Antonio Benitez-Rojo
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Antonio Benítez-Rojo (born in 1931) is a Cuban writer. Born in Panama, Benítez-Rojo lived in Cuba with his mother and stepfather from the age of seven.
In the mid-1950s, backed by United Nations grants, Benítez-Rojo studied statistics at the United States Department of Labor and Commerce, and later studied in Mexico. Turning down offers to work in Chile or Geneva, he returned to Cuba in 1958 and became head of the Statistics Bureau at Cuba's Labor Ministry.
Benítez-Rojo began working at the Ministry of Culture in 1965 and won the Premio Casa de las Américas for the short story collection Tute de reyes in 1967. The following year, he won a writers' union prize of a trip to a socialist country; however, the government did not permit him to leave Cuba.
By 1975, Benítez-Rojo had been made head of Casa de las Américas, the publishing house run by the Cuban government. Five years later, in 1980, he was given permission to attend a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris. He traveled from Paris to Berlin, obtained a US tourist visa, and came to the United States, where he became a professor of Spanish at Amherst. He died in 2005.
One of his most influencial publications, La Isla que se Repite, was published in 1998 by Editorial Casiopea in Barcelona, Spain.
[edit] References
Reid, John. "Cuban author at Amherst is in 'writer's heaven'", The Daily Hampshire Gazette, September 1989.
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