Juan Edmundo Pérez Desnoes

He was the son of a Cuban of Spanish origin and a Jamaican mother who spoke to him in English, and was born on October 2, 1930. He married in 1956 María Rosa Almendros, daughter of the exiled Spanish pedagogue Herminio Almendros. He died at age 93 in New York

Desnoes wrote in 1965 the novel Memorias del Subdesarrollo, a complex story about the alienation of a "Cuban bourgeois" and his process of adaptation to the Revolution. The English edition was published in 1967, with the title of Inconsolable Memories. However, in the English-speaking world it has come to be known as Memories of Underdevelopment, a more exact translation.

This novel served as the basis for the screenplay of the film directed by director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in 1968. This film, according to Desnoes, is an example of a great adaptation from the written to the visual.

Desnoes, as an art critic, wrote many essays in the 1960s and 1970s. He self-exiled in 1979, moving to live in New York City.1​ Recently a new screenplay of Memorias del desarrollo was written and adapted for film by director Miguel Coyula.

Published Works
Novel
No hay problema, 1961
Memorias del subdesarrollo, 1965
El cataclismo, 1965
Essay
Lam: azul y negro, 1963
Para verte mejor, américa latina, 1972, book of photographs by Paolo Gasparini with texts by Edmundo Desnoes
As editor
Los dispositivos en la flor: Cuba, literatura desde la revolución, 1981
In anthologies
Cuentos de la revolución cubana, 1970, (Ambrosio Fornet, ed.)