Circuba: Circo Fantasia

“This is the purest Cuba I have ever experienced, one without Cinemax and 3D theaters, where people are still able to find joy in the smallest things life has to offer.”

If I had to go to a deserted island and could take only one of my reportages with me—only one out of the hundreds—it would certainly be the “Circuba” story. This is the purest Cuba I have ever experienced and exactly what I wanted to document: a Cuba without “Cinemax” and 3D theaters, a land where people are still able to find joy in the smallest things that life has to offer. Coming from a highly developed country (Germany), where many people complain a lot despite having an abundance of things and opportunities, I’ve always treasured Cuba’s main asset as its humble people.

So, some 20 years ago, for over a year on and off, I followed the circus tent ‘Fantasia’ all through Cuba. The state-owned circus company did not perform in the big cities, rather in the smallest of villages. The idea was to bring their entertainment to the remote places, most of them so-called ‘Batey,’ little villages amidst sugarcane plantations. One would hardly find a movie theater in these places, so when the circus came to town, it was always a big sensation for old and young alike. Kids would rush up with excitement to set up the tent. Farmers, who had worked their entire life in the country side with animals, would get dressed as if for a big wedding, and enjoy the show with pure joy, watching the performances of Yorbis, the gnome; the muscle packed Duo Aldo and Pedro Chapman, the ‘Space Warriors,’ the deaf clown couple; beautiful Yissel, with her ‘Los Febles’ artistic group or the main act, where Jesús tried to get three goats to stand on a seesaw (and the animals most often would not do what he wanted them to do).

© Sven Creutzmann, 2020. All photos on this page.

But the circus is not only about the artists or the spectators. It is also about all the people that work long hours backstage, set up the big and heavy tent, take care of the animals, run the little amusement park next to the circus tent, sell tickets, take the tent down again and get the entire company to their next destination.

Towards the end of the reportage, the circus company’s headquarter had acquired a fancy new tent from Spain. I really liked the old one, its canvas had been repainted dozens of times, one could feel the history it was holding woven into its fabric. But at the circus, everybody was excited about the new tent, something modern had arrived! When they set it up in Havana for the first time, everybody was so proud…until they realized that the plastic tent had only one entrance, for the public but none for the artists or animals.