Ediciones El Puente

Ediciones El Puente (The Bridge Publications) was a literary project for young writers in Cuba just after the 1959 revolution. Between 1961 and 1965 they published each other's work, introduced dozens of new voices - among them poet and translator Nancy Morejón, playwright Gerardo Fulleda León, playwright-activist Ana Maria Simo and folklorist Miguel Barnet - and held readings and performances.

Nevertheless, El Puente is remembered primarily as one of the casualties of the wave of social repression in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s. Accused, among other things, of fostering homosexuality, Black Power, publishing exiles, and consorting with foreigners, some members were detained, and/or sent to the UMAP concentration camps. A few left the country.

Cuban literary critics are beginning to address the group, and in 2005, the Gaceta de Cuba published a series of pieces on El Puente. Much of the group's work was republished and analyzed in the 2011 book Ediciones El Puente en la Habana de los años 60: Lecturas críticas y libros de poesía, edited and introduced by Jesús J. Barquet.

El Puente was begun by José Mario Rodríguez, a young poet who perceived the post-revolution literary world in Havana as closed to new writers. "[Lunes de Revolución] only covered people connected to the director Guillermo Caberera Infante, and they never reviewed books by young writers." He wanted to create a publishing project that would be open to everyone, "Especially young people, new people. We wanted to find new talents with quality works inside Cuban culture. That's the thing that interested us most."

Gerardo Fulleda León remembered meeting José Mario in 1961 at a theater workshop that was also attended by playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.

"The next day, in the José Martí National Library, he and Eugenio introduced me to Ana Justina Cabrera and after that to Ana María Simo. We immediately began to exchange opinions, argue about certain points, and on others agree. From that day forward, we scheduled appointments or met up in the afternoons in the gardens of the Writer's Union, in the park, at the entrance to a series of Soviet films at the Cinemateca de Cuba, at a theater function in Mella, in the hallways of an exhibit of Portocarrero, at a concert of Bola or Burke; the afternoon would turn into night and we would go to listen to a concert of filin at El Gato Tuerto, or jazz at the Atelier. We went up and down La Rampa and ended up at dawn at the Malecón reading poems, singing boleros, and telling each other our hopes and dreams."

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Wikipedia