Cuban Playwright and Professor Matías Montes Huidobro Dies in Miami

May 8, 2022

Matías Montes Huidobro (Sagua La Grande, 1931), one of the most prominent intellectual figures of Cuban exile, died this Friday in Miami at the age of 91, after a prolific career dedicated to playwriting, narrative, university teaching, journalism, and literary publishing.

Montes Huidobro's death occurred on Friday, May 6, as reported by editor Luis de La Paz, who had recently recognized him with the Ateje Prize in playwriting.

Exiled in 1961, Montes Huidobro was co-founder of the magazine Bohemia in exile, and much of his life took place in Hawaii, where he worked for decades as a professor at that state's university, alongside his wife, also a professor and essayist Yara González, who died in July 2021.

Author of an extensive body of dramatic, essay, and narrative work, including volumes in English, Montes Huidobro was—along with Rine Leal, both classmates at the Instituto de La Habana—one of the most meticulous researchers of twentieth-century Cuban theater, of which he left testimony in the four volumes of Cuba, detrás del telón, published between 2008 and 2010, which document eight decades of Cuban theater.

When asked by Diario de las Américas about milestones in Cuban theater in the twentieth century, Montes Huidobro cited Tembladera (José Antonio Ramos, 1917), La muerte alegre, by Evreinoff, directed by Luis Baralt, the founding of the Grupo Prometeo, foundation of modern theater on the island (1948, directed by Francisco Morín), which premiered Electra Garrigó; 1954 is a great year for Cuban playwriting with the premieres of Las criadas (Jean Genet, directed by Morín) and La ramera respetuosa (Jean Paul Sartre; under the direction of Eric Santamaría; 1959 to 1961 is a period of unity and diversity.

La Madre y la Guillotina (1976), La navaja de Olofé (1986), and Exilio (1988) stand out among his theatrical works; in essays, Persona, vida y máscara en el teatro cubano (1973), Bibliografía crítica de la poesía cubana; (exilio: 1959-1971), and La narrativa cubana entre la memoria y el olvido: Ensayos stand out. He founded the magazine Caribe on Cuban literature and the Persona publishing house.

His novel Por esa fuente de dolor won the Café Gijón Prize (Spain, 1997), and was a finalist for the Premio Planeta with Segar a los muertos (1980); a story of the first days of 1959, when the incited masses shouted in Havana: ¡Paredón!, ¡Paredón!

In 2017, the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) recognized the role played by Montes Huidobro in promoting Spanish culture in the United States with its Enrique Anderson Imbert award.

For a possible epitaph for Montes Huidobro, perhaps this assertion by Don Fernando Ortiz might be fitting, from Etnia y sociedad: "Full Cubanness does not merely consist of being Cuban through any of the environmental contingencies that have surrounded individual personality and forged its conditions; it also requires the consciousness of being Cuban and the will to want to be Cuban."

Or these two from his former classmate, Rine Leal: "What ultimately matters is to assume that 'other' theater and judge it based on its aesthetic quality, beyond temporal circumstances that will overcome absence and oblivion." Or when he stated: "Neither the political foolishness that claims that Cuban culture (and therefore theater) is in exile, nor the patriotic chauvinism that transforms a creator who permanently abandons the country into a mediocre one or deposits him in that zone of silence, which still surrounds much of our studies."

Matías Montes Huidobro is survived by his children Ana María and Eugenio, and two grandchildren.