Edmundo Desnoes

Edmundo Desnoes (2 October 1930 – 6 December 2023) was a Cuban writer and author of the novel Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), a complex story depicting the alienation of a Cuban bourgeois intellectual struggling to adapt to the process of the Revolution staying on the island after his family decides to leave the country. He originally called the work Inconsolable Memories in the first English edition, published in 1967 by the New American Library and which the author translated from the Spanish himself. The book was adapted in 1968 into the seminal Cuban film of the same title Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) by the director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the name by which it is also known in English.

Early life Desnoes was born in Havana, Cuba to a Cuban Father and a white Jamaican mother. He attended school in both Cuba, and the United States, and was fluent in both Spanish and English. At the age of 15 he met his future partner Felicia Rosshandler, though the two fell out of contact at age 17 and not meet again until they were 50.

Writing

Novels Memorias del subdesarollo (1965), Memorias del desarrollo (2007),

Nonfiction

Caribe: contra y desde (2024),

Editor

Los Dispositivos en la Flor: Cuba, literatura desde la Revolución (1981)