Zoé Valdés

Zoé Valdés (born May 2, 1959 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban  novelist, poet, scriptwriter, film director and blogger. She studied at the Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona, but did not graduate. From 1984 to 1988, she worked for the Delegación de Cuba at UNESCO in Paris and in the Oficina Cultural de la Misión de Cuba in Paris. From 1990 to 1995, she was an editor of the magazine Cine Cubano. She lives with her daughter in Paris. She has been married three times: with Cuban writer Manuel Pereira Quintero, Cuban government official José Antonio González and Cuban independent filmmaker Ricardo Vega.

Zoé Valdés was educated by her mother and abandoned by her father when she was a child. Valdés began writing when she was nine or ten years old, thanks to her grandmother who would constantly read poetry to her. Her grandmother was of Chinese and Irish origins. When Valdés was seventeen she wrote her first poetry collection, Respuestas para vivir (1981). She published her first poem when she was 19 years old in El Caimán Barbudo, a literary magazine created and funded by communist youth. She published her first lyrical novel, Sangre Azul, in 1993.

Valdés was part of one of the first generations educated under the support of the Cuban Revolution. She studied at the Instituto Pedagógico Enrique Varona until her fourth year. She later received her degree in Philology at the Universidad de La Habana and then continued her studies at the Alliance Francaise in Paris. From 1984 to 1988, she worked for the Delegación de Cuba at UNESCO in Paris and in the Oficina Cultural de la Misión de Cuba in Paris.

After returning to Cuba and being unemployed for a brief time, she became assistant director of the magazine Cine Cubano for four years (from 1990 to 1994). She also began to pursue a career as a scriptwriter for the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). In 1990 she traveled to the United States in order to start filming her script Vidas paralelas. The filming of her script was then moved to Venezuela. In 1990 she received the award Primer Premio Coral for the best unreleased screenplay for her script, Vidas paralelas at the XII Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.

Valdés was officially exiled from Cuba in 1994 for political reasons. As an openly opponent of the Castro regime, Valdés always wanted to change the political scene in Cuba from within the country through her writing. However, she began to have issues with the magazine Cine Cubano and the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), specifically the magazine's director, Alfredo Guevara. Furthermore, in the 1980s she was arrested for driving two Spanish tourists around Habana because one of the laws of the regime prohibited Cubans to interact with foreigners. In 1991, she received an award that was asked to be donated to the Castro regime, which she denied to do. She also signed a publishing deal for her novel La nada cotidiana with a French publishing company, without consulting the government. The only other person to do so was Reinaldo Arenas who was condemned to two years in jail.

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Wikipedia