MADRID, Spain.- Eliseo Alberto (1951-2011), essential author of Cuban and Latin American literature, on a day like today, but in 1998, received the Alfaguara Novel Prize, one of the many awards he received outside of Cuba, his native country, where instead he was declared a traitor and taken into exile.
The important prize was won by his novel Snail Beachshared with the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, for Margarita, the sea is beautiful.
The jury, headed by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, chose these works from a total of 602 from Latin American countries.
How did you pick up the medium? the dayAt the official award ceremony three months later, Eliseo Alberto expressed: “Today, May 26, has been the happiest Tuesday of my existence. (…) I want my wandering friends to be here; dearest friends who today walk apart on the streets of Madrid, Miami and London. (…) My words also reach the island where right now my friends will be shirtless, thirsty and sweaty and they will be writing the new statements of the Cuban nation and that only helps to lighten my nostalgia”.
Snail Beach tells the story of Beto Milanés, an emigrant of Cuban origin, a combatant in the war in Angola, and who one day in June goes out looking for someone to kill him. The stories of a sergeant who has decided to apologize to his only child, Mandy, a transvestite who lives with an Armenian dressmaker; the ghost of a pianist trying to save her daughter; a literature professor who spends the night in a bar and three boys who have gone to buy beers at a supermarket.
Another of his great books is report against myselfwhere he recounts how the Cuban State pressured him, when he was a teenager, to make a report against his own family and report on the activities of his father, also a renowned writer Elisha Diego.
According to Eliseo Alberto himself, “is a book about Cuba, which is written only once. It did good for many people, and without being pedantic I know that if I am ever remembered it will be for that work”. … It is the search for answers to what happened with the emotion of the years of the Revolution, not with reason or with passion. As I have always said: it is a book in which I defended only one right: the right to be wrong, something that is little recognized and less by politicians”.
The collections of poems are also his authorship. thunder will matter and the things that i love; the plays an instant in everything and Eternity finally begins on a Monday; and the novels the red campfire and Esther somewhere among others.
Lichi, as his closest friends called him, during his years in Cuba he worked as a journalist, was a professor at the San Antonio de los Baños International Film School, and participated in the creation of film scripts for films such as Guantanamo.
Eliseo Alberto died in Mexico on July 31, 2011, at the age of 59, due to complications suffered after a kidney transplant.
