Dominican ambassador gives lecture on Jorge Amado's work

HAVANA, Cuba, Feb 20 (ACN) Poverty and marginality in Jorge Amado's work was the theme of the lecture given by His Excellency Dr. Flavio Rondón de Jesús, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to Cuba, in the context of the International Book Fair in Havana.

Organized by the Latin American Literary Agency (ALL), the meeting was attended by Miguel Barnet, renowned Cuban writer, ethnologist and director of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation, as well as by ambassadors, cultural attachés and diplomats from several countries, including Colombia, Norway, Kazakhstan and Uruguay.

“It is an honor to be here with you and listen to your views about one of the most important writers and communist militants of contemporary literature, who, like other great like-minded fellow novelists and poets like José Arango, César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, knew how to unveil the fate of the common man,” Rondón de Jesús remarked.

The ambassador stressed that the Brazilian writer, formidable in all his prose, died in 2001, but left us a vast work marked by a lyrical style that defies time and preserves a sort of continuity throughout, with a constant concern for marginality and poverty.

He shared with the audience some phrases of Jorge Amado, who said: "I have never tried to run away from the drama we have had to live, that of a dying world in a rising world" and who considered that the vocation of the novelist is to bring back to light some half-erased words, as if they were those lost icebergs drifting on the surface of the ocean.

“It is impossible to finish without quoting him or looking at his real or imaginary discourse, as lucid as Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral, The Lost Steps and other paradigmatic texts, because their present is not a destination but a reality from which their work is born and the people must be the victor in each book, as the author we have discussed used to say,” concluded the ambassador.