Cuban journalist and film critic Rolando Pérez Betancourt died this Saturday in Havana at the age of 78, due to complications from cancer that he had suffered from since November 2022. The official press confirmed the news, although it did not reveal the cause of the death. death, and stressed that the host of the popular program The Seventh Door had an impeccable political record and “never lacked the support of the communists.”
Martin Hacthoun, a journalist and friend of Pérez Betancourt, specified in his profile from Facebook that last November the critic had debuted with myeloid leukemia, which caused a kidney infection that kept him weak until his death this Saturday morning, at the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital.
The Cuban government awarded Pérez Betancourt the José Martí National Prize for Journalism, among other decorations, for his life’s work. Born in the Cuban capital on September 25, 1945, he began working at the age of 16 as an apprentice compositor at the newspaper’s printing press. Todayof the Popular Socialist Party. He later worked as a typographer, designer and finally a sportswriter.
When in 1965, after a political and cultural unification maneuver, Fidel Castro dissolved the newspapers Today and Revolutionand founded Granma, organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, Pérez Betancourt joined its editorship and the culture section. He graduated as a journalist in 1973 and that same year he started a film column, Chronicle of a spectator.
During the so-called Gray Quinquenio, a time of censorship and strict cultural surveillance, he studied French at the Institute of Foreign Relations and the Institute of Foreign Trade.
During the so-called Gray Quinquenio, a time of censorship and strict cultural surveillance, he studied French at the Institute of Foreign Relations and the Institute of Foreign Trade, and played an important role in recommending and criticizing the films shown on the Island. .
In the 1980s he hosted the television programs Tanda del domingo, Cine vivo and Noche de cine. The seventh door, the program that made it most popular, and which aired until this Friday, began in 2003.
In an interview quoted by his obituary in Granma, Pérez Betancourt confessed that he did not consider himself “a television man” and that he preferred written criticism. He added that he saw himself as “a literate tastemaker.”
The official press She has been emphatic when describing Pérez Betancourt as a journalist sympathetic to the regime. For cubadebatethe critic owes to the communists, and in particular to the leader Blas Roca Calderío, the possibility of having worked in Today from childhood”. The outlet declared that the journalist’s family suffered numerous “precariousness” that his work at the newspaper helped to resolve. The current director of GranmaYailin Orta, called him an “organic revolutionary”.
Pérez Betancourt was the author of numerous books on cinema such as critical roll (1991), novels like returning woman (1986) and chronicle, as It happened 20 years ago (1978).
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