A Santiago-hearted Man

His blood was mixed: Catalonian on the father’s side and Lebanese on the mother’s. He was born on August 14, 1953, so his zodiacal sign is Leo, with stubborn and self-willed characteristics, as well as a suicide trend to face failures; but Antón Arrufat Mrad stands as the living antithesis of such zodiacal description.

The Excelencias Group invites you to come closer to the life and work of this dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist, who has turned 61 years old.

Antón Arrufat’s personality has come out of the personal experiences of his heterogeneous life. Marked by his ecclesiastical education, the many times his family moved, the death of his parents when he was very young, his stay and trips throughout the United States and Europe; as well as the literature that has accompanied him to date and has given him personal fulfillment.

He suffered from myopia since he was a child – and he still does, as it is congenital – although his family knew nothing about it. This disease made him take longer to learn how to read, and he studied at Dolores school, Compañía de Jesús, at his hometown.

The family moved to Havana when he was eleven years old. He would rather stay for longer at the cradle of son and rum. Many years later, his memories on the short time he spent in Santiago de Cuba became the argument and pretext to shed light on his work as a novelist with The Box is Closed, which was published in 1984 and gave him the Critic Award in 1985.

He continued studying at the capital and got his degree in 1979 in Philology, at Havana’s University.

This dramatist didn’t walk into the theater world in 1957 when his first play, The Investigating Case, was premiered; but when he was just a child and used to perform plays that came out of his prodigious imagination and had his family and visitors watching the show.

His plays have been translated into Polish, English and French and have been performed in United States, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Warsaw.

The country’s culture-related media treasures his first writings and the most contemporary ones, such as Ciclón and Casa de las Américas magazines, which he founded and directed for five years, Lunes de Revolución, Cuba en la UNESCO, Unión, La Gaceta de Cuba, and many others. He has also been published overseas.

There has also been polemic in the heterogeneous life of the man that was a friend and literary executor of Virgilio Piñera. Seven against Tebas is the play that made him win the José Antonio Ramos award given by Cuba’s Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC is the Spanish acronym), as well as fourteen years of intellectual silence.

His prose has brought about several awards, such as: Crítica Literaria and Casa de las Américas in theater and poetry respectively, National Literature Award (2000), Julio CortázarIberia-American Short-Story Award (2005), Alejo Carpentier medal and the Cuban Culture Distinction.

Defining the people of Santiago is like talking about carnivals, conga, rum, baseball… but when it comes to describing Antón Arrufat Mrad you have to say that he is snobbish - his friends assert that it is because he lived near Lezama Lima -, ironic, he doesn’t like the Santiago accent, although he loves Smith Key right in the mouth of Santiago de Cuba’s bay, he doesn’t like journalism and strongly believes that literature is important depending on the quality of what is written, not the number of written things.