When Chibas arrived in Cuba, she discovered an unsettling juxtaposition of forgetting and remembering. She contacted long-lost family members, who treated her like visiting royalty. She stopped people on the streets to ask if they knew Eduardo and they would tell her stories.
But when she visited the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, she discovered to her dismay that her father’s name had been removed from a list of rebel commanders. When she searched for his face in old photographs at the Cuban National Archives, she found that his image had been airbrushed out.
At first, Chibas planned to tell her story in a documentary film, but the stage veteran and head of the acting program at CalArts soon realized that theater was the ideal medium as it allowed her to embody the characters she knew so well.
“She goes through a lot spiritually and emotionally and physically in the transformations, but it is something she is able to search for and find,” said the play’s director, Mira Kingsley. “It is her family so in a way it is already born in her body, it’s in her muscle and in her bone. So a lot of the piece has been searching for that history that is already living in her.”
Chibas could not agree more. In the final scene of Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, she delivers her own de facto manifesto in the cascading rhythm of a spoken-word poem.
“I am the daughter of Raul y Dalia. I am the daughter who sprang from the thoughts of Eddy Chibas,” she says. “I am the daughter of Afro Cuba.”
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Marissa Chibas': Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary
