Francisco de Oraá Carratalá

He was born in La Habana. Still a child, his family moved to Caibarién, in the province of Villa Clara, where he lived until 1960, the year of his permanent establishment in the country's capital.

He completed his high school studies at the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de Remedios, in Villa Clara itself. As a teenager, he enrolled in the Juventud del Partido Socialista Popular in 1943, and from then on developed numerous tasks as an activist in the educational center where he studied.

Very early on he began to show a vocation for letters, as he collaborated in the children's literature magazine titled Ronda, which circulated nationally, and around 1941 he made his texts known in Archipiélago, from Caibarién, which was distributed throughout Latin America. During that time he also collaborated in El País Gráfico.

Later, after 1959, with works of a political nature and occasionally literary ones, he spread his name in other publications: Hoy Domingo (literary supplement of the newspaper Hoy), Revolución, Prensa Libre and El Mundo, newspapers of great importance in the country's cultural life.

After establishing himself in La Habana in 1960, he worked as a librarian at the newly founded Escuela para Instructores de Arte, where he also directed the worker-peasant advancement of the center's employees and taught classes to staff and scholarship recipients.

After several years of work in the library and in teaching, he began working in 1966 as editorial secretary of the magazine Unión, of the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), a position he held until 1996.

During these three decades, he made direct translations from French and many versions, based on literal transcriptions, of poems by Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and other authors from the then socialist bloc. Among his French translations is Cartas a Theo, by Vincent Van Gogh, published by the Instituto Cubano del Libro.

He collaborated with poems, translations and critical essays in the magazines Unión, Casa de las Américas, Bohemia, La Gaceta de Cuba, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, Islas, Revolución y Cultura.

As part of his literary life, Oraá served as a judge in the Latin American contest Casa de las Américas, in the national UNEAC contest and in those of literary workshops in various provinces of the country.

He traveled to Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union representing Cuban writers at the Pushkin Festival and the Festival of Soviet Literatures.

His poetic work has been translated into Polish, French, Russian, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, and has been made known in literary magazines and anthologies both national and foreign.

In 1995 he participated with a paper at the Colloque International à José Martí, convoked by L' École Normale Superieur de Fontenay-St. Cloud, France.

In 1964 he published his volume of poems "Es necesario", which immediately positioned him as a singular voice within his generation. Critics judged this book as the anguished search of the poetic self, intuited as insurmountable solitude, of a self-recognition in others.

His second work, "Por nefas" (1966), turned out to be a desperate effort to conjure the forces that envelop him in an alienating reality, hence the fundamental themes are solitude and anguish. "Por nefas" is an expression of old Castilian that means "by any means", "on one side and on the other", "for better or for worse", according to the context in which it appears; thus, in this book, introspective images appear or those that refer to the reality of things, but always somber, sometimes dark, which distanced him from the colloquial line of most of his contemporaries. On the back cover the stylistic intention of the poems is described: carelessness and awkwardness.

Almost all the poems that make up these first two books were written during the nineteen fifties.

"Con figura de gente y en uso de razón" (1968) brought about a change in the perspective of the lyric subject: there is a counterpoint between solitude and solidarity. The book shows a poetic maturation as his voice is consolidated, always metaphorical, with avidity for the image, but seeking greater communication. This poetry collection shows, on the other hand, the itinerary of the existential transmutation of the poet and the man.

His next book, "Ciudad ciudad", earned him the Prize "Julián del Casal" for poetry 1978, from UNEAC, and critics have valued it as a thematic continuation of his previous work, expression of one who has been able to rise above melancholy and solipsism to share optimism and integration. Using lyric and epic elements, the poetic conformation is careful, without the awkwardness pointed out in his previous work, but always as the authentic result of an undeniable need for expression.

In 1986 he was awarded the Prize of Criticism, from the Ministry of Culture, for his poetry collection "Haz una casa para todos".

Other later poetry books (where, even, there is a poetry collection dedicated to children: Mundo mondo, from 1989, Prize "La Rosa Blanca" for children's literature) continued that refinement of poetic speech, always yearning for images and symbols, always questioning with respect to life and its deepest meaning, now enriched and unfolded (as in La rosa en la ceniza, 1990) by the presence of a son.

Both in essay and in narrative, Francisco de Oraá is always a poet. In his reading of Martí embodied in La espada en el sol (1986), we find ourselves before a profound and sensitive, essential interpretation of Martí's work based on the texts themselves, an intelligent and delicate interpretation expressed in finished prose. There are no pretensions of academic rigor, nor of categorical exhibitionism, quite the contrary; however, the writer, through his poetic intuition, penetrates the deepest zones of José Martí's work and thereby contributes to its better understanding.

Also in a poetic and creative way he conceived "La parte oscura" (1997), a novel that breaks with the molds in use in the nineteen nineties to propose a world with more transcendent signs within its apparent respect for tradition. A work with a good dose of introspection, full of symbols, of oneiric elements, leaves with its reading a unique experience in the panorama of the last decades of the twentieth century. La parte oscura was translated into German and in 1998 obtained the Prize of Criticism.

For the excellence of his work, for his contribution to the enrichment of Cuban culture, the Ministry of Culture conferred on Francisco de Oraá the National Prize for Literature in 1993.

Cintio Vitier expressed that Francisco is one of the poets of the History of Cuban lyric poetry of all times, not only of his generation nor of the twentieth century. I believe he is a poet little known in Cuba and less so outside of Cuba. A silent man, very humble, very modest, a poet of great intimacy. Not of very extensive work but very intense. And, from the triumph of 1959, the collective with the personal is a very profound way. Besides, he is a magnificent critic. He has made one of the best interpretations I know of the Versos Sencillos, by José Martí.

He died in La Habana in the year 2010.