Translated by Mark Weiss.
200kb, 7x7ins, 40pp, published in 2010.
Best known for his plays and fiction, Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979) has become in the past two decades a totemic figure for younger Cuban poets, despite the relative paucity of his poetic production. As he said himself, "I have always considered myself a casual poet."
Piñera was written out of history and refused the right to publish or leave the island, like so many others in the dark decade of the 1970s, and he owes his current status perhaps as much to that repression and his legendary if sometimes exaggerated resistance to the powerful, and to his open homosexuality, as to his irreverent humour and his embrace of everyday event and the language and culture of the streets.