Date: 06-26-2025 / 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Address: Vallehermoso 110, Chamberí, Madrid
14ymedio, Havana, 23 June 2025 — The 11th and penultimate edition of the first season of Lecturas Al Fin, organized by the creative collective Forma Foco, arrives with “Cuco the Union Leader,” an excerpt from the novel La Grieta (Verbum Publishing, 2018) by Cuban journalist and writer Reinaldo Escobar, winner of the 2018 Ibero-American Verbum Novel Prize.
About La Grieta, Yoani Sánchez said: “In the style of a tropical Milan Kundera, Escobar unravels the successive masks that many of the characters put on to survive professionally and socially. Opportunism, indolence, and even radicalism are some of the obligatory masks for the political carnival of which he is a part.
Sometimes he manages to glimpse the face beneath and feels the overwhelming desire to flee in terror. […]// This novel is, for all that, the description of a professional and social suicide. The timely narration of how the flame of a utopia scorched the wings of a generation of Cubans, with the consent and approval of many of them. Reinaldo Escobar, who burned in that fire, has had the courage to tell it.”
Reinaldo Escobar (Camagüey, 1947) is a journalist and editor of the online newspaper 14ymedio. He was expelled from official journalism in Cuba for “ideological weaknesses” and has since been a key figure in independent Cuban journalism, having practiced the profession for over 50 years. His first novel, “La grieta,” was written in 1993, confiscated by State Security, and rewritten from memory more than two decades later.
The reading will be shared by the journalist and daughter of the author, Luz Escobar.
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