Saturday August 15, 2026 10:30am - 11:45am MDT
Beyond the Postcard: Cuba’s Untold Stories opens a window into a Cuba that exists beyond the postcard image—beyond vintage cars, palm trees, and streets staged in nostalgia.
Beneath that surface is another geography: memory that refuses to fade, silences that were never neutral, survival written into everyday life, and stories that were never supposed to be spoken.
Based on the book Cuba, Qué Linda es Cuba by Hebert Poll Gutiérrez (Primigenios Publishing House, Miami, 2020), this is not a conventional book presentation. It is a multidisciplinary crossing where film, puppetry, animation, poetry, and spoken word collide—sometimes gently, sometimes violently—bringing fractured memory and lived imagination into the same fragile space.
At its core, the work speaks to what has been erased, softened, or pushed out of frame. It opens a space to think about identity, migration, social fracture, and cultural resilience, while asking audiences across Canada’s diverse communities to recognize what echoes of their own stories live inside Cuba’s narrative.
Here, performance is not illustration—it is evidence. Film, poetry, and live action do not decorate the story; they interrupt it, question it, expose it.
The audience is not outside of it. They are pulled into writing, response, silence, discomfort—into a shared questioning of freedom, dignity, and belonging.
A central element of the experience is “The Wall of Voices”, an interactive space where audiences leave fragments of themselves—memories, contradictions, unfinished thoughts—expanding the work beyond the stage and into collective memory that keeps shifting.
Guiding this journey is storyteller Diane Din Ebongue, moving between artistic languages, holding tension between page and stage, past and present, truth and imagination.
This is not only a Cuban story. It is a human one—fragile, urgent, and still unfolding.
Presenters 
Multidisciplinary artist, curator and storyteller
Diane Din Ebongue is a Cameroon-born multidisciplinary artist, storyteller and curator based in Alberta. Her work explores Afrofuturism, identity, skin tone representation, and cultural memory through visual arts, film, photography, mixed-media installations, and storytelling. She has presented solo...
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Playwright, storyteller, author, poet, Spanicarts, Playwright Guild of Canada, Storytellers of Canada
Hebert Poll Gutiérrez is a Cuban Canadian author, playwright, poet, and storyteller with 21 years of experience. He sees art as a tool to defend his triple cultural identity—as a Cuban, an Afro-descendant, and an artist—and to create stories that connect African roots with visions...
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