Cuban Writer Pablo Fernandez Dies

On Thursday, Culture Minister Alpidio Alonso lamented the death of the Cuban writer Pablo Fernandez, who wrote over 20 poetry books and was worth the National Literature Prize.

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"Fernandez was one of our most talented and beloved writers. Our condolences go to his relatives and friends," Alonso stated. Fernandez was born in 1931 in Las Tunas province. After studying elementary education in his hometown, he moved to New York, where he lived for 15 years until he returned to Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

In 1960, he published his first writings in the magazine Origins and directed the weekly literary supplement Monday of Revolution. Between 1961 and 1962, he was also the editorial secretary of magazine "the House of the Americas" until he was appointed cultural advisor to the Cuban embassy in the U.K.

After completing this mission in 1965, he was assigned chief of Cuba's Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publications.

In the 1970s, Fernandez became a member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences editorial board, a jury of the House of the Americas Award, the Havana Latin American Film Festival, and the Miguel de Cervantes Award.

His poetic work includes titles such as Hymns (1962), Suite for Maruja (1978), Learning to die (1983), Round of enchantment (1990), Book of Life (1997), Of stones and words (1999), and The Little Notebook of Manila Hartman (2000).

The critic Jorge Arcos expressed that Fernandez's poetry is "Creation canticle and praise, which gives a philosophy of light, and raises a notion of life as a pilgrimage." For his literary work, Fernandez also earned the Literary Criticism Prize, the Distinction for National Culture, and the Raul Gomez Medal awarded by the Culture Ministry.