FILM:
Cuba's Almodóvar Girl
Dalia Acosta

HAVANA,  (IPS) - She swept the floor, emptied the ashtrays and watched the plates of food served by the waiters with hungry eyes. Afterwards, when the lights were dimmed and the music came on, she appeared on stage and sang "I want to be an Almodóvar girl."

"In a long shimmery dress and a turban, I sang that song I had rehearsed so often in front of the mirror in my apartment in Havana, and at the end I turned my back to the audience. Then they could see, beneath my evening gown, my humble waitress uniform," Cuban actress María Isabel Díaz told IPS.

Díaz created the show herself after arriving in Spain in 1996, and for a long time she performed in "bars and taverns," hen parties and all kinds of celebrations. It was how she earned her living and made her way in the country she had chosen for "a new experience of life."

The future world-class actress felt the need to stretch her wings during the severe economic crisis that afflicted Cuba in the 1990s.

Working with Pedro Almodóvar, who had directed films she loved, like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "All About My Mother", was basically an impossible dream, even after she travelled to Barcelona.

Now the first Cuban "Almodóvar girl" confesses that working with the director of her dreams on the movie "Volver" (2006), nominated for an Academy Award and shown at the 28th New Latin American Film Festival in Havana, was a challenge and also "great fun."

"Working was such a joy. There were tensions, as in every movie, but we weren't aware of them. Pedro looks after his actors very well, he is very human and down-to-earth. I have come to think that his great talent arises from his humanity. I was very surprised," she said.

Díaz said that Almodóvar "concerns himself about everything, even about whether you are feeling cold." And that, she said, "is a very rare thing these days."

A graduate of Cuba's Higher Institute of Art (ISA), Díaz was 16 or 17 years old when she began to act in her high school theatre group, with Carlos Varela, who is now a singer-songwriter, rock star Tanya, actor René de la Cruz, Jr., actress Daysi Quintana, singer Mayra de la Vega and theatre director Víctor Varela.

She was still a student at ISA when film-maker Orlando Rojas offered her the leading role of La Gorda in the film "Una novia para David" (1985).

Next came parts in "Papeles secundarios" (Orlando Rojas, 1989), "La vida en rosa" (Rolando Díaz, 1990), "Hello Hemingway" (Fernando Pérez, 1993), "El plano" (Julio García Espinosa, 1995) and "Melodrama" (Rolando Díaz, 1996). Later she played a leading role for four years in "La hora de las brujas", a television programme transmitted live once a week.

With this experience under her belt, she went to Spain and decided to stay there for a while. "I wanted to do something as frivolous as finding out what snow was like, and I just stayed on. I had no money, I felt like a backpacker although I actually had a suitcase, but I was never short of friends. I always had a roof, food and affection."

But for a long time she could not do any of the things she had hoped and dreamed. "I even forgot I was an actress. People would ask, and I would say 'I'm an ISA graduate,' but I would never tell them that I had acted. I was living so, so far away from my world, that it was like a joke," she said.

"I worked in restaurants, took care of children, was a hotel waitress," even though she had legal documents which she obtained immediately on her arrival in Spain. "But even with my residence permit I couldn't get a work contract, let alone in my profession. And in Barcelona, as soon as I opened my mouth, people would look at me as if to say 'Where on earth did this one spring from?' I was a complete and utter immigrant."

Even renting an apartment was difficult. When people heard her foreign accent, they just stopped listening. "They would say 'I'm sorry, only Spanish people,' and I knew it would be extremely hard, but I persevered. I don't know why I didn't go back to Cuba then, I didn't even think my life here was going to get any better," she recalled.

But she was sure that her time in Spain was not over yet. So, after five and a half years of doing "any old thing" in Barcelona, a couple who were Cuban actors introduced her to their agent, and two months later she was cast in a television serial in Madrid.

She had never wanted to move to the Spanish capital because she thought it was "an enormous city, out of proportion, inhuman," but she found she had been totally wrong: "Madrid is a lovable city, chaotic, very like Havana. I didn't want to live in a city where there was no sea, and suddenly I saw the sea in the Paseo del Prado."

Díaz invented her own sea. Walking through the centre of Madrid, her imagination would transform the Prado into the no less emblematic Malecón of Havana, the avenue that follows the coastline for 10 kilometres on the edge of the Cuban capital.

"It wasn't just any sea, it wasn't like the sea at Barcelona that never seemed to 'smell right', it was my sea. And that was when my life began to change," she said.

After that first serial, she continued to work in television and returned to films with a "tiny role" in "Piedras" (2002), directed by Ramón Salazar. "I played a prostitute who sang 'La vie en rose', and after that I played a number of sex workers: they were battered, robbed, informers, but all prostitutes."

Díaz considers that foreigners are not appreciated in Spain. "They don't realise the real role of immigrants in Madrid and everywhere in the country. An immigrant is always pigeon-holed as a maid, a prostitute or a poor woman, never as a doctor, for example," she said.

In addition to "Piedras", she was cast in "Cosas que dejé en La Habana", Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1997), "Un rey en La Habana" (Alexis Valdés, 2005), "Locos por el sexo" (Javier Rebollo, 2006) and "Volver", Almodóvar's film that has already been awarded several prizes at the San Sebastián and Cannes film festivals.

The film begins with Raimunda's teenage daughter killing the man she believes is her father, who was sexually abusing her. On the same day, Raimunda's sister, Sole, has to attend an aunt's funeral on her own. When she gets back home, she finds her mother's ghost in the trunk of her car, and hides her in the house.

Everyone knows that the mother had died years ago in a fire, but she comes back as a ghost to change their lives.

Díaz plays a friend who helps Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) to get rid of her husband's body. A simple role, but Almodóvar had it very well thought out.

"When I saw the film, I couldn't believe I had acted in it. I loved the way the story was told, I felt so identified with it ... I felt like a spectator who thinks 'I want that to happen to me.' My mother died 25 years ago, and it was as though she had sent me this movie," the actress said.

Seeing the film was as important to Díaz as acting in it. "I was 17 when my mother died, and from that day on I had dreams in which I was having a shower, and she would come and draw back the curtain and say to me 'Ahhh, I was just checking on how you were behaving.' I'm 42 now, and I still imagine that she's going to turn up and surprise me."

"It was just like when I watched 'Suite Habana' (a Cuban film directed by Fernando Pérez). When I saw 'Volver', I cried my eyes out," Díaz said.