Cubans find laughter as therapy amid crisis

Laughter rings through a Havana theater as an audience of about 150 spectators fills the space. The monthly show, "La Risa por Delante" (Laughter Up Front), uses humor to confront the harsh realities of daily life in Cuba, including frequent blackouts, shortages, and rampant inflation.

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It's an exercise in life: we who are alive laugh, the dead cannot laugh. So being alive in the midst of all this circumstance, this great crisis that has hit us, I think is the best exercise we can do, and above all, to laugh in a group... with the people who come here.

The initiative, held for over a year and a half at the Nave Oficio de Isla cultural collective, features renowned Cuban comedians and actors. The show's popularity is evident, with nearly 50 people turned away from the last performance due to a full house.

"It's an exercise in life: we who are alive laugh, the dead cannot laugh," said actor Osvaldo Doimeadiós, a promoter of the event. "So being alive in the midst of all this circumstance, this great crisis that has hit us, I think is the best exercise we can do, and above all, to laugh in a group... with the people who come here."

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Talking about humor and practicing it is a challenge. Humor itself is a crisis... facing a word, a situation, a character, or a context and moving within this crisis making humor is always a creative exercise that we have embraced in the space 'La Risa por Delante'.

Comedians tackle Cuban reality with irony, though they avoid overly sensitive topics like tensions with Washington or the possibility of a U.S. invasion. Doimeadiós, for instance, jokes about the collapse of tourism by describing a foreigner seen walking near Havana Cathedral. Another comedian, Alejandro Phillips, satirizes the scarcity of dollars in banks with a made-up symptom called "TRD: Dollar Finding Disorder." The show's writers find the daily struggles of Cubans to be fertile ground for comedy, comparing Cubans' survival skills to astronauts preparing for a moon mission.

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The type of situations that Cubans live through daily is fertile ground for comedians.