Cuban playwright and poet Antón Arrufat, who was once marginalized by the Castro regime because of his creative freedom and homosexuality, died Sunday, May 21 in Havana at the age of 87, the Ministry of Culture announced. "Sad news for Cuba: the great poet, novelist and playwright Antón Arrufat, National Prize for Literature (in 2000) and essential man of Cuban culture, has died," the ministry tweeted, without specifying the reasons for his death.
Born in 1935 in Santiago de Cuba (southeast), author of numerous poems, essays, novels and plays, Antón Arrufat won in 1968 the literary prize of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Uneac) for "The Seven against Thebes", allegory of the political Cuba of the time, today considered a reference of Cuban theater. But it quickly fell out of favor, due to the institutional rejection and censorship of this work, then considered "counter-revolutionary", which could not be performed on a Cuban stage before 2007.
Prohibition of publication
In the early 1970s, the era of the "Quinquenio gris" ("the five grey years"), the Cuban authorities established moral "parameters" according to which one had to be revolutionary and heterosexual to have the support of the regime. "Yes, we were parameterized" as it was used then and "we never knew why," Arrufat said in an interview with AFP in September 2022, shortly before Cuba approved a new family code that includes same-sex marriage.
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Forbidden to publish, the writer was sent for 14 years to work as a warehouseman in a municipal library in a distant suburb of the capital. "I hung on, hanging on like a horse," added the playwright, one of the few artists to have decided to stay in Cuba despite the stigma, in 2022.
In the interview, he recalled his links with other Cuban writers known for their homosexuality, such as José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and Virgilio Piñera. (1912-1979), isolated deaths without having reviewed their texts in bookstores or theaters. Gradually, Arrufat was then rehabilitated. He participated in the famous film "Strawberry and Chocolate" (1993), which depicted for the first time in a Cuban film a homosexual character. And in 2000, he won the National Prize for Literature.