The library of Casa de las Américas has been named after "Roberto Fernández Retamar" since yesterday

June 10, 2020

The Casa de las Américas Library has had the name of Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930-2019) since yesterday, in tribute to the former president of the institution from 1986 until his death, on the date of his 90th birthday.

Roberto was the most faithful reader of this Library and the one who donated the most funds to it over more than 50 years. His first posthumous book, Alternativas de Ariel, is in the institution's collections.

He left us essential texts on José Martí and regarding the cultural decolonization of our America and of the entire South. He made the magazine Casa de las Américas one of the most important in the Hispanic American sphere.

In addition to the initiative of naming that center after him, located at the central corner of Línea and G, in Vedado, the institution has organized, in coordination with other entities and cultural spaces, an entire day of activities dedicated to the 1989 National Prize for Literature.

Cuban television premiered yesterday at 10 p.m. on the Cubavisión Channel signal, the documentary Sobreviviente, a production by Omelio Borroto Leiseca and Mundo Latino.

On the other hand, Canal Clave will rebroadcast on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, the tribute concert to Haydee Santamaría Con las mismas manos. Canciones y poemas, performed by Retamar and troubadour Silvio Rodríguez.

The Casa had planned to hold the International Colloquium "The Return of Caliban: Presence of Roberto Fernández Retamar", to recall his impact on Cuban letters and culture, but due to the current epidemiological situation caused by Covid-19, it will no longer be able to take place as designed. The tribute will then reach people through the media and virtual space.

Highlights of his intellectual trajectory include collaboration with the renowned magazine Orígenes and his time as secretary of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, where he founded the magazine Unión in 1962 together with Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier and José Rodríguez Feo.

He also founded and directed the Centro de Estudios Martianos and its Yearbook from 1977 to 1986, the date when he began to direct Casa de las Américas, whose magazine he had already been leading since 1965.

In 2008 he was elected director of the Cuban Academy of Language, an institution of which he had been a member since September 17, 1995 and had extensive teaching work at the University of Havana. He also received the title of doctor honoris causa from the universities of Sofía (1989), Buenos Aires (1993) and Marta Abreu de Las Villas (2011).