The history of Cuban literature was born in the same
minute that Silvestre de Balboa was finishing the poem
Espejo de paciencia. It was the XVII century and important
works have not stopped ever since.
Traditions of the XVIII and XIX centuries influenced
considerable in Cuban novels. The first is Cecilia Valdés
(1839) vivid picture of the colonial reality by Cirilo
Villaverde,
There
were also writers of the Cuban reality like Nicolás
Heredia with his novel Leonela (1893), Ramón Meza
with Mi tío el empleado (1887), and Martín
Morúa with Sofía (1891).
José
Martí wrote the first modernist novel: Amistad Funesta
(1885). In the naturalist trend of the beginning of the
XX century, outstand Miguel de Carrión with Las honradas
and Las impuras, and Carlos Loveira with Generales y Doctores,
(1920).
Novelist
Alejo Carpentier (Cervantes award 1977), starts his production
in the 30´s with the Afro Cuban novel Ecué-Yamba-O,
to create later on a wide work: El reino de este mundo,
Los pasos perdidos, El siglo de las luces, El recurso del
método, which turned him into one of the most important
novelists in Cuba and the world.
"I
was always lucky writing when I was in Cuba”, confessed
once the American writer Ernest Hemingway. And certainly
it was here that he worte The old man and the sea, Nobel
Prize in 1954.
Cuban
literature includes significant personalities like José
Lezama Lima, Dulce María Loynaz (Cervantes award
1992), Nicolás Guillén and other creators,
like José Soler Puig, Lisandro Otero, Pablo Armando
Fernández, Manuel Cofiño, Luis Rogelio Nogueras,
Jesús Díaz, Eliseo Alberto Diego, Daniel Chavaría
and Leonardo Padura.
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