She was Cuba’s first black model, a figure of contemporary dance and the unforgettable heroine of the Russian-Cuban film “Soy Cuba”, considered a masterpiece of world cinema. Sixty years after the shooting, Luz Maria Collazo recounts her memories.
At 79, she says she has a “very bad memory”. So to try to revive her, she took out of the drawers of her small apartment in the Nuevo Vedado district of Havana envelopes filled with photos, posters, magazine covers.
So many testimonies of a professional life marked by art and begun under the auspices of the artistic explosion that followed the 1959 revolution.
“I was lucky to be there during this period of artistic vitality”, confides the almost octogenarian with long black hair who has kept her haughty look despite the years.
The mestizo, born in Santiago de Cuba in 1943, but who grew up in Havana, was fifteen when the revolution led by Fidel Castro arose. At 18, this daughter of a driver and a housewife wants to learn drama.
“I saw an ad in a newspaper” to study at the National Theater. It was also possible to study contemporary dance. “I wanted to be an actress and in the end it was dancing that seduced me,” she says.
However, the cinema catches up with her. In 1963, when she was coming out of a hairdressing session at the Habana Libre hotel, she was approached by the wife of the Soviet cinematographer Sergei Ouroussevski.
The latter came to Cuba with Mikhail Kalatozov, director crowned with a Palme d’Or in 1958 for “When the storks pass”. The two men are in charge of carrying out one of the projects co-produced by the Cuban Institute of Art and the Cinematographic Industry (ICAIC) and the Soviet studios to exalt the alliance between the two brotherly countries.
The cinematographer’s wife asks Luz Maria Collazo if she is ready to star in the film. “I wanted to work, I said + yes + to everyone,” she told AFP, remembering that she had to face “a lot of racism” at the time.
The shooting of this four-part film, which recounts the overthrow of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (1952-1959) by the revolutionaries of Fidel Castro, is spread over several months.
Luz Maria Collazo, who plays a poor young woman forced into prostitution in casinos frequented by the American mafia, remembers a director “very kind, delicate” with the actors he directed through an interpreter .
Despite the precarious material conditions, the result is a film with breathtaking black and white photography and virtuoso camera movements, with innovative sequence shots for the time.
However, the film did not have the expected success. It was released in 1964, when Fidel Castro and Nikita Krouchtchev were cold. In Havana, it is barely screened, deemed too “poetic” and giving an “exotic vision” of the Caribbean island, remembers the actress.
“The film was not successful and I was a little disappointed”, says the one who will not shoot other films, but is today, sixty years later, one of the last witnesses of this adventure.
It will be necessary to wait until the 90s for the film to be exhumed from oblivion. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese discovered it, dazzled, in 1993. The restored version of the film received a prize at Cannes in 2004. The work is now studied in film schools.
The thwarted fate of the film will not prevent Luz Maria Collazo from continuing in the world of image through modeling. Again, her beauty hit the mark and she was spotted “in the street” in Havana by photographer Alberto Korda, author of the legendary portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara.
He offers her to pose for “professional photos”. “He was one of those who promoted me the most. It was exceptional at the time to choose a black woman”, recalls the former contemporary dance teacher, now retired and who has lived alone since her death. of her Italian husband.
Today, she looks at those years with a look filled with “sadness” because of the passage of time and the difficult economic situation in Cuba which makes her life more precarious. “It gives me a lot of nostalgia to look at these photos,” she breathes.