2023-05-21 11:59:00
The Cuban poet, playwright, narrator and essayist Antón Arrufat died in Havana at the age of 87 of age, this May 21, reported on Facebook the pro-government journalist Pedro de la Hoz.
Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1935, Arrufat moved with his parents to the Cuban capital at the age of 11. In 1979 he graduated in Philology at the University of Havana.
Like many Cuban writers, Arrufat was a victim of censorship and punishment by the regime. In 1968, his play The seven against Thebes He received the “José Antonio Ramos” Award from the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), but generated a controversy that condemned him to ostracism for 14 years in which his literary production was censored within Cuba.
The work was finally released in 2007. Seven years, Arrufat received the National Literature Award and the Alejo Carpentier Award.
Other awards he has garnered throughout his career include the Critics’ Award for the novel the box is closed, in 1985; the Literary Critics Award for the collection of poems Lilies on a background of swordsin 1987, and the Literary Critics Award for The night of the killjoyin the year 2000. He was also creditor of the Distinction for Cuban Culture.
He was also the author of poems such as Clearly, final review, Written on the doors, the footprint in the sandand of the essays The little things, Virgilio Piñera: between him and mey The discursive manamong others.
His servile attitude towards the regime, after the censorship he suffered and for which he never received a public apology, was also rewarded with a house on Prado street, in Old Havana, and with the Félix Varela Order, a decoration he received from Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2021.
That servility was also translated into his signing, in October 2022, of the official “Message from Cuban journalists, writers, artists and scientists to their colleagues from other countries”, published in La Jiribilla. The message responded to the criticism unleashed by government repression against Cubans who participated in various protests from the end of September of that year to the beginning of October.
The signatories of the message defined themselves as defenders of the “values” of the Cuban Revolution, identified “with the effort and self-sacrifice of the Cuban authorities.”
Arrufat’s signature was number 32 among official intellectuals who described the denunciations of the repression as “manipulation” and “distortions” of the Cuban reality.
In 2017, the PEN-Club of Cuban Writers in Exile rejected the creation of a PEN Cuba headed by the playwright.
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