Actor and playwright Robby Ramos on telling Cuba's story, holding heterodox views in the art world, and Hollywood's writer and actor strike
Robby Ramos’ play “The Walls Have Ears” is about three Cuban siblings who’ve taken diverging paths in the early years of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, only to find themselves confronting those differences in an unexpected encounter at Presidio Modelo, a notorious prison on Cuba’s Isla de Pinos. In writing the script, Robby drew not only from the life of his own grandfather (who had himself been a political prisoner in Cuba), but also from the stories he’d been told by others in his family who lived through those early days of what would become the most most brutal, influential and durable dictatorship in the western hemisphere.
While the subject matter makes “The Walls” an inescapably political work, Robby didn’t go about the project with an activist motive. Instead, he was looking to tell a compelling story about a family and a people torn apart — from a perspective that is too often handicapped by too much emphasis on the politics and too seldom explored outside of Cuban and Cuban exile circles.
In this conversation, Robby Ramos and I talk about his play, how growing up in his Miami Cuban family informed his politics and his views on liberty and why moving to New York to pursue theater opened his eyes to the need for work like “The Walls Have Ears.”
We also talk about Robby’s broader acting career, including his work in theater and TV — especially his role on the cast of Heels — and the business side of “The Walls,” which was as much an entrepreneurial venture as it was a artistic passion project.
Finally, Robby and I talk about the strikes by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA (which, at the time of this recording, were in their last days).
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Nicolás Antonio Jiménez is the founder of DADE. He’s always working through his rotation of writer, podcast host, podcast producer, photographer and editor hats.
A Miami native and graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, Nick’s background includes work in democracy promotion, human rights advocacy, content marketing and magazine journalism (most recently as senior editor of Cigar Snob).