Norberto Fuentes

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Norberto Fuentes (* 1943 in Havana , Cuba ) is a Cuban journalist and has lived as an author and journalist in Miami / USA since 1994 . He studied Hispanic American literature and then worked as a journalist for the newspapers “Cuba”, “Hoy” and “ Granma ”, the latter the central organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. He had international success in the 1980s with his book about Ernest Hemingway's years in Cuba, to which Gabriel García Márquez wrote the foreword.

Life in Cuba

In 1961, at the age of eighteen, Fuentes traveled as a reporter with troops from the Cuban government, which had come to power two years earlier, through the Escambray Mountains to fight opponents of Castro's rule, officially known as “bandits”, who had rallied there for an armed uprising. Fuentes described the action, in which he himself participated, with the words: I am writing about the best era. I wanted all of this. Fatherland and pissed-over dead. History and Wisps. Shootings and spies. In the 1980s, Fuentes reported as a journalist on Cuba's military support for the Angolan Marxist government against the invasion of South Africa and the UNITA rebel movement supported by South Africa . As a close friend of Fidel Castro , he worked at times with the Cuban secret service.

Departure into exile

Fuentes broke with Fidel Castro in 1989 when he had several high-ranking military officials and members of the Interior Ministry around the prominent and popular General Arnaldo Ochoa convicted and executed, among other things, for drug trafficking in a highly controversial process . Fuentes, a friend of some of the convicts, was placed under house arrest and was not allowed to work or leave the country. In 1993 he was captured during a failed attempt to escape at sea. In September 1994, after a 23-day hunger strike and after successful advocacy from the Colombian Nobel Prize winner for literature, Gabriel García Márquez, he was granted permission to leave the country. García Márquez picked Fuentes up in Havana with a special machine from the Mexican government and accompanied him to Mexico. Fuentes has lived in the USA since 1994 , where he works as a writer and speaks about contemporary history and Cuban politics.

Castro's fictional "autobiography"

He said of his "Castro's Autobiography" that it was his very personal exorcism . Critics of his book about Castro, in which Castro narrates in first-person form, see a deficiency in Fuentes’s accounting tone colored by being too close. The book also requires extensive detailed knowledge of the history of Cuba and the Cuban revolution. The German version, from which long passages on the military action in Angola are missing, has 800 pages, the two-volume Spanish edition 2000 pages.

Publications

  • Condenados de Condado, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1968 (received the literature prize of the Casa de las Américas Institute in Havana in 1968 , Spanish)
  • Cazabandido, Libros de la Pupila, Havana 1970 (Spanish)
  • Posición Uno , Girón, Havana 1982 (Spanish)
  • Hemingway en Cuba, Letras Cubanas, Havana 1984 (Spanish)
  • Nos impusieron la violencia, Letras Cubanas, Havana 1986 (Spanish)
  • El último Santuario, Siglo Veintiuno, Mexico / Madrid 1992 (Spanish)
  • Dulces guerreros cubanos (German: Sweet Cuban Warriors ), Seix Barral, Barcelona 1999, ISBN 978-8432208416 (Spanish)
  • Narcotráfico y Tareas Revolucionarias: El Concepto Cubano , Universal, Miami 2002, ISBN 978-0897299879 (Spanish)
  • La Autobiografía de Fidel Castro. I: El paraiso de los otros. Seix Barral, Barcelona 2004 (Spanish)
  • La Autobiografía de Fidel Castro. II: El poder absoluto e insuficiente. Destino, 2004 (Spanish)
    • The autobiography of Fidel Castro , from the Spanish by Thomas Schultz. CH Beck, Munich 2006. ISBN 3-40654216-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sandro Bernini: “I shameful old bed shit” in: Die Weltwoche , edition 20/2006, accessed on July 8, 2012
  2. ^ Raymond L. Williams: The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945. Columbia University Press 2007, p. 212 f.
  3. ^ Rieks Holtkamp: A visit to the Cuban writer and dissident Norberto Fuentes: Die Verdammten von Havanna, in: Die Zeit of August 26, 1994, accessed on August 24, 2014
  4. ↑ Norberto Fuentes in: Der Spiegel, September 5, 1994, accessed on July 8, 2012
  5. ↑ perlentaucher.de : Norberto Fuentes: The autobiography of Fidel Castro. Reviews
personal data
SURNAME Fuentes, Norberto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Havana , Cuba