening in which the conviction of poet Silvio Rodríguez filled the Villena Hall with children's voices singing words as transcendent and defining as ever: "The pale-faced man who lives to harass hounds me, until together we all put him in his place."

Also in attendance were Marta Bonet, president of UNEAC; Yuris Nórido, vice president; Marilyn Garbey, president of the Association of Performing Artists; Yasel Toledo Garnache, president of the Hermanos Saíz Association; and Jorge Brooks, president of the Section of Criticism and Research of the Association of Performing Artists, among others.