My Cuban Dream to close Havana Film Festival New York in May 2026

The last screen at the Havana Film Festival New York will belong to a Cuban dance story that has already traveled far from home. My Cuban Dream, the documentary by Spanish filmmaker Christian Dehugo, is set to close the festival on Thursday, May 7, at 6:45 p.m., with Lizt Alfonso in New York to present the project.

HFFNY lists the film as Mi sueño cubano / My Cuban Dream, a 2025 documentary running 90 minutes and programmed in Latin Beats on Screen. The festival is in its 26th edition this year, and it is a project of the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, the New York nonprofit chartered in 2000 that has long used cinema to keep Cuban and Latin American cultural life moving through Manhattan.

For Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba, the New York slot lands with extra resonance. The company’s official biography says LADC fuses ballet, flamenco, Afro-Cuban and contemporary dance, a mix that helped define its identity long before it reached major international stages. The documentary, which premiered on October 26, 2025 at the Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid in Spain, follows that artistic line from Havana’s rehearsal rooms into a global festival circuit. At its Valladolid debut, the film screened to a full house in Sala 5 of the Cines Broadway.

Dehugo’s film also sharpens the focus on what has always made Alfonso’s work travel well: discipline, clarity, and a style that is unmistakably Cuban without ever staying inside one box. The story tracks a company built over decades in Havana, then carried outward through tours, commissions, and festival appearances. LADC’s own record includes performances at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, and Central Park SummerStage, all proof that the company’s language has found room on some of the city’s most visible stages.

New York is not new ground for Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba. New Victory Theater’s archive shows the troupe appeared there in 2015, after becoming the first Cuban dance company to perform a full season at the theater in 2003. That history gives My Cuban Dream a fitting landing place: not just as a film screening, but as another step in the company’s long export of Cuban dance, carrying the movement, rigor, and flair of Havana into an audience ready to read it as both art and cultural memory.