Antonio Benítez Rojo

Narrator, film screenwriter, essayist and Cuban university professor. One of the most important thinkers on Caribbean culture.

He was born in La Habana. Before turning one year old, he traveled with his parents to Panamá, where he remained for six or seven years. This experience would be important in his later vision of the Caribbean and its connections with Cuban culture. Upon his return to La Habana, he studied at Colegio de Belén, a Jesuit institution where he graduated with a degree in Letters. He pursued a university degree in Economics and Accounting, and obtained a scholarship from the International Labour Organization to continue his studies in Washington and México.

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed, he worked as a technician at the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba for a few months, and moved to the Statistics Department of the Ministry of Labor, where he remained until 1966. He worked briefly as an advisor in the Ministry of Justice and also served as part of the Center for Information and Studies of Culture. He was Vice-Director of the National Direction of Theater and Dance of the National Council of Culture (1966-1967) and editor-in-chief of the magazine Cuba Internacional (1968-1969).

His vocation as a writer manifested itself late. It was precisely in the late sixties that Benítez Rojo began writing his first works of fiction and decided to submit them to competitions. In 1967 he obtained the Premio Casa de las Américas and, in 1968, the "Luis Felipe Rodríguez" Award from the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), with his short story collections Tute de reyes and El escudo de hojas secas, respectively. With both volumes, Benítez Rojo soon gained international renown and became one of the most important narrators in Cuban literature.

His prestige led him to work at Casa de las Américas, where he directed the Center for Latin American Literary Research (1970-1971), the Editorial Department (1974-1980) and the Center for Caribbean Studies (1979-1980). As part of his work at that institution, he was responsible for the Compilation of texts on Juan Rulfo (1969) and the anthology Fifteen Stories from Latin America (1970), the latter in collaboration with Mario Benedetti. Around the same time he was compiler of 10 Short and Famous Novellas (1971).

He was screenwriter for Guerra del tiempo (1974) and Una mujer, un hombre y una ciudad (1978), as well as for the films Los sobrevivientes (1977), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea; and La tierra y el cielo (1978), by Manuel Octavio Gómez, which were adaptations based on his short stories "Estatuas sepultadas" and "La tierra y el cielo," respectively.

In 1980, Benítez Rojo left Cuba to settle permanently in the United States. There he was a professor of Latin American literature at Amherst College, Massachussets, and visiting professor at Harvard, Emory, Brown, Yale, Pittsburgh and Miami universities. He died in Massachusetts in 2005.

Benítez Rojo's first three volumes of short stories are characterized by belonging to a fantastic narrative, close to the magical realism that became fashionable in Latin American literature. This perspective, although he later abandoned it as a fundamental tendency in his narrative, is a component present in later works. In his early short stories, the confrontation between the old order and past conceptions with the new worldview promoted by the Cuban Revolution is recurring. On the other hand, Benítez Rojo is indebted to the imprint of Alejo Carpentier: in general terms, his narrative work is linked to Carpentier's, especially from his interest in the historical novel and the Caribbean.

With El mar de las lentejas, Benítez Rojo initiated a cycle he called "Mar de fondo," where he intended diverse Caribbean events to structure a chronicle of the region over five centuries. It is a historical novel characterized by the breadth of its socioeconomic approach, its postmodern formal scheme, and the cultural incidents on which it feeds. El mar de las lentejas combines four different narrative lines, followed through four clusters of characters: King Felipe II of Spain agonizes on his deathbed at El Escorial in 1598, and sadly reflects on his long reign; the soldier Antón Babtista, a fictional character, arrives in La Española in 1493 with Columbus's second voyage and is followed through his rapacious career among innocent and docile Indians; don Pedro, the young son-in-law of Adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who lives from the founding of San Agustín in 1565 and participates in the massacre of French Huguenot troops captured near Florida; and finally the Ponte family, made up of Genoese merchants transplanted in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and who maintained a profitable triangular commerce between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. This plural novel, which according to Benítez Rojo's own words has History itself as its protagonist, is interested in illustrating the importance of Catholic Counter-Reformation in Spain's economic and colonizing policy; in revealing the incipient economic force of capitalism and utilitarian spirit over the ethical or religious principles of the Middle Ages; in demonstrating the transposition in America of the spirit of the Crusades, which a few years earlier had inspired the war against the Moors in Spain; and in offering a vision of History from the perspective of the common man.

Following these motivations, Benítez Rojo published El enigma de los esterlines, an incursion into the adventure novel for young readers. This work recounts, through an old manuscript, the activities of the Esterlines, a powerful band of pirates, corsairs, buccaneers, merchants and slavers. It is a historical novel full of fiction and suspense, which has repercussions in the present. Its value also lies in the fact that it is inspired by episodes related to Espejo de paciencia, by Silvestre de Balboa, considered the first written work of Cuban literature.

With Paso de los vientos Benítez Rojo returned to his interest in the Caribbean from different time periods. These are historical fragments developed through characters who can constitute the archetypes of Caribbean history: colonizers, smugglers, merchants, pirates, revolutionaries, slaves, all of them in a setting of ambition, ideals, violence, cruelty, cunning and political wisdom. These are ten short stories, written mostly originally in English, and previously published in A View from the Mangrove (1998). With this volume, Benítez Rojo concluded his project of writing a trilogy about the Caribbean using different literary genres.

In his last novel, Mujer en traje de batalla, however, he returned to the same interests based on the fascination produced by a character judged as heretical in some versions of History: Henriette Faber, a woman of Swiss origin who lived during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between Europe, the Caribbean and the United States, and who was remembered for practicing medicine disguised as a man and for breaking Church laws by marrying a young woman in the town of Baracoa, in eastern Cuba.

Benítez Rojo chose some episodes from this woman's biography to dramatize them in the novel: orphanhood and childhood in her uncles' house, premature marriage to a lieutenant in Napoleon's troops, her first experience in war and widowhood, medical studies under a man's identity, participation in the campaigns of Russia and Spain, the journey to the Caribbean and settlement in Cuba, marriage to Juanita de León in Baracoa, legal proceedings and, finally, her expulsion from the Antillean colonies. But Mujer en traje de batalla not only vindicates the memory of Henriette Faber in her life journey and epic dimension, but also rescues her from her inner complexity. Its pages immerse us in the memories of a divided woman who, now elderly and in the United States, externalizes her psychology and updates the long chain of episodes that led to the scandal for which she became known.

In Benítez Rojo's texts, an economic and mathematical perspective is recognizable, originating largely from his university education. It is present not only in his numerous historical fictions, but also in his essayistic work, nourished by important examples such as "Latin American Novel, Caribbean Novel and Afro-Atlantic Novel: Notes for a Taxonomy of the Novel," "The Role of Music in the Emergence of Afro-Cuban Culture," "Creolization and Nation building in the Hispanic Caribbean," "The Caribbean and the Afroatlantic Connection," "Sugar/Power/Text," "From the Plantation to the Plantation: Similarities and Differences in the Caribbean," "Caribbean Culture in Cuba: Continuity versus Rupture," and many others. From this economic perspective Benítez Rojo is particularly interested in the slave plantation, in the merchant fleet and in other mechanisms that were articulated in the Antillean region during the colonial period. Benítez Rojo was convinced that without understanding the mechanism of mercantilist expansion and sugar plantation, one could not fully comprehend the literature and culture of the Caribbean. As for mathematics, from them not only derive the structures of several of his narratives, but they also allow him to take advantage of the theoretical utilities of Chaos, complexity and fractal geometry to articulate a postmodern understanding of the Caribbean.

His anthological essay La isla que se repite is part of the cycle initiated by Benítez Rojo with El mar de las lentejas, and later completed with Paso de los vientos and Mujer en traje de batalla. This essay is considered by many Caribbeanists as the most recent and attractive epistemological proposal for understanding the area, which is studied by Benítez Rojo from a multidisciplinary perspective, mixing History, Economics, Ethnography, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, Literature and Art; and supported by Chaos theory and fractal geometry. One of the most significant contributions of this essay is that the Caribbean is not limited to a mere geographic space, but responds to a certain group of values that can appear or flourish in any corner of the planet.

In 1980, the Cuban government granted him permission to give a lecture at La Sorbona, in París. He traveled from the French capital to Berlin, obtained a tourist visa for the United States, and traveled to that country. Already in the U.S., he taught Spanish at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard, Emory, Brown, Yale, Pittsburgh and Miami universities.
One of his most influential publications, La Isla que se Repite, was published in 1998 by Editorial Casiopea in Barcelona. He died in 2005.

Works
Tute de reyes (short stories), Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, La Habana, 1967.

El escudo de hojas secas (short stories), Ediciones Unión, La Habana, 1969.

Los inquilinos (story), Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 1976.

Heroica (stories), Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 1976.

El mar de las lentejas (novel), Letras Cubanas, La Habana, 1979.

El enigma de los esterlines (novel), Gente Nueva, La Habana, 1980.

Antología personal (short story), Editorial de la universidad de Puerto Rico, San Juan, 1997.

La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (essay), Ediciones del Norte, Hanover, 1989.

Paso de los vientos (short stories), Editorial Plaza Mayor, San Juan (Puerto Rico), 1999.

Mujer en traje de batalla (novel), Alfaguara, Madrid, 2001.