Juan Manuel Betancourt

He is a writer, journalist, screenwriter, photographer, and humorist.

He spent his early years in his native Matanzas. With the triumph of the Revolution he moved to La Habana, and when the magazine Palante was founded in 1961, he began his career in humorous journalism, until 1966 as a contributor, and later as part of its staff, where he remained until his death, but he had already lost the name Juan Manuel Betancourt González, for a long time he was already Betán.

Not known by it, but truly Betán, in an omnipresent way. Many have thought that already in Palante, after so many years, those in the editorial office ignored the name he carried in his identity card. Everyone, those in the newsroom and readers, throughout the fourteen provinces and the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud, called him and recognized him as Betán.

His work as a journalist, writer, and humorist expanded between 1968 and 1971. Three of his comic books won a Special Prize from the OIP during that period: Matilda y sus amigos, Los siete samurais del 70, and Pol Brix contra el Ladrón Invisible.

Among reports, articles, and other variants of journalistic humor, Betán also began appearing with his stories and tales in various humor anthologies, such as: Una bocanada de humor (Agenor Martí), Ese personaje llamado la muerte (Imeldo Alvarez), Más de 100 años de humor político, Veinticinco años de humor Palante, and Revistón de Palante, the last three organized by Évora Tamayo.

In 1989, through Editorial Pablo de la Torriente Brau, he worked on the selection and coordination of a humor anthology: Humor de puño y letra. Shortly after, through this same publisher, he published Breve muestra de humor gráfico cubano.

When his book Guía para tontos de capirote came out in 1982, it was said: "This is one of the good ones, one that comes to enrich the tradition of creole humor, in which, with Caribbean flavor and roguish air, all the popular wisdom that the overstuffed fear and the poets and artists faithful to the humanism of our culture applaud is merged."

Faced with the effects of the "special period," far from being intimidated because the weekly Palante suddenly became a monthly, he grabbed the typewriter – the marvel of the computer had not yet arrived – and began to write novellas, novels, the first in the line of his humorous texts, such as Parece que va a llover, still unpublished, and in the interstices of his creative activity, he assembles a selection of the works he published in his Palante section called Amplíe su cultura si puede, even hammering out successively three novellas of the "Western genre," which are also unpublished in his papers, the thing was to break the backbone of the need for expression, to find paths to his concerns.

Encouraged by his colleagues in the newsroom, he decided to write a detective novel, based on an original idea by his wife, the writer, caricaturist, and painter designer at Palante, Miriam Alonso.

The surprise knocks on the doors of this couple of creators: Crimen con brumas, which is the title of the novel, received a mention in the Police Literature Contest that the Political Directorate of the Interior Ministry convenes every year. This recognition encouraged Betán, and in the next call he received the First Prize with the novel Pentagrama negro, which is why he continued advancing in the cultivation of the fascinating genre.

Betán entered the group of cultivators of the police genre, but without forgetting that he was a born humorist. His stories, novellas, and detective and mystery novels are equally liked by adult readers as by children and young people, undoubtedly not only because of the stories that make up the narrative fiction, but because of the appeal of the fantasy of fabulization, because of the adventures and intrigues that the characters experience, because of the suspense he achieves in the elaboration of the plot, realistic and at the same time symbolic, taken from reality, from daily events, but at the same time open to different scenarios and settings.

For example: three of his police novels (Entre el amor y la muerte, La muerte del cargabates, and Traficantes de tinieblas) have been broadcast in radio adaptations produced at Radio-Arte and by various provincial and municipal stations throughout the country. The latter won the Second Prize at the National Radio Festival 2004.

The police novel Perros de pelea, which recreates with realism and tenderness the inhumane practice of fighting with these little animals, includes an appendix with technical records of the dog breeds mentioned in the work.

In early 2003, Betán received an invitation from Cuban writer and humorist José Pelayo, resident in Chile, to write jointly a short novel of an infantile-humorous-police style that had been commissioned by the Alfaguara Editorial branch in the homeland of Pablo Neruda.

The work, titled El chupacabras de Pirque, the fruit of that effort, has become quite a success, due to sales of copies, due to the various reprints it already has, due to its presence in numerous schools in the Andean country as complementary class reading, and due to the reception of specialized criticism.

The joint work of Betán and Pelayo achieved new successes with the following detective humor works: Por una nariz, El secreto de la Cueva Negra, En las garras de los mataperros, El enigma del huevo verde, and Eternamente Yolanda, forthcoming. Alone, Betán presented to Alfaguara Editorial the adventure novel for young people titled Percival Paz y la leyenda del ahorcado.

Always at Palante, alongside his wife Miriam and his colleagues in the newsroom, Betán continued writing. Faithful to his style, to his magazine, to his homeland, to his creative projects, perhaps a little removed from the gatherings of the established, but sure of his dreams, working.

He won more than forty national and foreign prizes in police and humorous literature, drawing, and photography. He was a screenwriter for didactic comic strips which earned a Special Prize from the OIP.

In Cuba he published the book Guía para tontos de capirote (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982) and his stories have appeared in numerous anthologies.

He has written nine police novels, two of which were awarded in the national contest that the Interior Ministry of Cuba convenes annually, while three others have been adapted for radio and one of them awarded at the National Radio Festival 2005.

As coauthor with Pepe Pelayo he has published El chupacabras de Pirque, El secreto de la cueva negra, and En las garras de los mataperros (Editorial Alfaguara-Chile. 2003, 2004, and 2005).