Herberto Dumé was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1929 and graduated from the National Academy of the Performing Arts in 1950.
He began his career as a theater director in 1955 and in 1959 became the director of the Teatro Nacional de Cuba, where he founded the theater company Grupo Guernica.
Dumé left Cuba for exile in Spain in 1965 and soon after settled in New York.
[1] In 1969, with the support and sponsorship of the New York State Council on the Arts, Dumé, José Corrales, and Edy Sánchez founded Dumé Spanish Theater in a small basement in the Greenwich Village area of New York City.
He staged plays by writers from Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen to Cuban playwrights Abelardo Estorino,[2] José Triana, and Virgilio Piñera.