# Marta Rojas Rodríguez **Date of birth:** May 17, 1931 **Categories:** Society, journalist, literature, professor Cuban writer and journalist with extensive experience, she was an exceptional witness to the assault on the Moncada Barracks and the trial of Fidel Castro following this event. National Prize for Journalism José Martí in 1997. Winner of the Alejo Carpentier Prize for the novel in 2006. She was born in Santiago de Cuba and studied Journalism in Havana. Soon after graduating, she was an exceptional witness to the events of July 26, 1953, the assault on the Moncada by Fidel Castro. This event and the trial were meticulously covered by the newly graduated journalist, but her reports would be censored at Revista Bohemia, the publication to which she submitted them. Immediately afterwards she began working in the Cuba Section of that magazine. Although she had prepared during her year of practice as a student to work in the sports newscast on Television (Channel 4). After the triumph of the Revolution, she continued working at Bohemia and shortly thereafter joined the team of journalists at the newspaper Revolución. Later she joined the team of Granma from its creation (1965). She was head of information, editing, and the culture page. Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Communication. First war correspondent, Cuban and Latin American, in South Vietnam and Cambodia (1965-1975). During that period she was in Vietnam nine times, south and north. Later she covered trips by President Fidel Castro, including to Chile, other Latin American countries, and within Cuba. Fiction Narrator Finally the journalist gave way to the fiction narrator. She is the author of novels such as: El columpio de Rey Spencer (first edition in Chile in 1993 and later in Cuba in 1996), Santa Lujuria (published in 1998 and in 2000). Both were the subject of study at the Afro-Hispanic Literature Congress of the University of Arkansas, El harén de Oviedo, published in 2003 and Inglesa por un año (Letras Cubanas Publishing, 2006). The latter earned her the Carpentier Prize for the novel, one of the most contested prizes in Cuban letters. According to the jury that awarded her the prize, her novel will undoubtedly mark historical fiction in Cuba, and will be appreciated not only for rigorous investigative work and the daring to shed light on a little-treated era, but also for the verisimilitude of its narration and the dynamism of its dramatic situations. Marta Rojas at work Regarding the novel Santa Lujuria, American researcher Miriam DaCosta Willis has written "it is a subversive and iconoclastic text that serves as counter-discourse to the official history written by the founders of the Creole lineage". Professor and literary researcher Elba Birmingham-Pogorny from the University of Arkansas wrote a laudatory paper on El columpio de Rey Spencer. For Marta Rojas these novels bring to light Cuban colonial society, in which class discrimination, the privileges of the rich and nobility, eroticism and sex hidden beneath hypocrisy and other evils that corroded the men and women of that time, all lurked. She believes that truth, fiction and verisimilitude are mixed in the literature of this genre and that is what she tries to achieve. Other works by her Marta reproaches the Chavian colonel about Melba and Haidée Her other works include: the testimonial book, anthology, El juicio del Moncada, with a prologue by Carpentier (various editions), those dedicated to the Vietnam War; Tania, la guerrillera inolvidable (co-author, first edition with Mirtha Rodríguez Calderón, published in English by Random House, 1970), El que debe vivir, Casa de las Américas Prize 1978; La cueva del Muerto, a historical novel brought to film by director Santiago Alvarez. Stories by Marta Rojas appear in the anthologies Estatuas de Sal (Unión Publishing) and Cuentistas cubanas de hoy (Océano Publishing, Mexico) and in Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby, Jonathan Cape, London and Pantheon Books, New York (1992) and Afrocuba (University of Puerto Rico, and Center for Cuban Studies, New York) by Jean Stubbs and Pedro Pérez Sarduy). She has made documentaries with director teams José Maldavsky and Gonzalo Arijón, for French television and collaborated on documentaries from ICAIC since the founding of the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry. For Marta Rojas, of all her works, the most impactful is La Generación del Centenario in the trial of the Moncada, later titled by the editor El juicio del Moncada, which becomes an inescapable reference for those who wish to know the arbitrariness committed by the government of Fulgencio Batista against those who assaulted the former Santiago barracks and the interventions of Fidel Castro which constitute his defense argument and at the same time a forceful denunciation of the evils of the Cuban neocolonial republic. Awards and Recognition Replica of the Machete of Máximo Gómez National Prize for Journalism José Martí in recognition of her life's work in 1997 Prize for Cultural Journalism José Antonio Fernández de Castro 2004 National Hero of Labor of the Republic of Cuba in 1999 Alejo Carpentier Prize for the novel 2006 Master of Youth Prize 2017 Mirror Doors Prize 2019, for her work El equipaje amarillo Assessments of her work In one of the few prologues to a book written by Alejo Carpentier, Miguel de Cervantes Prize winner, he defined Marta Rojas as: "Agile and talented writer, of profound journalistic vocation, keen eye, direct and precise style, gift for showing many things in few words". Lisandro Otero (Revista Casa de las Américas, No. 141) says: "Marta Rojas possesses the basic virtues of a good journalist... But in addition to her journalistic qualities, she is endowed with the attributes of a good narrator, she knows how to tell the story she sets out to with a fluid, serene and comforting rhythm". Mirta Yáñez: "Marta Rojas knows how to furnish her novels. Naturally we learn of the drinks, the songs, the garments, the foods, all with a realism that does not disdain sensuality and imagination. A meticulous researcher, she imprints a tone of daily life that eliminates the stiffness of poor (and boring) historical novels.