The Sauto Theater: a crack on the ceiling and another in the culture of Matanzas

Matanzas/From the Plaza de la Vigía, the Sauto Theater is still erect like a lighthouse in the middle of Matanzas. Who looks at him from afar imagine that within his walls more than a century and a half of history, the beauty of the muses painted on the roof with the scars of a city that, like his coliseum, has seen his cultural life has seen.

Ignacio, guitarist and in love confessed from his city, looks at him from a bank in the square. “It hurts to see helpless people sleeping in their portals, when they should be inside, enjoying a good show,” he murmurs while reviewing the invisible strings of a guitar with his fingers. He knows well the decline that has marked the Sauto: years of closures for repairs, increasingly sporadic functions and cultural management unable to maintain the splendor of yesteryear.

The theater, inaugurated in 1863 as the Teatro Esteban and renamed in honor of Ambrosio de la Concepción Sauto, patron of the arts, has seen Sara Bernhardt, Anna Pavlova, Ernesto Lecuona, Ernesto Lecuona and even José Raúl Capablanca, who once played chess in his halls. Today, however, it has a diminished billboard and has become an epicenter of begging in the city. Just a few months ago, an individual with psychiatric conditions violated a lobby door and entered the enclosure, remembering the lack of protection that this national monument suffers crudely.

“It is the reality that we have to live,” Ignacio reflects. “The society looks the other way while the houses of culture disappear, the artists emigrate and the programming plans are made only to fulfill numbers.”

But the Sauto, as if he kept in his columns the echo of the applause to Alicia Alonso or the words of Carilda Oliver Labra, resists ruin. A crack that crossed its false roof closed the curtain from the main room for eight months. On a scaffold Fifteen meters, two young Matancerras, Anabel del Río and Lizbett Caballero worked tirelessly. With flashlights attached to the forehead and neck, they cleaned dust accumulated for more than 162 years, watched the original paint with delicate Japanese paper and returned the color to the muses that watch the stalls.

“We grew up loving this theater,” he confesses from the river to the official press. And perhaps that devotion explains the patience with which they filled cracks, leveled surfaces and applied reversible products to respect each original line. At the same time, engineers reinforced the roof with wood and technicians reviewed air conditioning, acoustics and even the blacksmiths.

The result came this July, with the reopening of the main hall and a concert that returned to the Souto its reason for being: the encounter between art and the city. “The objective is to offer stable and quality shows, despite the energy and logistics challenges we have,” said its director, Kalec Alberto Acosta Hurtado, proud that the programming beating again.

Ignacio, however, does not lower the guard. “The restoration cannot stop,” he warns, looking at how the afternoon light caresses the theater columns. “This place needs a vigía, someone who takes care of it as it deserves.”

That breakdown is the one that is missing because the state management of the property and the massive exodus of a good part of the Matanzer artists do not give truce to the cultural center. “You can paint walls and retouch a roof but a theater what you need are, mainly, shows and public,” says Ramón Luaces, a Matancero musician emigrated to Miami who keeps very good memories of the theater.

“Every time I went out with my friends, many of them troubadours, we ended up in one way or another in the Souto, because if there was no concert we put it together in the portals,” he recalls. “The last time I went to Matanzas, I realized that now that whole area is dangerous at night, it is very dark when it plays a blackout and when you approach you feel insecure.”

In the house of Luaces in Florida, the USA, some of their guitarist friends and singers frequently meet. “I have it now in my garden because these people who are here are the one that started there.”