Triana, José (1931–)
Triana, José (1931–)
José Triana, a Cuban playwright from Camagüey, lived in Madrid in the 1950s. With the rise of Fidel Castro in 1959, Triana returned to Cuba, eager to help build a new society. The revolution fostered the arts, primarily as a venue for its leftist ideology. By 1969 the government subsidy for culture was $16 million, a huge investment in the infrastructure of this island nation, much of it fostering theater groups. Triana wrote several plays that were well received; in 1965 he won the coveted Casa de las Américas prize for La noche de los asesinos, his most acclaimed work, which ostensibly was a critique of the (Fulgencio) Batista years (1952–1959), but was thought by some to be subversive. After participating in the Nancy Festival of 1957 and marrying a French woman, he returned to Cuba but was ostracized by the regime. In 1980 he fled the island and settled in Paris, where his plays secretly written in Cuba finally became known and appreciated.
See alsoBatista y Zaldívar, Fulgencio; Theater.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nigro, Kirsten F., ed. Parabras más que comunes: Ensayos sobre teatro de José Triana. Boulder, CO: Society for Spanish and American Studies, 1994.
George Woodyard