MIAMI, United States. — The prominent Cuban playwright, essayist, professor and writer Matías Montes Huidobro died this Friday at the Kendall Regional Hospital in Miami at the age of 91, the newspaper reported. The New Herald.
Born on April 6, 1931 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, Montes Huidobro completed his secondary education studies at Institute No. 1 in Havana, later obtaining a doctorate in Pedagogy from the University of Havana.
Already in 1951 he became known as a poet with the publication of his poem The cow with the long eyesrepeatedly anthologized, and as a narrator with the publication of his short story the ninth sonpublished in the magazine Bohemia.
That same year he made his debut as an essayist on the pages of the magazine New generationof which he is one of its founders, and received the Prometheus Award for on the same rocks (1951).
In 1953, Matías Montes Huidobro married Yara González Fernández-Hermo, from whose relationship two children were born, Ana María and Eugenio.
The New Herald reports that after teaching at the school of journalism at the University of Havana —a center where he had obtained a doctorate in Pedagogy—, the writer definitively left Cuba to go into exile in the United States in November 1961.
“He settled in Pennsylvania, where he was a high school teacher in Meadville. He then went to Hawaii, where he worked, along with his wife Yara González, as a professor at the University of Hawaii until his retirement in 1997, ”says the Miami newspaper.
Upon his return from Hawaii, Montes Huidobro settled in Miami until his death.
Works, awards and recognitions
Montes Huidobro’s dramatic work includes texts such as The mother and the guillotine (1976), Olofe’s razor (1986) and Exile (1988), all staged and edited.
Among his essays stand out Person, life and mask in the Cuban theater; Critical bibliography of Cuban poetry (exile: 1959-1971), Person, life and mask in the Puerto Rican theater Y The Cuban narrative between memory and oblivion.
“Montes Huidobro wrote of all genres, especially theater, some of his works were premiered in Cuba, where he already stood out when the revolutionary government began (…). He was an epic Cuban who fought from literature, as in his pronouncements for the art, culture and freedom of Cuba. His name will remain forever as a pennant of our itinerant Cuban literature, ”said journalist Olga Connor in statements collected by The New Herald.
In life, Matías Montes Huidobro was awarded the Prometheus Award for the drama on the same rocksthe 1997 Café Gijón award for his novel that source of pain and with the Anderson Imbert prize, awarded to the whole of his work by the North American Language Academy, in 2017. He was also a finalist for the Planeta prize for his novel Reaping the Dead (1980).
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