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Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (born 27 January 1950, in Matanzas, Cuba) is a Cuban novelist. He grew up in Pinar del Río and began to work selling ice cream and newspapers when he was 11 years old. He was a soldier, swimming and kayak instructor, agricultural worker, technician in construction, technical designer, radio speaker, and journalist for 26 years. He is a painter, sculptor and author of several poetry books. He came to Centro Habana, a dilapidated part of the capital, when he was 37 and was astonished by the level of violence but also by the energy of the people who lived there. He is the author of ''Dirty Havana Trilogy'', ''King of Havana'', ''Tropical Animal'' (winner of Spain's Alfonso Garcia Ramos Prize in 2000), ''The Insatiable Spiderman'', ''Dog Meat'' (winner of Italy's Narrativa Sur del Mundo Prize), ''Snake's Nest'' (winner of the Prix des Amériques Insulaires et de la Guyane in 2008), ''Our GG in Havana'', and the short stories of ''Melancholy of Lions''. ''Di ...
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Matanzas
Matanzas (Cuban ; ) is the capital of the Cuban province of Matanzas Province, Matanzas. Known for its poets, culture, and Afro-American religions, Afro-Cuban folklore, it is located on the northern shore of the island of Cuba, on the Bay of Matanzas (Spanish ''Bahia de Matanzas''), east of the capital Havana and west of the resort town of Varadero. Matanzas is called the ''City of Bridges'', for the seventeen bridges that cross the three rivers that traverse the city (Rio Yumuri, San Juan, and Canimar). For this reason it was referred to as the "Venice of Cuba." It was also called "La Atenas de Cuba" ("The Athens of Cuba") for its poets. Matanzas is known as the birthplace of the music and dance traditions danzón and Cuban rumba, rumba. History Matanzas was founded on October 12, 1693, as ''San Carlos y San Severino de Matanzas''. This followed a royal decree ("''real cédula''") issued on September 25, 1690, which decreed that the bay and port of Matanzas be settled ...
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Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area. The territory that is now Cuba was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taino, Taíno peoples inhabiting the area at the time of Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish colonization ...
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Dirty Realism
Dirty realism is a term coined by Bill Buford of ''Granta'' magazine to define a North American literary movement. Writers in this sub-category of realism are said to depict the seamier or more mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language. Definition The term formed the title of the Summer 1984 edition of ''Granta'', for which Buford wrote an explanatory introduction: Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwanted mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction. Style Sometimes considered a variety of literary minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Writers working within the genre tend ...
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- Obscene Hyperrealism
The symbol , known in Unicode as hyphen-minus, is the form of hyphen most commonly used in digital documents. On most keyboards, it is the only character that resembles a minus sign or a dash, so it is also used for these. The name ''hyphen-minus'' derives from the original ASCII standard, where it was called ''hyphen (minus)''. The character is referred to as a ''hyphen'', a ''minus sign'', or a ''dash'' according to the context where it is being used. Description In early typewriters and character encodings, a single key/code was almost always used for hyphen, minus, various dashes, and strikethrough, since they all have a similar appearance. The current Unicode Standard specifies distinct characters for several different dashes, an unambiguous minus sign (sometimes called the ''Unicode minus'') at code point U+2212, an unambiguous hyphen (sometimes called the ''Unicode hyphen'') at U+2010, the hyphen-minus at U+002D and a variety of other hyphen symbols for various uses. Wh ...
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List Of Cuban Writers
A list of Cuban writers, including novelists, poets, and critics: Cuban authors and writers have influenced and shaped the history of the world. Throughout the years many of their contributions have caused radical shifts: from social movements to global perspectives in the Americas and beyond. A * Brígida Agüero (1837–1866), poet * Mirta Aguirre (1912–1980), poet, novelist, and journalist * Magaly Alabau (born 1945), poet * Dora Alonso (1910–2001), author and journalist * Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), openly gay poet, novelist, and playwright, author of '' Before Night Falls'' () B * Emilio Bacardi Moreau (1844–1822), poet, writer, playwright, and patriot * Joaquín Badajoz (born 1972), poet and writer * Gastón Baquero (1916–1997), poet and writer * Miguel Barnet, anthropologist and testimonialist * Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1931–2005), author and critic * Pedro Luis Boitel (1931–1972), poet and dissident * Mariano Brull (1891–1956), postmodern p ...
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Pinar Del Río
Pinar del Río is the capital city of Pinar del Río Province, Cuba. With a population of 191,081 (2022), it is the List of cities in Cuba, 10th-largest city in Cuba. Inhabitants of the area are called ''Pinareños''. History Pinar del Río was one of the last major cities in Cuba founded by the Spanish, on 10 September 1867. The city and province was founded as ''Nueva Filipinos, Filipinas'' (New Philippines) in response to an influx of Filipino Cubans, Asian laborers coming from the Philippine Islands to work on tobacco plantations. Pinar del Río's history begins with two tribes, the Guanahatabey, a group of nomadic people who lived in caves and procured most of their livelihood from the sea. Less advanced than the other indigenous natives who lived on the island, the Guanahatabey were a peaceful and passive race whose culture came about largely independently of the Taíno. Another culture that inhabited this area was the Ciboney People, a subgroup of the Taino people who inh ...
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Centro Habana
Centro Habana is one of the 15 municipalities or boroughs (''municipios'' in Spanish) in the city of Havana, Cuba. A chinatown - ''Barrio Chino'' - is also located here. It is a smaller municipality of Havana, and it has the highest population density. Centro Habana is divided into five ''consejos populares'' (wards): Cayo Hueso, Colón, Dragones, Los Sitios and Pueblo Nuevo. It is the part of the city located in the polygon bounded by the Malecon, the Paseo del Prado, Maximo Gómez, Arroyo and Infanta streets. History The infrastructure of the city, built 450 years ago, heavily deteriorated during the 1990s after the collapse of the Cuban-Soviet trade partnership. In 1996, restoration projects were started to improve housing and infrastructure in the Cayo Hueso community. Centro Habana was established as an administrative division in 1963 and later formally made its own ''municipio'' in 1976. Demographics In 2004, the municipality of Centro Habana had a population of 158, ...
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Alfonso Garcia Ramos
Alphons (Latinized ''Alphonsus'', ''Adelphonsus'', or ''Adefonsus'') is a male given name recorded from the 8th century (Alfonso I of Asturias, r. 739–757) in the Christian successor states of the Visigothic Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. In the later medieval period it became a standard name in the Hispanic and Portuguese royal families. It is derived from a Gothic name, or a conflation of several Gothic names; from ''*Aþalfuns'', composed of the elements ''aþal'' "noble" and ''funs'' "eager, brave, ready", and perhaps influenced by names such as ''*Alafuns'', ''*Adefuns'' and ''* Hildefuns''. It is recorded as ''Adefonsus'' in the 9th and 10th century, and as ''Adelfonsus'', ''Adelphonsus'' in the 10th to 11th. The reduced form ''Alfonso'' is recorded in the late 9th century, and the Portuguese form ''Afonso'' from the early 11th and ''Anfós'' in Catalan from the 12th century until the 15th. Variants of the name include: ''Alonso'' (Spanish), ''Alfonso'' (Spanish an ...
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Irony
Irony, in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually or expected to be the case. Originally a rhetorical device and literary technique, in modernity, modern times irony has also come to assume a metaphysical significance with implications for the correct human attitude towards life. The concept originated in ancient Greece, where it described a dramatic character who pretended to be less intelligent than he actually was in order to outwit boastful opponents. Over time, ''irony'' evolved from denoting a form of deception to, more liberally, describing the deliberate use of language to mean the opposite of what it says for a rhetorical effect intended to be recognized by the audience. Due to its double-sided nature, irony is a powerful tool for social bonding among those who share an understanding. For the same reason, it is also a source of division, sorting people into insiders and outsiders depending upon w ...
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Literary Persona
A persona (plural personae or personas) is a strategic mask of identity in public, the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. It is also considered "an intermediary between the individual and the institution." Persona studies is an academic field developed by communication and media scholars. The related notions of "impression management" and "presentation of self" have been discussed by Erving Goffman in the 1950s. The word ''persona'' derives from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The usage of the word dates back to the beginnings of Latin civilization. The Latin word derived from the Etruscan word "," with the same meaning, and that from the Greek ('). It is the etymology of the word "person," or "parson" in French. Latin etymologists explain that persona comes from "per/sonare" as "the mask through which (per) resounds the voice (of the actor)." Its meaning in the latter Roman period ch ...
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Special Period
The Special Period (), officially the Special Period in the Time of Peace (), was an extended period of economic crisis in Cuba that began in 1991 primarily due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Comecon. The economic depression of the Special Period was at its most severe in the early to mid-1990s. Things improved towards the end of the decade once Hugo Chávez's Venezuela emerged as Cuba's primary trading partner and diplomatic ally, and especially after the year 2000 once Cuba–Russia relations improved under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Privations during the Special Period included extreme reductions of rationed foods at state-subsidized prices, severe energy shortages, and the shrinking of an economy forcibly overdependent on Soviet imports. The period radically transformed Cuban society and the economy, as it necessitated the introduction of organic agriculture, decreased use of automobiles, and overhauled industry, health, and diet countrywide. Peopl ...
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Picaresque
The picaresque novel (Spanish: ''picaresca'', from ''pícaro'', for ' rogue' or 'rascal') is a genre of prose fiction. It depicts the adventures of a roguish but appealing hero, usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt the form of "an episodic prose narrative" with a realistic style. There are often some elements of comedy and satire. The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel ''Lazarillo de Tormes'' (1554), which was published anonymously during the Spanish Golden Age because of its anticlerical content. Literary works from Imperial Rome published during the 1st–2nd century AD, such as ''Satyricon'' by Petronius and ''The Golden Ass'' by Apuleius had a relevant influence on the picaresque genre and are considered predecessors. Other notable early Spanish contributors to the genre included Mateo Alemán's ''Guzmán de Alfarache'' (1599–1604) and Francisco de Quevedo's ''El Buscón'' (1626). Some o ...
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