Rafael Almanza Alonso

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Rafael Almanza Alonso
Born	Rafael Gabriel Almanza Alonso (1957-03-24)March 24, 1957 Camaguey, Cuba
Occupation	writer
Nationality	Cuban
Genre	poetry, essay

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Rafael Gabriel Almanza Alonso (born 1957) is a Cuban intellectual, poet, narrator, literary and art critic, opera librettist, cultural animator, curator, freelance journalist, editor, videographer, researcher of the work of José Martí, and teacher of writers, artists and journalists.

Biography

Rafael Gabriel Almanza Alonso, son of a baker and a primary teacher, was born on March 24, 1957, in the city of Camagüey, Cuba, where he has always resided. In 1975, after 18 years, he gave up studying letters, tried to study architecture, and finally ended up agreeing to study the career of Construction Economics in the former Soviet Union. For this, he traveled to Havana, where he remained learning Russian for a year, but for ideological reasons he was denied going to the Soviet Union and returned to study in his hometown for an economics degree, at the University of Camagüey. During his stay at the university he studied Marxism in depth. However, in 1980 the university authorities expelled him for a year, adducing ideological problems.

After graduating from the university with honors, he worked as a researcher in the specialty of management in the sugar sector. In 1984, he met Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz at the inauguration of the José Lezama Lima house museum. At the end of the '80s, he met some of the young writers of his province such as Daniel Morales, Jesús Lozada, Jesús D. Curbelo, and others of older age, such as Roberto Manzano. Together with the narrator Morales, the poet Curbelo, and the engineer Alejandro Montesinos, he attempted to launch the Antenas magazine project (Second Period), which only reached a first issue, and then disappeared immediately due to censorship. 1988, at 31, a religious experience completely moved him, and his atheism collapsed. Eight years later, in 1996]], he entered the Catholic Church, where he had been baptized as a child. In 2003 begins from Cuba, with Antonio Domínguez and Carlos Sotuyo (both based in Miami), the project Homagno Editions: a non-profit author's editorial, organized by friends and writers who collaborate in the publication of Rafael Almanza's books, and others. Thus, begins his work as editor. He currently serves as General Coordinator, from Camagüey, Cuba, of the Homagno Editions in Miami.

Poet

Rafael Almanza takes his first steps as a writer between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Write science fiction novels and stories first; later, at fourteen, he will write poetry. At the end of the baccalaureate he begins to write the first poems of what will be his first published poems book, Libro de Jóveno (2003). It will be rescued and published twenty years late, by Homagno Editions, in 2003, although it had, as a recommendation for the publishers of the island, with a complimentary critical note that Cintio Vitier had written in 1990. In that same year culminates his second book of poems El gran camino de la vida, also published by Homagno Editions in 2005. His poetry of youth, published late and abroad, today remains completely unknown to the members of his generation and the Cuban and foreign critics who have taken care of that promotion. Between 1991 and 1994, his first seven extensive hymns were written: Del Contacto, De la Almendra, Al Sol del Centro, De la Distancia, Desde el Sueño, Iconos y Virtual. Between 1999 and 2001 he resumed his writing by adding other hymns: Vórtice, Áncora, Memorial. Finally, sixteen hymns are published in HymNos, in 2014, by Homagno Editions.

The Universal Love

Most of Almanza's work is included in the lifelong creation project The Universal Love. To date, it's divided into six sections. The first section, whose title is Testigo de la Luz, includes the first two books of poetry or poetry of youth: Libro de Jóveno (with poems dated between 1975 and 1984), and El gran camino de la vida (whose texts were written between 1985 and 1990). The second section Nada existe, dedicated to the narrative, includes the storybook El octavo día (1998), the short novel Nada existe (unpublished) and the stories Fívulas u peróvulas (unpublished). The third section is dedicated to his poetry of maturity HymNos. The fourth section of The Universal Love is devoted to criticism and it only includes an essay on the Cuban poet of the Orígenes Group Eliseo Diego, whose title is Elíseo DiEgo: el JuEgo de DiEs? The fifth section, dedicated to the identity and the patriotic component, is constituted so far by two works: Los hechos del apóstol, an essay that interprets the last days of José Martí through his two diaries, and Vida del padre Olallo, a biography about a nurse and religious, currently in the process of canonization by the Catholic Church, of the order of San Juan de Dios in the 19th century in Camagüey. The sixth section includes a final booklet El Cancionero Trascendental and other poems (unpublished). Two sections yet to be added, the seventh and eighth, would complete The Universal Love: Tiempo de palabra would include journalism, newspapers and a kind of autobiography; Hermano mensajero would be devoted to correspondence.

HymNos: free poetry between tradition and avant-garde

In the attempt to place Almanza's work in postmodern aesthetics, it is unavoidable to quote his words about Eliseo Diego's Divertimentos:

(...) he practice a reality without realism, in which every thing of the real, every object is and means at the same time: it is in God and it means God, it means God because it is, and it is because it means God; where the opposites coincide and beyond the poetic word is always there, in the other real, and it is beyond.

(...)
We can affirm that our poet would be a "heretical postmodern" who sings the Love of divinity on our Island (...) The HymNos, whose inspiration is Christian, then simply try to witness the existence of the divine discourse (...) his text Icons, dedicated to the figure of the Father of the Trinity, creates a kind of object for sacred praise, in visual images formed by the spatial distribution of the verses that produce an emotional effect on the reader, either by their spiritual content or by their artistic execution

.

With the publication of HymNos, Almanza's poetry is placed alongside the avant-garde and the latest trends in contemporary poetry, although paradoxically it remains anchored in tradition.
Also, the treatment that the visual component receives in HymNos establishes a bridge with a canonical visual background such as Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard of Stéphane Mallarmé, the calligrames of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poetry of Mexican José Juan Tablada, of Chilean Vicente Huidobro, by Argentine Oliverio Girondo, with Blanco and other visual poems by Octavio Paz and with the poetry of Cuban Samuel Feijóo. Along the same lines as these precursor poets, Almanza's visual poetry differs from contemporary concrete poetry because it does not nullify the discourse of the poetic text, even though it produces object poems. The foregoing also does not exclude other more radical expressive possibilities. In HymNos we find an agraph anthem, a photographic anthem, although inserted within the discursive set of HymNos. Contrary to concrete poetry, the discourse in Almanza's poetry can be read as discourse and regarded as an image. Because of this, poetry formally attached to poetic tradition is not excluded either. The avant-garde deployment in HymNos has its traditional counterpart in the more than 3000 hendecasyllables that we find in this volume, in poems whose length in this meter oscillate between more than 300 and more than 600 hendecasyllables. The most avant-garde hymns are Desde el Sueño Vórtice, Semejante, Unánime and Áncora. On the other hand, his poetry is close to the purest of tradition in hymns such as De la Almendra, Iconos -although it is also a visual poem- Virtual, Del Amor Divino and Anual. The stylistic freedom of HymNos resists classifications, alien to any school and in turn belonging to all, free between tradition and avant-garde. Part of Almanza's visual poetry and videos have been exhibited by curator Lester Álvarez at the Universal Theater exhibition, Center for the Development of Visual Arts, Havana, 2014

• HymNos: visual poetry
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  Iconos – Iconostasis. Vórtice
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  Desde el Sueño – Lamp. Escutcheons
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  Desde el Sueño – Lamp. Iconos – Iconostasis
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  De las Consignas – Neon light 1
• 
  De las Consignas – Neon light 2

Essayist and researcher of José Martí

In 1983 Almanza culminates En torno al pensamiento económico de José Martí, which will be published seven years later by the Social Sciences Publishing House, in 1990. In this essay he identifies and frames the different stages through which Martian economic thought travels. Eleven more years later, in 2001, his second book on Martí, Hombre y tecnología en José Martí, is published by Editorial Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. In 1993 he begins, at the request of Cintio Vitier, the writing of a paper on the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego for the commemoration of the forty anniversary of the Orígenes group, which will eventually become the extensive monographic essay Elíseo diEgo: el JuEgo de diEs?, published in 2008 by Letras Cubanas, in Havana. In 1994 he writes the essay Los Hechos del Apóstol, which will be published in 2005 by Ediciones Vitral, in Pinar del Río. In this book he investigates the Martian ideals through his action, from fundamental texts such as Abdala, El presidio político en Cuba, and mainly his diaries De Montecristi a Cabo Haitiano, and De Cabo Haitiano a Dos Ríos.

Narrator and biographer

In 1996 he concludes his book of short stories El Octavo día, published in 1998 by Editorial Oriente, in Santiago de Cuba. The novel Nada existe and his book of stories Fívulas u peróbulas remain unpublished. In that order, they make up a section of El Amor Universal and a unity of meaning.
He has also written a biography about a local Catholic nurse for altars, Vida del Padre Olallo, which is published in Barcelona in 2005 by the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God and then by Homagno Editions.

Articulist, independent journalist, curator, art critic, opera librettist and cultural animator

External video

Un Caracol Nocturno: Introduction to José Lezama Lima's Poetry, YouTube video

Con Todos. Homenaje a Guy Pérez-Cisneros, YouTube video

Su rastro breve: un juego de abalorios, YouTube video

Ni a salario ni a beneficio. Sobre el Quijote y Cervantes, YouTube video

Among other intellectual activities, he highlights his work as a columnist, cultural animator, curator and video maker. In 1997, he began publishing articles in the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, in Spain. As an independent journalist he published in 2011 the article Razones para desconfiar del periodismo in the online magazine Convivencia and Jóvenes, sed jóvenos in 2013 in the online magazine Hora de Cuba. At this moment, Almanza still works as an independent journalist.

In 1999 he premiered as an art curator with the exhibition of the painter Joel Besmar, Ubique Pictura. He has curated or written the words of the catalog of about twenty exhibitions of plastic arts in Cuba, the United States and Mexico. Until today he continues his work as a critic and curator, which makes him a spokesman for the Camagüeian schools of painting and video. In the '90s he writes opera librettos: Ebbó and Muerte de Homagno, for the Cuban composer Louis Franz Aguirre, as part of a frustrated project to create the Cuban national opera. In 1999 he writes Carne, a dramatic play based on the José Martí's Adultera drama, and other opera librettos at the request of Aguirre and the Italian composer Adriano Galliussi. In the cathedral of his hometown, for more than five years, he carried out an important cultural work: several literary gatherings and the cinema club El Navegador which will motivate his Encuadres, film critic still unpublished. It has carried out with annual frequency, since 1995, the oldest independent cultural activity in the country: the Peña del Júcaro Martiano.

Political persecution

In addition to his unjustified expulsion from the university, Rafael Almanza has suffered from constant political persecution since 1991, when he was integrating a group of professional respondents. Mainly, for his conviction of staying in the country and continuing to teach young writers and artists from an openly anti-Castro position. Recently he has been enduring constant death threats, interviews with political police officers, and extreme surveillance not only for him, but of his friends and other visitors to his home by the repressive organs of the Castro dictatorship; specifically, trying to prevent the last two celebrations of his Peña del Júcaro Martiano, on December 29, 2018 (where the state security agents went to the homes of at least 10 collaborators, threatening them not to attend under serious consequences, nailed a board in the door of his house, and threw eggs at the facade) and August 31, 2019 (when a police operation prevented everyone from entering and then arrested those who remained outside, including a journalist, a lawyer and a priest).

The meetings, despite everything, took place.

Almanza's house has become a home for writers, artists and journalists for more than two decades.

Works

• En torno al pensamiento económico de José Martí (essay) 1990 (Around the Economic Thought of José Martí)
• El octavo día (Short Stories) 1998 (The Eighth Day)
• Hombre y tecnología en José Martí (essay) 2001 (Man and Technology in José Martí)
• Libro de Jóveno (poetry) 2003 (Book of Jóveno)
• El Gran Camino de la Vida (poetry) 2005 (The Great Way of Life)
• Los hechos del Apóstol (essay) 2005 (The Facts of the Apostle)
• Vida del Padre Olallo (biography) 2005 (Life of Father Olallo)
• Elíseo DiEgo: el juEgo de diEs? (essay) 2008
• HymNos (poetry) 2014

Further reading

• Almanza Alonso, Rafael (March 1, 2019). "Lujurias de Rafael Almanza I". Árbol invertido (Interview). Interviewed by Yoe Suárez. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
• Almanza Alonso, Rafael (August 28, 2019). "Lujurias de Rafael Almanza II". Árbol invertido (Interview). Interviewed by Yoe Suárez. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
• Cino, Luis (October 16, 2018). "Rafael Almanza y el amor universal". Puente a la vista. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
• Manresa González, Carlos (2018). "Rimas en libertad: apuntes para un estudio de la rima libre o mezclada en la poesía cubana contemporánea". Rhythmica. XVI: 113–147.
• Manresa González, Carlos (2018). "El agon en Rafael Almanza; Iconos de Almanza: revisión del endecasílabo dactílico". La obedencia rebelde: Roberto Manzano, Rafael Almanza y Jesús David Curbelo, tres poetas contemporáneos ante el canon cubano (PhD). University of Montreal. pp. 121–151, 205–219.
• Velázquez Callejas, Ángel (February 27, 2017). "La poética de Eliseo Diego: El juego de dies?". Instituto Cubano de Ciencias Culturales de la Diáspora. Ego de Kaska Foundation Inc. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
• Price, Rachel (2015). "Free Time". Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island. New York: Verso. pp. 128–140. ISBN 978-1-78478-122-4. Search this book on
• Del Pozo, Ivania (2002). "El icono literario: Rafael Almanza". Espejo de vehemencia. Un viaje al Camagüey poético. Camagüey: Editorial Ácana. ISBN 959-267-007-2. Search this book on .
• Almanza Alonso, Rafael (1997). "Martí: hombre telúrico.Entrevista a Rafael Almanza" (Interview). Interviewed by Eudel Cepero. Pinar del Río: Revista Vitral. Retrieved March 18, 2020.

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