Pablo Armando Fernández Pérez

One of the great contemporary Cuban writers. Novelist, poet, playwright, and translator. His work has accompanied Cuban letters during the revolutionary period.

Pablo Armando Fernández was born at the Delicias sugar mill in Las Tunas, in eastern Cuba. His mother, Rosalía Pérez Pupo, possibly of Sephardic origin, was the daughter of a landowner who ended the War of '95 with Mario García Menocal. His father, José Fernández Carralero, came from a humble peasant family with extensive involvement in Cuban liberation struggles during the Colonial period (a great-grandfather and grandfather had fought in the War of '68 and '95, respectively).

Pablo Armando Fernández completed his primary education in his birthplace. He spent his high school years between his island and the United States, where he resided from 1945 to 1959 and where he discovered that his destiny lay in poetry and literature. He studied his first two years in Holguín and later at Textile High School in the United States. His relationships at that time with Manila Hartman, wife of composer Harold Gramatges, and with Carson MacCullers notably influenced his consciousness as a poet.

In 1953 he published Salterio y lamentación in Havana, and on September 9 of that same year he gave his first poetry reading at the Lyceum Lawn Tennis Club in Havana, introduced by Cintio Vitier, in the presence of Emilio Ballagas, José Lezama Lima, and Fina García Marruz. This was followed by readings at the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo and the publication of poems in the magazines Orígenes and Nuestro Tiempo.

In 1954, back in the United States, he studied journalism at Washington Evening and later took courses at Columbia University in New York.

1956 was a transcendent year for Pablo Armando Fernández. He married María Julia González Santos, his Maruja, his life companion. He worked at Mexican Lines and published Nuevos poemas, with a foreword by Eugenio Florit. The following year he made contact with the leadership of the Revolutionary Movement 26th of July in New York: he participated in rallies and meetings, among other activities.

He debuted as a playwright in 1958 with his dramatic poem Las armas son de hierro, directed by Humberto Arenal and sponsored by the Movement 26th of July. The work was presented in the auditorium of the Movement itself on Amsterdam Avenue.

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, driven by his attachment to left-wing thinking, his sense of social justice, and his hope of joining in the transformative processes that the political change on the island promised, he returned to his homeland and committed himself to the revolutionary fervor. He began working with President Manuel Urrutia and when the latter resigned, Guillermo Cabrera Infante convinced him to accept the position of subdirector of Lunes de Revolución. From then on he accompanied the literary venture of the publication, from issue number 17 until its disappearance in 1961, and from that date on he moved to Casa de las Américas magazine as Editorial Secretary.

He published all his poetry including "Apocryphal Poems of Hadrian," with a foreword by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Likewise, Himnos came to light.

He served as Cultural Counselor of the Cuban Embassy in England from 1960 to 1965.

He was Secretary of Organization of the First National Congress of Writers and Artists of Cuba, whose opening was announced on August 18, 1961. His poetry collection Libro de los héroes received an honorable mention in the Casa de las Américas Contest, which went to press in 1964. In 1966 he collaborated in the reorganization of the International PEN Club through his position as head of publications of the Cuban Commission of UNESCO, where he worked until 1967.

Los niños se despiden won the novel prize in 1968 in the Casa de las Américas Contest. It is a polyphonic novel, full of voices, of recollections, of myths unleashed by poetic language. The text constructs a new mythology of Cuban roots; thus organized are the bundle of resurrections and struggles, of population flows and family belief systems. Inserted in the whole zone of the so-called "novel of the Cuban Revolution" and amid the literary revolution of the novel of the sixties in the Latin American world, with its burden of quests and experimentations, Los niños se despiden interwove, in a high degree of lyrical tension, the experimental play of narrative structure with the often magical vision of the experiences of Alejandro, its protagonist, both in his beloved Deleite (Las Tunas) and in the "island without myths, without fables, without true legends," as Manhattan seemed to him. The search for a consolidated identity, for a comprehensive knowledge of the world, as well as for a space of idyllic nature called Sabanas, will mark the departures and returns of this singular character.

He received the Accésit Adonais Prize in Spain for his poetry book Un sitio permanente in 1969. From 1971 until 1979 he worked at the Printing House of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba.

In 1978 he published his Suite para Maruja, considered one of the greatest poetic works of Cuban literature. He won the Critics' Prize in 1985 for his poetry collection Campo de amor y de batalla, which, according to the jury, earned a permanent place in Cuban poetry because "it marks a certain breaking and overcoming in the handling of language."

In 1991, his novel En el vientre del pez appeared among the 10 best-selling fiction books in Miami, according to a list published by Nuevo Herald on March 3.

He was part of the jury for the Cervantes Prize in Madrid in the 1992 edition. In 1993 his novel Otro golpe de dados came to light, a historical fresco set during a period of crisis in the eighteenth-century Cuban period, in a somewhat mythical world in the eastern part of the island. The story of a French-origin family, with its contradictions and anguish, serves him to intone the song of the birth and consolidation of Cuban nationality.

In 1995 he won the Critics' Prize again for Talismán y otras evocaciones and in 1997 he was admitted to the Cuban Academy of the Language as a full member and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy with a text titled "The Affective Landscape in José Martí's Campaign Diary" and received the National Prize for Literature, the highest distinction that Cuban culture confers on its writers. That same year he presented his book De memorias y anhelos; the documentary Nostalgia by Jorge Aguirre was shown, about his life and work, and he received the Félix Varela Order of the First Degree from the hands of the Minister of Culture.

He was director of the "UNION" Magazine of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (1987-1994) and Director of the Editorial Fund of Casa de las Américas (2001-2005). He is currently an Advisor to the Presidency of Casa de las Américas.

With an intense cultural life, Pablo Armando Fernández is also one of the best ambassadors that Cuban culture has had in the world. He has given lectures at several recognized universities in the United States such as: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, American University, and New York University, among others. Also in Canada: Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal; and in universities in Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Jamaica, and Granada. He has also presented at important universities in Great Britain such as Oxford and Cambridge.

His work as a lecturer extends to other European countries: Spain, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and to other continents: Africa, Asia, and Australia.

The XII International Book Fair of Havana (2003) was dedicated to Pablo Armando Fernández for his lifetime work. National Prize for Literature, 1996.