Invasive Newspaper – Online newspaper of Ciego de Ávila

• When the Nobel Prize in Literature Ernest Hemingway read the novel Contrabando, by the Cuban Enrique Serpa, the award-winning North American novelist asked to meet its author. The quality of the text had hit him hard.

As the essayist Loló de la Torriente told Leonardo Depestre, she was in charge of preparing the meeting between the two writers. After the required introductions, the conversation flowed. Together they had lunch at the Floridita.

In one part of the dialogue Hemingway asks Serpa why he was wasting his time as a reporter, to which the Cuban neither short nor lazy replied: Because here in Cuba they don’t pay $ 20,000 for a short story for the cinema, you know, and my family and I also eat.

And it was then that Ernest, in an affable tone, said to him in admiration: “You are the best novelist in Latin America and you must leave everything to write novels.”

Enrique Serpa (1900–1968) Cuban journalist, writer and diplomat, is considered by specialists as one of the most representative writers of twentieth-century Cuban narrative.

He was a classmate of Rubén Martínez Villena in primary education, although life took him hard in childhood to the point of learning and performing different jobs as a dry cleaner, shoemaker, and typographer; he cut sugarcane and worked in the office of a sugar mill in Matanzas and, later, he did so in the law firm of Fernando Ortiz.

Known is his participation in the Café Martí gathering together with Villena and other intellectuals such as Andrés Núñez Olano, who made up the Grupo Minorista.

Serpa served as head of correspondent and information officer at El Mundo newspaper, literary director of Chic magazine, editor of Excelsior and was a contributor to other important publications such as the Cuban Bimonthly Magazine, La Gaceta del Caribe, El Fígaro, Carteles and Bohemia. . He traveled through the United States, Guatemala, Venezuela, Haiti, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Between 1952 and 1959 he lived in Paris, where he served as a press attaché for the Cuban embassy. In 1959 he returned to his homeland and collaborated in El Mundo, Bohemia, Unión magazine and Mar y pesca.

His publications include the books La miel de las horas, Felissa y yo, Contrabando y La Trampa (novels), North America at War, Presence of Spain. Fiesta Night, Trinidad Days, Vitrina (poetry).

He received multiple awards and recognitions: National Novel Prize for Contraband; and for his best reports: Raid Habana – Santiago de Cuba, Oro en la Isla de Pinos; in addition to the Antonio Bachiller y Morales Award for Contraband, among many others. He was declared Adoptive Son of Remedios and Pinar del Río.

• The statement E pur si muove means And yet it moves. It was attributed to Galileo Galilei forced to recant by proclaiming, after Copernicus, that the Earth turned on itself.

• La Gaceta de La Habana, founded in 1754, was the first Cuban newspaper, it included a “pink” page with notes on the island’s nobility.

• In Physics, incandescence is called the location and state of the body that, due to reaching a high temperature, emits its own light.

• Thermidor, internet friend, is the name given to the eleventh month of the French Republican calendar (from July 20 to August 18).

• The fabulous Phoenix Bird was the only one of its kind, according to mythology. They say that he lived for several centuries in desert areas of Arabia, and that he allowed himself to be trapped and burned and then reborn from his own ashes.