14ymedio, Havana, 16 July 2019 — Cuban authorities denied entry to Cuba to the poet and essayist Jorge Luis Arcos. The academic was not allowed to board a flight in Santiago de Chile because airline employees informed him that he could not enter the island, according to a press release from the Betania publishing house.
“We denounce this arbitrary situation, which violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (signed by Cuba), and we show our solidarity with this brilliant Cuban intellectual, who has seen his rights — as a Cuban citizen — trampled,” the text adds.
Arcos was exiled to Madrid in 2004 and since 2010 has been based in Argentina. Three years ago he traveled to Cuba to present a book on the poetry of Raúl Hernández Novás in the Casa de las Américas and recently he had his passport authorized for travel to the island at the Cuban Consulate in Buenos Aires.
Born in 1956, Arcos is one of the most important Cuban literary critics of recent decades and one of the most renowned scholars of the so-called Orígenes group. He is currently working as an assistant professor of literature at the National University of Río Negro, Argentina. Between 1995 and 2004,in Havana, he directed, along with Enrique Saínz, the literature and art magazine Unión.
He is the author, among others, of books of essays: On The Poetic Work of Fina García Marruz (1990); The Unitiva Solution; On the poetic thought of José Lezama Lima (1990); Origens: Irradiating Poverty (1994) and Kaleidoscope; The poetics of Lorenzo García Vega (2012).
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