Jorge Olivera Castillo (b.

Havana Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...

, 1961) is a Cuban poet and

dissident A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 2 ...

. He worked as a journalist for the Cuban state-run television station ICRT for 10 years. He was briefly detained in 1992 for trying to leave the country on a raft; in 1993, he left his position at ICRT and began writing reports for

Radio Martí Radio is the technology of telecommunication, communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transm ...

, a U.S.-funded,

Miami Miami is a East Coast of the United States, coastal city in the U.S. state of Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade County in South Florida. It is the core of the Miami metropolitan area, which, with a populat ...

-based station critical of the Cuban government. With two other journalists, he founded an independent news agency, Havana Press, in 1995, and later became the director. Olivera Castillo was arrested in 2003 as part of the Black Spring crackdown and sentenced to eighteen years in prison for writing articles "against national independence and Cuba's economy". In prison, he spent nine months in

solitary confinement Solitary confinement (also shortened to solitary) is a form of imprisonment in which an incarcerated person lives in a single Prison cell, cell with little or no contact with other people. It is a punitive tool used within the prison system to ...

, and suffered from a range of health problems. He began writing poetry and fiction while in prison as a coping mechanism. His wife, Nancy Alfaya, became a member of the

Ladies in White Ladies in White () is an opposition movement in Cuba founded in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents and those who have been made to disappear by the government. The women protest the imprisonments by attending Mass each ...

, agitating for his release. After international pressure, he was released for health reasons after serving only 18 months of his sentence, but remained under close supervision. He is currently a visiting scholar at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

Works

Poetry

* ''Confesiones antes del crepúsculo''. Miami: Ed. Proyecto de Bibliotecas Independientes, 2005. * ''En cuerpo y alma''. Ed. Olgy and Olega Krylovových. Prague: PEN Czech Republic, 2008. (Spanish and Czech) :, 2010. (Spanish and French) * ''Sobrevivir en la boca del lobo''. Madrid: Editorial Hispano Cubana, 2012. . * ''Cenizas alumbradas''. Warsaw: Lech Walesa Foundation, 2010. (Spanish and Polish) * ''Tatuajes en la memoria''. Prague, 2013. * ''Quemar las naves''. iami Neo Club Ediciones, 2015. .

Short stories

* ''Huésped del infierno''. Valencia: Editorial Aduana Vieja, 2007. . * ''Antes que amanezca : y otros relatos''. Buenos Aires: Fundación Cadal, 2010. .

References

External links

Jorge Olivera Castillo
at PayoLibre.com (in Spanish) Cuban male poets 1961 births Living people 21st-century Cuban poets 21st-century male writers Black Spring detainees {{Cuba-poet-stub