# Félix Pita Rodríguez

**Date of birth:** February 18, 1909

**Date of death:** October 19, 1990

**Categories:** translator, poet, journalist, narrator, literature, essayist, Arts, Society

Poet, narrator, essayist, playwright, journalist, literary critic, translator, radio and television writer. One of the great voices of Cuban literature. National Literature Prize winner.

He was born in Bejucal, in the former province of La Habana, and completed his primary studies at the public school of his native town. After his father's death, he moved with his family to La Habana, and between 1926 and 1927 he traveled through Mexico and Guatemala, where he worked as an assistant to a seller of costume jewelry and miracle tonics.

He contributed to the major publications in which avant-garde movements were expressed in Cuba during the first decade of the last century, such as Revista de Avance, Social, Atuei and the literary supplement of Diario de la Marina.

The bohemian character of his youth led him to visit Paris (1929), where he was in direct contact with the main figures of the surrealist movement; Italy (1930); Spain (1931) and Morocco (1932). In the company of Juan Marinello, Alejo Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén, he was part in 1937 of the Cuban delegation to the II Congress of Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture that took place in Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris during the Spanish Civil War. He visited Belgium in 1938 and upon returning to Paris served as Editor-in-Chief of La voz de Madrid (1938-39).

Upon returning to Cuba in 1940, he directed the Sunday magazine of the newspaper Noticias de Hoy, the official organ of the Socialist Popular Party, until 1943. With his poem "Romance de América la bien guardada," with anti-fascist themes, Pita obtained first prize in 1942 in a contest called by the War Propaganda Directorate of the National Defense Ministry.

Parallel to his journalistic activity, he worked as a radio author and was elected in 1943 by the Association of Radio and Print Chronicles as the best dramatic author of that year, while also occasionally venturing into our theatrical life with his work "El relevo," premiered in 1944 at the Teatro Principal de la Comedia under the direction of Paco Alfonso. This was a work that aimed to offer a dramatic sketch in one act, divided into five scenes, about Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion. In 1946 he won the International "Hernández Catá" Prize for his story "Cosme y Damián." As a radio and television author, he later worked in Buenos Aires (1949) and Caracas (1958-59).

Upon his return to Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, he carried out outstanding work in the literary life of the country. He was Vice President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba and President of its Literature Section, member of the jury of important national and international contests, such as the Casa de las Américas Prize. As a representative of our cultural organizations, he traveled to, among other countries, the Soviet Union, China and Viet Nam.

He translated various texts of Vietnamese literature from French, notably the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh. His poems and stories have been translated into numerous languages such as English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Vietnamese. His story "San Abul de Montecallado" was made into a film in Mexico.

In 1985, in recognition of his complete body of work, he obtained the National Literature Prize, and in 1986 he won the Critics' Prize for his book De sueños y memorias. For his outstanding contribution to national culture, he was awarded the Distinction for National Culture and the Félix Varela Order.

Pita stands out as one of the most intense and prolific short story writers of Cuban literature from the thirties onwards. His narrative work is characterized in general by being infused with his poetic vein, and by insisting above all on social themes with an emancipatory projection.

Pita's stories can be divided into five fundamental stages: early Havana stories (1927-1929); avant-garde stories (1929-1936), influenced by Paris and surrealism; anti-fascist militant stories, where he gains ideological awareness; the Montecallado stories (1945-1955) and those of the Isthmus (1946-1955), all bearing the mark of humanistic inquiry and reflection on American reality; and stories after 1959, a date that generally marks a radical shift in Pita's work.

In his first two stages, to which stories such as "Eurípides, vegetariano," "El fantasma borracho," "La musa," "Fábula de Puck, vendedor ambulante," "Alanio o de la indiferencia" and "Eclipse de don Menguante" belong, common features stand out such as constant digressions from the action; plays on words and the breaking of traditional rhetoric and syntax; affiliation with surrealist ideas, such as concern for the commodification of art and culture, the manipulation that the market makes of public expectations, the negation of bourgeois status; humor or irony; marks of orality; the rupture of conventional narrative structures and the illusion of fiction through the transgression of the boundaries between reality and imagination, and between author, narrator and reader; as well as the conscious attitude toward the creative process.

The subsequent stories were those of his narrative maturity. They began with his experiences in the villages of Spain —from which he constructed the village of Montecallado, although not described from local characteristics— and in Central American countries, fundamentally in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and in Guatemala. In these stories there is a correlation of characters and anecdotes, and although surrealist motifs persist, in essence these are realistic stories where themes of solitude and solidarity appear, and of alienation and work as moral antitheses. The stories of this stage are narrated almost all from the perspective of characters from the urban and agrarian underworld, and therefore popular speech and imagination are important here. The most important story of this period is Tobías (1952), without doubt, the most anthologized of Pita's works.

From the 1960s onwards, Pita returned to insisting on stories about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, although this time from a much more social perspective. Niños de Vietnam (1968) was also a book of stories of social interest, which Pita dedicated to his granddaughter based on experiences acquired in that Asian country. The book highlights the heroism of the Vietnamese people, and especially their children. In a way, this book introduces another facet that began to manifest itself forcefully thereafter in Pita's narrative: its didactic character, evidenced in works of difficult generic classification, and with a certain playful, imaginative and transgressive character, such as Los textos o Elogio de Marco Polo.

The poetic work of Félix Pita Rodríguez places him as a Cuban avant-gardist out of time, like writers such as Samuel Feijóo, Virgilio Piñera or Lorenzo García Vega. However, being the youngest of all of them, in his work there are no post-modernist precedents, something that was common among poets who arrived at the avant-garde with a maturing body of work. On the other hand, Pita's vital experience led him to reproduce the bohemian and carefree attitude of the modernists, something that is indeed expressed in his work in general.

His poetry is fundamentally nourished by the surrealist mark he experienced during his time in Paris. As a result of this, his poetry collections Corcel de fuego (1948) and Las noches (1950) stand out. Corcel de fuego, Pita's first major poetic attempt, was a book that did not exceed 500 copies financed by the author himself, and with a prologue by Ángel Augier. It is the only poetry collection that Pita wrote before the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. This is a notebook that is nourished by the experiences accumulated by Pita from Guatemala to Mexico, and from Montparnasse to the Spanish trenches. Some moments in the volume, in fact, contain autobiographical elements. The book contains four sections that advance by concentrating anguish in an atmosphere of unreality and solitude, until reaching, in the last part of the notebook, absolute certainty of death.

As happens with other areas of his poetry, in this notebook an arbitrary organization of images manifests itself, but not to produce a reality —as in surrealism— but rather it starts from the irrational, from a "lyricism without concerns for intelligibility," as he himself stated on one occasion. This book is linked to French poetic production at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in inquiring into the capacity of words to express realities in themselves, and the correspondences between different types of sensory perception. These early compositions of his are a manifestation of "pure nonsense" poetry, since they lack thematic or conceptual centers, and are therefore incoherent. On the other hand, he understands amorality as supreme freedom, and pain, confusion and feeling are intuited, not understood, through the connotation of words.

It is for all this that Juan Marinello characterized Pita as a poet of "the new evasion." Other resources that define Pita's early compositions are humor and the tropological use of adjectives, with which he also gives meaning to the irrational. In Corcel de fuego, some of the persistent themes in Pita's poetry are introduced: the existential world, and human destinies in the face of life and death. Some of the categories of his work thereafter were the road and the journey, as a trajectory or vital project; the future-past unity, as a cyclical journey for action or inertia, depending on whether it is life or death; and the hand and the foot, as vital instruments and signs.

From 1960 onwards, Pita's work is divided into two major thematic zones: the first, driven by the urgency of revolutionary reality and the social changes that were taking place in socialist Cuba, and characterized therefore by epic breath. To it belong notebooks such as Las crónicas. Poesía bajo consigna (1961), Poemas para Viet-Nam (1966-1975) and Cantata del guerrillero heroico (1969). In these poetry collections Pita converges with the work of many other Cuban poets who, in those years, wrote poetry of service, testimonial and committed poetry.

The other zone of his poetic work after 1960 is driven above all by the lyrical breath that already characterized his earlier poetry. These are poems that insist on the anguish of existence and on the theme of death, without setting aside, however, notes of humor (Tarot de la poesía).

Félix Pita Rodríguez died in La Habana on October 19, 1990.