With his elegant bearing, serious demeanor, and robust build, Alejo Carpentier was undoubtedly a genuine Cuban, despite his French accent and measured speech. His extensive literary, theoretical, musicological, journalistic, and editorial work places him at the forefront of Cuban and Latin American intellectual thought.
Alejo Carpentier Valmont was born on December 26, 1904, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and would have turned 121 this year. His birthplace is a subject of debate, and although he claimed in an interview that it occurred on Maloja Street in Havana, it is assumed this was a strategy to evade the Machado regime's repression, which could have deported him as an unwelcome alien.
After his death, a different biography began to be documented, placing the birth of the prominent intellectual in Lausanne, Switzerland, on this date. He was the son of the French architect Georges Julien Carpentier and the Russian piano teacher Catherine Valmont or Blagoobrasoff, who had been a medical student in Lausanne where she met her husband.
After Carpentier's parents married, they moved to Havana in 1908 or 1909 with young Alejo, who received an excellent education that combined bilingual training—in Spanish and French—a passion for reading, and a strong musical vocation.
Alejo is one of the renovators of Latin American narrative, whose writing style incorporates all dimensions of his vision of America, including dreams, myths, magic, and religion. He defined his Caribbean artistic method, was a musicologist, and managed publishing, visual arts, and musical projects.
His baroque works, *El siglo de las luces* (Mexico, 1962) and *El reino de este mundo* (Mexico, 1949), along with his other novels, *¡Ecue-Yamba-O!*, place him among the most prominent figures in Latin American literature. (Madrid, 1934), The Lost Steps (Mexico, 1953), The Chase (1956), Baroque Concert (Mexico, 1974), Recourse to the Method (Mexico, 1974), and The Rite of Spring (Mexico, 1978).
He was the second writer to receive the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize, awarded in 1977, considered the highest recognition of the creative work of Spanish and Latin American writers whose work has significantly enriched the literary heritage in the Spanish language.
Carpentier's extensive political, literary, musical, teaching, and cinematic career, from his entry into the so-called Minorista Group in Cuba (1923-1927) until the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, would be impossible to summarize in a few lines, as would his creative periods in France, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean.
In 1941, he married Lilia Esteban Hierro in Santa María del Rosario. He was close friends with her family.
With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he returned from France to Havana, where he was appointed general manager of the Editorial de Libros Populares de Cuba y el Caribe (Popular Books Publishing House of Cuba and the Caribbean). From then on, he contributed to publications such as El Mundo, Revolución, Granma, La Gaceta de Cuba, Unión, Cuba, Islas, Casa de las Américas, Bohemia, Revolución, and Cultura, among others.
In 1960, the Revolutionary Government appointed him vice president of the National Council of Culture. The following year, he was also appointed vice president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba and represented the island, along with Nicolás Guillén, at the Seventh Mexican Book Festival.
He participated in the First Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists. In 1962, he was appointed Executive Director of the National Publishing House of Cuba, a position he held until 1966. He taught History of Culture at the School of History of the University of Havana. He was one of the editors of the magazine Unión, along with Nicolás Guillén and Roberto Fernández Retamar.
In 1963, Ediciones R published his novel El siglo de las luces (The Century of Lights) in Havana, and in 1966 he was appointed Minister-Counselor for Cultural Affairs at the Cuban Embassy in France, a position he held until 1980.
In 1972, a national tribute was held in Cuba in honor of his 70th birthday. On December 26, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba paid tribute to him at the Amadeo Roldán Auditorium, and in 1975 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Havana. On December 2 of the following year, he was elected Deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power for the municipality of Old Havana, a position he held until his death.
In November 1979, he traveled to Paris to receive the Prix Médicis Étranger for his French translation of *The Harp and the Shadow*, and many considered him a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, death surprised him in the French capital on April 24, 1980. His body, lying at the base of the José Martí Monument in Revolution Square, was given a moving funeral tribute by the entire revolutionary government, headed by Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and the people of Havana, representing all Cubans.