• Submitted by: admin
• Arts and Culture
• Literature
• 10 / 17 / 2006

By Mercedes Santos Moray

One of the most important personalities of the Cuban culture, the poet, narrator and essayist Cintio Vitier, celebrates his 85th birthday, laborious and lucid, being projected on his work, and contributing to the formation of new generations.

Member of a family of artists and intellectuals, this artist of the word, acknowledged with the Cuban Literature National Award and with the Juan Rulfo Ibero-American Award in Mexico, has also become a paradigm, from his teachings, to those who go into the path of creation and literary research.

Born in Key West, Florida, graduated as a lawyer, career he never exercised, he was a poet since his sensitive adolescence who very early came to prominence in the anthology prepared by the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the 1940s he joined the highest literary movement with the most aesthetic qualities in Cuba, the Grupo Orígenes, headed by José Lezama Lima.

Cintio has shared his life and his aesthetic restlessness with another writer as sensitive and Christian as him, Fina García Marrúz, with whom he has done a complete extraordinary work of study on the life and the literary production of the Apostle of the Cuban Independence, poet and journalist José Martí.

He is currently President of Honour of the Centro de Estudios Martianos, and his researches are sources of necessary consult, not only to know Martí, but also to reach the roots of Cuban poetry and culture since the 19th Century.

An active professor in his youth, he taught French language at the Escuela Normal de Maestros of Havana, and he was also a professor at the Central University of Las Villas. He has also created a profuse work of reflexive character, from the domain of the prose and the essay, with key titles as Lo cubano en la poesía.

The Kingdom of word has been, and still is, the scenery of his laborious and long existence. Thus, he has given us lyrical novels such as De Peña Pobre, and a voluminous essay production. As a poet he has given the legacy of a poetry nourished by the faith in God, in universal love, from his humanistic essences, and in his defined civic vocation which have given him his Cuban roots, in a work which has contributed to define and enrich the identity of the Islands culture process.

Source: CubaNow