Background
Antonio Ponte was born in 1964 in Matanzas, Cuba. Since 2006 he has been living in Madrid, not being allowed to return to his country.
Antonio Ponte
Antonio Ponte
Antonio Ponte
Neptune y San Lazaro, Havana, Cuba
Antonio Ponte studied at the University of Havana.
(In these renegade stories, set in Cuba during the hard ti...)
In these renegade stories, set in Cuba during the hard times following the collapse of the Soviet Union, people go to work only to find that their jobs no longer exist. They joke and tell stories from the past, live aimlessly, uncertain about what the future holds.
https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Malecon-Other-Stories/dp/0872863743
2000
Antonio Ponte was born in 1964 in Matanzas, Cuba. Since 2006 he has been living in Madrid, not being allowed to return to his country.
Antonio Ponte received a degree in hydraulic engineering from the University of Havana.
Antonio Ponte is an author with a growing reputation in Europe and North America as a deft writer. As a child growing up in Cuba, Ponte loved writing and briefly published a magazine for his friends. He became an engineer, a career he pursued for five years because there was no equivalent training program for writers. Then he served as a screenwriter. Ponte is considered a significant representative of a new generation of Cuban writers. He has created works that show the difficulties and hardships of life under Fidel Castro's dictatorship. Ponte has escaped the evident threat of censorship from the government. His two translated short stories: In the Cold of the Malecó & Other Stories and Tales from the Cuban Empire, were published in the United States. In these stories, Cubans who live in their homeland and abroad have been described as charming, playful, and subtle.
In 1997 Antonio Ponte became the first Cuban writer to be featured at the Miami Book Fair International, and in 2001 he was teaching Cuban literature and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania temporarily. At that time, he planned to return to Havana before taking another teaching assignment in Iowa. Additionally, Ponte was a visiting professor at Penn University and Princeton University, and a writer at the University of California Berkeley in California. Since 2006 he is living in Madrid and publishes in various publications, including the United States-based online literary magazine La Habana Elegante. He was on the advisory board of the regime-critical magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana in Madrid and was one of its directors in 2006-2009. In 2013 Ponte held the Andres Bello Chair in Latin American Culture and Civilization at New York University. He is currently the deputy director of the digital daily newspaper of Cuba.
Ponte's first fiction to be translated into English was six short stories collection, In the Cold of the Malecó & Other Stories. Several of the tales share a theme of disconnection. In Coming, Cuban students return from the Soviet Union. They discover that their skills in the Russian language are not needed anymore. In another story, a historian and an astrologer fall in love. One has a fatal illness, and they become vagabonds. A character in the Heart of Skitalietz has a philosophy. He thinks that when the electricity is turned off in his neighborhood and turned on in another, someone else is doing things for him.
With the translated collection Tales from the Cuban Empire, Ponte casts himself as a modern-day Scheherazade in the prologue. He hopes that the reader will not be bored by his account of a Cuban woman who hides in an airport bathroom, trying to escape all men in Because of Men. In Tears in the Congri Cubans studying physics in the Soviet Union go to extraordinary lengths to make the rice and bean dish called congri. At the Request of Ochon is told by a Chinese butcher who is teaching a student how to gently guide his knife through the meat without dulling the blade, while also commenting on his life and how to butcher an elephant.
(In these renegade stories, set in Cuba during the hard ti...)
2000Antonio Ponte is a critic of the Cuban government.
Quotes from others about the person
Jonathan Kiefer: "To call him underappreciated misses the mark because upon discovering him, people often become as compulsive about reading his work as he is about writing it."