This Thursday, the workers of the cultural institution together with the writer Laidi Fernández de Juan met on the Havana boardwalk to pay tribute to the prominent intellectual, a ceremony that has been held every July 20 since 2020.
According to published information, Fernández de Juan and the director of Design of this entity remembered the National Literature Award (1989) through anecdotes linked from his taste for image and design to Umberto Peña, with whom he shared a close friendship.
The feeling of joy prevailed among those who arrived there with flowers to throw into the sea.
On the anniversary of his physical departure, the La Ventana Information Portal offers a text published in number 307 of the Casa de las Américas magazine, that is part of a small set of narrations rescued by his daughter.
Born in Havana on June 9, 1930, Fernández Retamar was part of the Cuban Academy of Language, an institution he directed between 2008 and 2012, as well as a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Among his most outstanding works are the poems Elegy as a hymn (1950), Homelands, 1949-1951 (1952), Return from the ancient hope (1959), and the essays Calibán (1971), The son (Cuban music) of popular flight (1972) and Idea of style (1983), among others.
Throughout his career, he has received various awards such as the Rubén Darío Latin American Poetry Prize, the official Medal of Arts and Letters, awarded in France in 1998, and the UNESCO/José Martí International Prize in 2019, among many others.
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