Raúl Ramón Rivero Castañeda

Raúl Rivero was a journalist, dissident, rebel, owner of a dynamite-like sense of humor that has brought him displeasure and disagreements with cultural and political bureaucracy, Cuban to the core but fundamentally a poet.

Raúl Rivero Castañeda [Morón, 1945] has had, despite many hardships, a surprising life, rich in adventures and knowledge. He is perhaps the best-known poet of his generation, from the seventies, when he was published and celebrated in his country, not only for the quality of his conversational and anti-poetic poetry ["Poetry should not speak about me, but with me, about things that happen"], but for having been one of the official poets of that time. Today, his poetry, while remaining colloquial, is one of the most rhythmic and refined in the language, cut with a style that makes it wise and subtle. He published several poetry books and worked in Cuban media.

He was born in Morón, Ciego de Ávila, in central Cuba. Son of a couple with scarce resources, his parents were of peasant origin but he was born when they already lived in the town. Morón would have had about forty thousand inhabitants in those years, it was a ranching and agricultural area and his family had a small farm of minor fruits and some sugar cane, which they lived from. Later they emigrated to Havana at the beginning of the 1960s. Rivero was educated and enjoyed the privileges of the boom years of the revolution.

His father worked in various places and trades, he was an automobile salesman, administrator of gambling houses, barber… He always remembered with great affection those last years spent in his hometown.

He arrives at a Havana that for him will be from then on the National Library, the museums, the cinematheque, women, ideas, nightlife… In those years people would bathe and go out to the street at 10 at night to have a drink, to a nightclub; something spectacular about that era were the cabaret shows, so much so that he wondered how am I going to study? Those shows that Guillermo Cabrera Infante describes, the singers of the era live, that Havana of the 60s was visually incredible, fabulous and relatively cheap spectacles. The people you heard on records you could hear live, César Portillo, Antonio Méndez, the Orquesta Aragón, Tito Gómez, the Riverside in the Tropicana gardens for a peso… Benny Moré, Rolando Laserie, Pacho Alonso, Gina León, there was an atmosphere… The access to a world of freedom and beauty was truly impressive. The Havana that Cuban journalism painted through magazines and newspapers was a marvel, journalists like Gastón Baquero, the magazine Bohemia, there were the great journalists and there was debate.

At university he studied literature and met Jesús Díaz, Froylan Escobar, who is in Costa Rica, Helio Orobio. The Writers' Union had already been founded and they created a section called the Brigada Hermanos for young writers. He began to know writers like Heberto Padilla, Rafael Alcides Pérez, Luis Manrique, Roberto Fernández Retamar, who was his professor at the University, of poetry and Spanish American literature. Retamar was also director of the magazine Casa Grande; he published a small note there. Writers like Nicolás Guillén, Lezama Lima, Manolo Díaz Martínez also went to the Union, there was still a climate of considerable unity.

Many of them together with Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera would integrate what would later be called the Copelia Generation, because we would go out for ice cream after classes sometimes until four in the morning talking about everything; Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés joined there time later around 1966, since there was a relationship with the texts they wanted to make. Later other people appear like Jorge Fuentes, film director, and groups of people from the philosophy department like Jesús Díaz, to whom they propose then to create a literary supplement that will be called El Caimán Barbudo. Jesús calls a group of people whose proposal is to create a different vision of Cuban literature, not a revolutionary literature but from the revolution, from the postulates of the revolution…

He worked as a journalist for radio and the written press, and had the fortune of having lived in the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev, when the arms race led to a paralysis of the economy and a stubborn aversion to any change in the social course. It was in those years when the journalist became aware of his role as a poet in the world and understood that he had to break with an oppressive and cruel society.

First, he renounced his privileges, then he created an independent press agency [Cuba Press], writing, with his precise, ingenious, profound and mocking style for various media where he gained recognition from Cuban readers, and finally, after having signed a letter together with 74 other opponents of the regime, requesting freedom of the press, on Thursday, March 20, 2003, a dozen police officers burst into his house and arrested him, accused of conspiring with the United States and of attacking the socialist state. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Twenty-one months later, after a massive worldwide campaign demanding his freedom, and after having been awarded about seven international prizes in prison, he was released and sent into exile, to Madrid, where he still lives, in the company of his mother, his wife Blanca Reyes and Yania, his adoptive daughter. He belonged to the first generation of journalists who graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Havana after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

In 1966, he was one of the founders of the cultural magazine El Caimán Barbudo. Subsequently, he was correspondent for the Prensa Latina agency in Moscow between 1973 and 1976, returning later to Cuba, where he was in charge of directing the agency's science and culture service.

In 1989 he resigned from his membership in the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. Two years later, on June 2, 1991, he was one of the signers of the Letter of the Intellectuals, in which Fidel Castro was asked to free prisoners of conscience. That year, he left official journalism denouncing it as a "fiction about a country that does not exist."

In 1995 he founded an independent news agency from the Cuban government, called Cuba Press. In 2001 he was one of the founders of Cuba's first independent journalists' association.

In April 2003, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison during the so-called Black Spring, accused of carrying out subversive activities aimed at affecting Cuba's independence and territorial integrity, writing against the government, having been interviewed with James Cason, a US diplomat, and having organized subversive meetings at his home.

He served only a year and a half of this sentence because in November 2004, due to serious health problems and due to international pressure, fundamentally from Spain, he was released, officially after being granted the so-called extrapenal leave for health reasons. Shortly after, Rivero moved to Spain with his entire family.

Awards
Ortega y Gasset Prize
Reporters Without Borders Prize (1997)
Premio María Moors Cabot (1999)
International Press Institute World Press Freedom Heroes (2000)
UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize - Guillermo Cano (2004) See and modify data in Wikidata