Félix B. Caignet

Félix Benjamín Caignet Salomón, known as Félix B. Caignet, (March 31, 1892 - May 25, 1976) was a Cuban radio writer, broadcaster, poet, novelist, journalist, theater critic, singer and musical composer. He is known as a pioneer of radio broadcasting in Cuba, and as one of the creators of Latin American soap operas.

He was known for his ability to make radio audiences cry. He purposely wrote to make people cry, as he realized that “many were born with pain and misery tattooed on their souls and had so much pain and bitterness in their lives that they never cried for themselves.”

Caignet believed that the audiences “took on the feelings of one or another character who was suffering and, without being aware of it, associated their own pain with that of the fictitious figure, and cried with him or her.” Félix B. Caignet’s radio dramas were broadcast throughout Central and South America and brought stories of social reality and the “speaking in metaphors” narrative style into popularity.

Félix Benjamín Caignet Salomón was born on a coffee plantation in Santa Rita de Burene, San Luis, in the eastern region of Cuba. Poverty forced the family to move to Santiago de Cuba. There, Félix was exposed to the itinerant story tellers who made the streets their home and he became interested in writing, first with sentimental poems. At the age of 20 he became a journalist and began to contribute to the cultural magazine Teatro Alegre.

The newspaper El Diario de Cuba took him on in 1918 and within two years he had his own theatre column, “Vida teatral” (Theater Life) with the byline of Salomón. By 1920 he was also contributing to magazines and newspapers such as El Fígaro, Bohemia and El Sol under a series of bylines. Journalists of the time often protected themselves from retaliation, official or unofficial, through the use of pseudonyms. Caignet at various times signed himself as Doña To Masa (Mrs. All Dough), Miss T. Riosa (Miss T. Rious) and A. L. Khan Ford (Mr. Cam Phor), among many others.

He published a children’s story in 1925 called “Las aventuras de Chilín y Bebita en el país azul” (The Adventures of Chilín and Bebita in the Blue Country). He continued to write stories for children and, in the early 1930s, broadcast them on the radio on Cuba’s first radio program for children, “Buenas tardes, muchachitos” (Good Afternoon, Boys) on station CMKC of the Grupo Catalán. Some of the stories were invented on the air.

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