Writer and National Literature Prize Winner Eduardo Heras León Passes Away

April 13, 2023

At the age of 82, Cuban narrator, editor, and professor Eduardo Heras León passed away in Havana, whom many also knew as "Chino Heras," an affectionate way of addressing him, not only because it alluded to the features of his face, but also because of his recognized charm and kind treatment.

He was not only one of the most important writers of his generation, which earned him the National Literature Prize in 2014, but also an important literary editor, which is why he also received the National Editing Prize in 2001. He will also be remembered for being a teacher to several generations of writers.

In 1998 he founded the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Workshop, which would later become the Literary Training Center, which he directed until 2020.

He gained sympathy and recognition from the general public through the television broadcast of a Course on Narrative Techniques that he taught, together with writer Francisco López Sacha, in October of 2000.

He was born in August 1940. At age 12 he lost his father and had to work as a shoeshine boy, newspaper and lottery ticket seller, and portal cleaner, while continuing his studies. He managed to graduate from the Havana Normal School for Teachers in 1958. He was linked to the "July 26 Movement" from that time in the struggle against Batista's dictatorship.

In 1968 his short story notebook The War Had Six Names, about his experiences as a combatant during the invasion at Playa Girón, won the David Prize.

In 1970 he received a Unique Mention in the Casa de las Américas Contest for his short story collection The Steps in the Grass.
Ambrosio Fornet described him as "a small classic of revolutionary short story writing for the meticulous passion with which he manages to capture the whirlwind of an era and the stubborn lucidity with which he asserts—amid pressing historical demands—those individual and social values that transcend the era."

The Mention sparked controversy typical of that "gray five-year period" also analyzed and nicknamed by Fornet, after which the book suffered censorship. Heras León was punished and had to abandon his degree in Journalism to become a worker and later a teacher at the Vanguardia Socialista factory, known as Antillana de Acero.

There he worked as a metal worker, furnace operator, professor at the Workers-Peasants Faculty, Training Director, and Head of Human Resources until in 1976 he was able to resume university studies until he graduated with degrees in Journalism and Philology.

About this stage of his life he told his students:

"Imagine, I had written two books and both were awarded prizes. I wrote anywhere, at any time. I conceived The Steps… in the newspaper office. The noise of people or linotypes didn't bother me. I had an extraordinary capacity to concentrate, so much enthusiasm, so many dreams…

The situation, the punishment, was like a blow that stopped me. For some time, I didn't even read. I felt marginalized, without desire to write. No one explained anything to me; they didn't let me defend my views. Only true friends stayed by my side and they also suffered. Later, several people apologized to me."

Starting in 1976 he began working at the Cuban Institute of the Book as an editor. A year later he published his book Steel, a result of his experience at the steel factory.

He was a founder of Editorial Letras Cubanas. He also published At Close Range (1981), A Matter of Principle (1983, National UNEAC Prize and Critics' Prize in 1986).

From 1990 he was director of Casa de las Américas Publishing until 2000.

Words of Eduardo Heras León upon receiving the National Literature Prize, during the Havana Book Fair in February 2015:

Dear friends:

A boy of barely twelve years hurries back from school. The classes that day have ended, and he wants to get home as quickly as possible. He is worried and cannot help it. His father is ill, almost confined to bed, with hemiplegia on the left side of his body, and the boy knows he doesn't have much time left to live. When he arrives at the tiny place where they live, he sits on the bed, caresses his father's immobile hand, and a sudden wave of tenderness invades him. Then, without knowing why, with tears in his eyes, he promises that one day he will be a writer, that he will publish the books you could never publish, old man, so that you will always be proud of me. A few days later his father dies, and that promise remained as a stubborn commitment to life.

The years passed vertiginously, and life became increasingly difficult amid a poverty that seemed to have no end: shining shoes and sweeping portals, selling newspapers and lottery tickets, any job meant earning a few cents for daily subsistence. The three little Chinese shoeshines at the Corner of Tejas became artists of the brush and shoe polish. Meanwhile, the mother fought like a lioness to finish raising her four children and three of her husband's. She only imposed one condition on us: we could not stop studying. And she succeeded.

But at night, in the solitude of misery, after the exhausting days of labor, that boy would write verses. He had learned it by listening with his father to radio programs of the versifiers. And soon the names of Naborí, Colorín, Angelito Valiente, and Chanito Isidrón became familiar to him. Two years after losing his father, he entered Normal School and then the world was no longer so vast nor so foreign, because in those classrooms he met kindred spirits, some present here today, who nourished for the first time his newborn capacity to dream. Because that country saturated with injustices, bathed in young blood, was going to fly to pieces and transform into a return of ancient hope.

If I have lingered on this first episode of my life, it has not been to acquaint you with my autobiography, but to share with you my first contact with literature, which would be the basic sustenance of my spirit in the future, and which can perhaps help me and help you understand why I am here today, receiving an award that honors me so much.

On January 1st, 1959, closed doors opened, night was truly left behind, a message of dignity, justice, and honesty previously unknown penetrated us so deeply that we offered even our lives to defend it. And then, more than writing, in those moments we decided to live. And that is what we did. And then came the Bay of Pigs, and the Escambray, and military training in the Soviet Union, and several years in the armed forces: years of combat, of violence, of harsh confrontations with the enemy; in a word: we threw ourselves into the revolutionary whirlwind, into the epic battle to defend something that had changed us forever.

When I entered Journalism School I had the impression that I could and should recall what I had lived, tell the story, but tell it all, with its contradictions, with its successes and failures, with its miseries and heroism, with its courage and its cowardice, with its love but also with its hatred. That was the aesthetic of our generation. That is how we understood it and that is how we set out to tell it. And although it may seem like a cliché, we wanted to tell the young people for whom our work was intended: "This is the history, read it, so that you learn what it cost us: blood, sweat, and tears. Now that you know it, defend it." I must mention several names that have accompanied us since then. Some are no longer with us because they died; others took a path that took them away forever from our convictions: Germán Piniella, Rogerio Moya, Renato Recio, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, Víctor Casaus, Jesús Díaz, Raúl Rivero.

Then came, with regard to my second book, The Steps in the Grass, misunderstandings, dogmatisms, false interpretations in good faith and bad faith; merciless and destructive criticism, the absurd ideologization of art and literature, and the well-known Gray Five Years descended upon Cuban culture, impoverishing it, making it pay dearly for its stubborn vocation of seeking truth, which is ultimately the supreme objective of literature.

They were truly hard, uncertain years, where only the conviction that the Revolution had been made to end injustice and not to promote it kept us alive, despite the rigors of a punishment that lasted five years for me, years when all doors closed and a veritable conspiracy of silence that seemed endless was unleashed upon me. But I resisted. And I wrote, and literature was always a faithful companion in the worst moments, and it helped me remain loyal to the principles that have always guided my life.

Paradoxically, that punishment at the Vanguardia Socialista Factory introduced me to a new world, the world of the working class, where I met men of different character, who restored my faith in human beings. I dedicated two books to them, Steel and At Close Range. From the first I treasure, like a jewel, the laudatory comment from Julio Cortázar, which is my shield against those who called it an example of bad socialist realism.

But those years passed, and good literature, like art, preserved its values, overcame obstacles, and slowly emerged from the turmoil to intone again its song of freedom and hope. And my second book, that beaten, humiliated, vilified book, branded as counterrevolutionary by the bureaucrats of culture, survived nourished by the vital breath of those who believed in its author and in the justice of the Revolution. And it will remain (I have said it on other occasions) as a reminder to those who tried to drown under papers and directives the vigorous life of its characters, the complex human conflicts of those sweating and solidary beings who suffer and fear, fall and rise, but fight and triumph. We were those men; we are (and I want to repeat it here), the generation of loyalty to principles and ideals.

Dear friends:

Forgive me this historical journey that many of you know, and which perhaps was inevitable on a day like today, when the Institute of the Book and a jury whose decision I thank awards me this prize for the work of my entire life. I need not tell you how much this award honors me. I need not tell you the emotion I feel because I know that celebrating with me here are dozens of young narrators, graduates of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Center, a project to which I have dedicated an important part of my life. We have invested in them and will continue to invest, because their talent and craft are beginning to be recognized in contests, fairs, and publications of all kinds and because they have helped remake the literary map of the country; also present here are family members, childhood friends, classmates from Secondary School, from Normal School, from the University, comrades from the Artillery in the Armed Forces, from the Vanguardia Socialista Factory, from the Institute of the Book, from the Ministry of Culture, from Casa de las Américas, from UNEAC, from the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Center, places where I studied or worked, where I loved and was loved greatly. I embrace all of you from my grateful heart.

To whom shall I dedicate this Prize?

Perhaps to my father, to whom I dedicated my first book, fulfilling the promise of a twelve-year-old boy?

Or to my mother, without whose tenderness and self-denial, and her sometimes passionate encouragement, nothing would have been possible?

Or to my siblings, all now gone, in whom I always found understanding, support, confidence?

Or to my students from seventeen courses at the Onelio Center who have renewed in these years my incorruptible vocation as a teacher?

I could dedicate this National Literature Prize to all of them. However, rather than dedicate it, I am going to share this Prize with someone who is the treasure that life gave me twenty-five years ago, who gave up her professional career to accompany me in making the dream of the Onelio Center a reality; without whose love, tenderness, and dedication in each day of our lives I no longer know how to live: my wife, my companion, my friend, Ivonne Galeano.

Thank you.