Cuba’s once-celebrated dance director scrambles as cultural life collapses

Juan Miguel Mas built Danza Voluminosa into one of Havana’s strangest and most beloved stage acts, a company of larger-bodied dancers that once played the 2,000-seat National Theater. Today, at 60, he is scrambling through a very different city, teaching children’s workshops, organizing small community performances, and piecing together a living from the cultural wreckage left behind.

Mas, who was born in Havana in 1965, trained under major Cuban dance figures and made his debut in 1996. For nearly three decades, he remained a visible part of the island’s dance life, even as he faced discrimination over his weight. Danza Voluminosa stayed active until 2024, but the steady work that once sustained it has largely disappeared. Mas has also been told that his teaching contract with the National Theater of Cuba was suspended, a small administrative decision that speaks loudly about how far even prestige institutions have fallen.

His slide mirrors the collapse around him. Blackouts, water outages, rising prices and broken transportation already strain daily life in Cuba, and artists have taken a second hit as shows are canceled, production money vanishes and colleagues keep leaving the sector. CEPAL estimated that Cuba’s economy contracted 1.0% in 2024 after a 1.0% fall in 2023, deepening the recession that has hollowed out the formal cultural economy. In 2024, Reuters reported that more than 600,000 people were dealing with water supply problems, while local reporting cited official data showing more than one million Cubans had trouble accessing running water in mid-September 2024. Cuba’s power grid also suffered repeated breakdowns, including a nationwide blackout on October 18, 2024 after a major plant failure.

The cultural damage lands especially hard in Havana, where UNESCO says the Old City and fortification system were declared a World Heritage Cultural Site in 1982 and where the city remains Cuba’s leading tourist destination and a central hub of creativity and music production. Yet the state-run venues that once gave artists affordable stages have deteriorated, leaving many performers dependent on a shrinking circle of expensive private spaces. Michel Hernández has described that landscape as bleak and complicated, and Mas’s own routine shows what that means in practice: garage sales, a small home business and whatever paid work can still be improvised.

The broader population crisis has only sharpened the sense of unraveling. Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos has estimated Cuba’s resident population at about 8.62 million, a drop of roughly 18% between 2022 and 2023, while more than 738,680 Cubans arrived in the United States from October 2021 through April 2024. Mas says he wants to stay in Cuba because leaving would cut him off from the audience and the everyday Cuban life that still gives his work meaning. That is the quiet tragedy of his story: the man who once helped fill Havana’s great theater now survives at street level, in a city where even the stage itself has started to disappear.