SLP, Mexico.- The prominent Cuban editor and bookseller, Juan Manuel Salvat Roquefounder of Ediciones Universal, died this Tuesday in Miami, as confirmed by the newspaper Martí News.
A native of De Sagua la Grande, a city in the former central province of Las Villas, Salvat was always an active anti-Castro and anti-communist militant and in exile; with his Universal Editions and in more than 57 years as a publisher, he published numerous Cuban authors in Miami.
His bookstore located on Calle Ocho in Miami was a meeting point for generations of exiled Cuban intellectuals.
“A great Cuban exile died. Juan Manuel Salvat. Patriot, editor, writer, historian, he is the paper memory of our history and our truth. He founded a temple of knowledge: La Universal. My condolences to his family and friends. He was always with his bookshelf table and my books in each of my public interventions in Miami. “Eternal gratitude for your friendship and support,” Cuban writer Zoé Valdés wrote in a heartfelt note.
Salvat entered the University of Havana to study Law. Together with Alberto Muller and Ernesto Fernández Travieso, he published a newspaper called Trench and later founded another, Manicato.
From the Catholic University Group of Havana, to which he belonged, he tried to counteract the communists, he said in interview with William Navarrete.
In the summer of 1960 he left for Miami with his university classmates Muller and Fernández Travieso, with whom he would return to the Island to undertake the clandestine struggle against the regime.
“We were also certain that we could end the regime and there was a lot of instability. If so many people had not supported Castroism we would have been able to defeat it in its beginnings,” he said, and referred to the founding in Miami of the anti-communist and anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE).
After his clandestine return to the Island, he was detained and was able to escape through the Navel Base in Guantánamo, to return definitively to the United States.
In Miami, from where his political activism did not cease, in 1965 he founded a publishing house called Universal. “I sent books to friends and passed the bill to them, but since they had a better situation than me, they were not upset, although they called my editions ‘La Cañona’.”
In his long career as editor and manager, he published Lydia Cabrera, Rosario Hiriart, Calixto Masó, Matías Montes Huidobro and Yara Montes, the historian Enrique Ross, Ana Rosa Núñez, José Ángel Buesa, Amelia del Castillo, Guillermo de Zéndegui, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Fernández Santalices, Luis Aguilar León, Jorge Mañach, among others.
After the Mariel exodus, he added Reinaldo Arenas, Lourdes Casal, Heberto Padilla, Nivaria Tejera, Carlos Victoria, Armando Chávez Rivera, Vicente Echerri, Carlos M. Luis, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Rafael Rojas, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat to his catalog. , María Elena Cruz Varela, Esteban Luis Cárdenas, José Miguel González-Llorente, Concepción Alzola, Gladys Zaldívar, Ángel Cuadra, Roberto Valero, Luis de la Paz, José and Nicolás Abreu Felippe, and many more.
After the news of Salvat’s death, dozens of personalities recognized the loss that his death represents for Cuban culture.
“Cuban culture in exile is in mourning,” wrote narrator Daína Chaviano.
Writers, intellectuals, friends have agreed that Salvat has been an important disseminator of the literature, history and culture of the Island in exile.
“It symbolizes the most important thing about the Cuban exile culture. “It is an icon of the work that Cubans have carried out for more than six decades, beyond the borders of the island, wherever in the world there is a Cuban creator, he has had and has had the support of Juan Manuel Salvat,” expressed to Martí News the writer Pedro Corzo.
