Havana (Cuba), 1904 – Paris (France), 1980

By Flávio Aguiar

The literary success of his works was echoed in essays that founded concepts for understanding Latin American art. He formulated the theoretical foundations of “Marvellous Realism,” which he adopted in many of his texts, where he asserted nationalist, revolutionary, and mestizo themes, as seen in The Kingdom of this World (1948), which tells the story of Haiti’s independence from the perspective of an ex-slave. The Lost Steps (1953) engages with the confrontation between the European and the Latino and the dilemmas between backwardness and modernity—issues revisited in the novel The Century of Lights (1963), which seeks to encompass the influence of the French imagination in the Caribbean.

He participated in the surrealist movement, of which he was also a critic. He worked in journalism during his time in exile and was involved with the Minorista Group alongside Nicolás Guillén. After the Revolution, he returned to Cuba, where he held important positions in the socialist regime. As a significant intellectual, he managed to construct historical novels centered on the issues surrounding the formation of Creole literature through the Baroque style, which he claimed was the only style deserving of the monumental nature of America.

He mentored generations of writers, including fellow countrywoman Nancy Morejón, who explore in their projects what can be read in his War of Time (1958), focused on developing a novel that seeks to interpret a specific period. Some critics read him as a writer of philosophical novels; The Consecration of Spring (1978) highlights the competition between two temporal categories: that of man and that of history.

Interested in creating universal environments and archetypes of his time, his concern with history resulted in detailed narratives such as Baroque Concerto (1974), which reconstructs the journey of a Creole through Europe. The Method of Resources (1976) engages with the traditional Latin American dictator novel, written by fiction writers from whom he acknowledged having received influence, including Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Mario Vargas Llosa. He also published Literature and Political Consciousness in Latin America (1969).