Historic Cuban Editor and Bookseller Juan Manuel Salvat Dies in Miami

November 27, 2024

Historic Cuban editor and bookseller Juan Manuel Salvat, based in Miami since the 1960s and founder of Ediciones Universal, a publishing house that published numerous authors from the Island, died this Tuesday at age 84, reported art critic and curator Jesús Rosado on his Facebook profile.

Salvat was born in Sagua la Grande in 1940 and studied at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Havana, from which he was expelled in 1960, despite his position as vice secretary general of the University Student Federation at that school. Thus, he sought asylum at the Brazilian Embassy and left Cuba in August 1960.

"On February 5, 1960 our lives would change permanently. It had been announced that Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan, one of those most responsible for the Russian massacre in Hungary, would bring a wreath of flowers to the Martí statue in Central Park. A group of students organized ourselves to peacefully bring a wreath in the shape of a Cuban flag, as a gesture of protest. When we carried out our protest action, we were repressed by Government Police and taken as prisoners to G-2," Salvat said to Cuban historian Rafael Rojas in an interview published in the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana in the 1990s.

"Then came the expulsion from the FEU and the university, in public acts in Plaza Cadenas, where we were surrounded by mobs shouting 'paredón'... It was then that we became aware that the Castro Government would repress all freedoms to implement a communist system," he narrated.

"And we took the path of conspiracy, founding, in the same tradition of Cuban students from the 20s and 50s, the Student Revolutionary Directorate," he added, and as a member of this group, he returned on several occasions to the Island clandestinely and with false documentation to carry out propaganda campaigns and other actions against the Cuban regime. Later, he managed to return to Miami through the Guantánamo Naval Base.

In 1965, he created Universal Distributorship in Miami, and in 1968 he began publishing books under the Ediciones Universal imprint. In its more than 40 years of history, Ediciones Universal, considered the largest Cuban editorial project in exile, published over 1,000 titles, the majority by Cuban authors or on Cuban topics, since Salvat considered his main mission to preserve, through books, "the fundamental values of our culture."

Ediciones Universal, under Salvat's direction, made the first editions outside the Island of Cuban classics by authors such as Lydia Cabrera, Carlos Montenegro, and Reinaldo Arenas, and his literary work, according to what Salvat told Rojas, "reflects quite a bit of our exile."

"It formed almost from nothing and has developed according to circumstances, with a tremendous dose of family work. There are not many plans, but rather an open willingness to welcome the creative efforts of our compatriots," he added.

Regarding the importance of his intellectual work in exile, Salvat emphasized in that same interview: "The Cuban in exile has been very enclosed within the borders he creates for himself and which perhaps seem satisfactory for living. Reading is always a minority activity and in our case even more so because of the reality of being in a different linguistic environment, where new generations are born and develop that, for the most part, speak Spanish, but read and understand English better."

"Cuban exile culture needs to return to its roots on the Island. That is where it will achieve its definitive development and lose its isolation," he affirmed.

From his Universal Bookstore, located in Miami's Little Havana, which closed its doors in 2013, Salvat advocated for the need to read everything, and in his space, he also sold books by authors who showed their unrestricted sympathy for the regime. "I believe you have to read everything. Freedom in the world of culture is something that must be defended. We opposed the Castro regime for that reason, because it violated freedom," he said in 2013 in an interview with the newspaper El Mundo.

Thus, in the interview with Rafael Rojas for Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana he highlighted: "We have not stopped dreaming that at some point all our editorial collection can enter our country, circulate freely and grow with the creative contribution of our compatriots there. Ediciones Universal was born and has lived intimately united to Cuba and its culture and when circumstances permit, it will be able to develop on the Island as well."