Roberto Fernández Retamar (9 June 1930 – 20 July 2019,
Havana) was a Cuban poet, essayist, literary critic and President of the
Casa de las Américas. In his role as President of the organization, Fernández also served on the
Council of State of Cuba. An early close confidant of
Che Guevara and
Fidel Castro, he was a central figure in Cuba from the 1959
Revolution until his death in 2019. Fernández also wrote over a dozen major collections of verse and founded the Casa de las Americas cultural magazine.
Professor Joao Cesar Castro de Rocha, at the
University of Manchester has described Retamar as "one of the most distinguished Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century."[1] In 1989, he was awarded the
National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and most important award of its type.
On Caliban
Responding to the
arielismo of
José Enrique Rodó, who used the
Shakespearean character
Caliban as a metaphor for Latin American civilisation,[2] Retamar in 1971 influentially set up instead Caliban as a symbol of the Cuban people,[3] stating that: "Our symbol is not
Ariel, as Rodó thought, but Caliban….I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality".[4]