Manuel Ballagas, son of the poet Emilio Ballagas, and the dancer and actress Juanita Baró left Cuba during the Mariel exodus and developed in Miami an extensive artistic and literary career.
Havana, Cuba.- With deep regret, I just learned about the deaths, in Miami, by the writer Manuel Ballagas, on August 20, and with only two weeks apart, on September 4, of which his wife was for almost 50 years, the dancer, choreographer, actress and singer Juanita Baró. There are two very sensitive losses for the Cuban culture of exile.
Born in 1948, Manuel Ballagas was the son of Emilio Ballagas, one of the most important Cuban poets of the first half of the twentieth century, precursor to the so -called “black poetry.”
The first book that Manuel Ballagas wrote, in 1965, when he had not yet turned 18, With fear, caused the wrath of Fidel Castro.
About the incident with that book, which he published in El Puente editionswhere I was a member of the editorial board, when I interviewed Ballagas for several years Cubanet, He said: “Fayad Jamís, at that member time of the UNEAC directive, was conspired with Nonelio Jorge Cardoso to subtract from the printing press the galley tests of my book and give it to the commander René Rodríguez, very close to Fidel Castro, as a sample button of everything bad that was incubated among the intellectual mid -1965, and almost foaming by the mouth, Fidel called my intolerably morbid and counterrevolutionary book, and right there. Eight years later, in 1973 ”.
In 1980, Ballagas and Juanita Baró, after having been noticeable with more than ten thousand people at the Peruvian embassy in Havana, left Cuba during Mariel’s maritime exodus.
In the United States, Ballagas worked for seven years as head of writing of the Latin American supplement of The Wall Street Journal and also in The Miami Herald.
Ballagas, who, influenced in his writing by Chandler, Carver and Bukowski, was defined as “an American writer who has Spanish as the first language,” published two novels, stories books Hotel Paris and The Jagüey path and the carob. In his novel Account bird And in some of his almost autobiographical stories, such as “a young god of scrambled hair,” he faithfully portrayed the hypocritical fear and simulation that reigned in the Cuban intellectual and artistic world during the gray decade.
As for Juanita Baró, talented, passionate and authentic, always being carried along the path that would take her emotion, if a word defined her is an artist, thus with a capital letter.
His career of more than five decades began in the national folk set and continued in the cinema, in the films The Cimarrón, The other Francisco, Water days, Cuba color and the TV (he was a member of the jury of the television program to dance).
After settling in 1980 in the United States, he acted in the television comedy “What’s up, uses?”, Created the Cuban folk ballet company, worked for 10 years with Avante Theater, which sponsored the Hispanic Theater Festival in Miami; At the request of actor Andy García was the dance coach in the first film that directed: The Lost City; And he worked as a coach in the movies The Pérez Familyalong with Marisa Tomei and Anjelica Huston; and The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone. As an actress, the last film in which he participated was Plantedof Lilo Vilaplana, on the Cuban political dams.
