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4 unusual facts about Alejo Carpentier


Cuban National Ballet School

In 1961, state-sponsored education began with the creation of the Alejo Carpentier Provincial School of Ballet (Escuela Nacional de Ballet Alejo Carpentier).

La Maravilla

The title is also an allusion to Alejo Carpentier's term "lo real maravilloso americano", "marvelous American reality",.

Old Havana

Alejo Carpentier called it "de las columnas"(of the columns), but it could also be named for the gateways, the revoco, the deterioration and the rescue, the intimacy, the shade, the cool, the courtyards...

Roberto Sierra

Sierra's Concierto Barroco takes its inspiration from a scene in Alejo Carpentier's novel of the same in which Handel and Vivaldi jam with a Cuban slave during the Venice Carnival.


Dictator novel

In 1967 during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Miguel Otero Silva, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes launched a project consisting of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators, which was to be called Los Padres de la Patria (The Fathers of the Fatherland).

Haitian Revolution

Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's second novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949), (translated into English 1957), explores the Haitian Revolution in depth.

Louis-Philippe Dalembert

Trained in literature and journalism, Dalembert worked first as a journalist in his homeland before leaving in 1986 for France where he obtained his PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne with a dissertation on the Cuban author, Alejo Carpentier.


see also

Latin American literature

Latin American authors who figured in prominent literary critic Harold Bloom's The Western Canon list of the most enduring works of world literature include: Rubén Dário, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, José Lezama Lima, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.