Desnoes, Edmundo Pérez (1930–)

Edmundo Pérez Desnoes (b. 2 October 1930), Cuban novelist, essayist, and poet. Desnoes was born and raised in Havana and lived in New York, where he attended college from 1956 to 1959. He then returned to Cuba, where he held several posts in national cultural institutions, such as editorial board member of the Casa de las Américas. In 1967 he and film director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea adapted his 1965 novel Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) into a highly successful film that brought him immediate recognition. Largely because of this adaptation, Desnoes became a prominent figure in the Cuban cultural world of the 1960s, but in subsequent years his importance diminished as his literary output failed to live up to its earlier promise. Other works by Desnoes include the novel El cataclismo, an essay "Lam: Azul y negro," and a controversial anthology of Cuban literature, Los dispositivos en la flor (1981). In 2007, the film version of Memorias de desarrollo (Memories of Overdevelopment), a sequel to his most famous novel, was in its final stages of production.

See alsoCinema: From the Silent Film to 1990; Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás; Literature: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paolo Gasparini, Para verte mejor, América Latina (1972).

Additional Bibliography

Davies, Catherine. "Surviving (on) Soup of Signs: Postmodernism, Politics, and Culture in Cuba." Latin American Perspectives 27: 4 (July 2000), 103-121.

Desnoes, Edmundo. "Para terminar (Excerpt from the unpublished novel entitled Memorias de Desarrollo)." Casa de las Américas 234 (Jan-Mar 2004), 69-72.

                                     Roberto Valero