Young intellectual Erian Peña Pupo is a sum of a very brief name and surname and a long gift of trades of paths of knowledge. Some came to him from the same human condition surrounded by the mist of the inexplicable as is the definition of poet.
This has allowed us to have at the disposal of the sensitive reader his collections of poems Doors to flee from home (Ediciones Santiago, 2015), Palabras de canje (Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, 2022) and Hojarasca de las formas (Ediciones La Luz, Holguín, 2022).
In addition, the children’s novel No me olvides (Ediciones Luminaria, Sancti Spíritus, 2021) and the narrative plaquette Entre dos viejos pánicos (Áncoras, Matanzas, 2023), he is now in the process of editing, by the seal of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation, the research Imágenes en tránsito. The Cinema of Eduardo Manet in Cuba, the result of his Master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Movies, by the University of the Arts-ISA and the New Latin American Cinema Foundation (Havana).
Erian is also a member of Uneac (Cuban Artist and Writers Association), the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS), the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (Fipresci) and the Cuban Film Press Association (ACPC). He is also a professor of the subjects Cuban Cinema and Latin American Cinema at the Holguin branch of the University of the Arts (ISA)
We also know of various literary awards that he has obtained, such as the Ángel Augier scholarships (Uneac, Holguín) in 2023 and the Juan Francisco Elso Award for Research on Visual Arts (AHS, 2022) and the Bladimir Zamora In Memoriam Awards for Journalism (2024); Eliecer Lazo for Short Stories in 2022 (Matanzas); Paco Mir for Short Stories 2022 (Uneac, Isla de la Juventud); América Bobia (Matanzas, poetry) 2021; Rubén Martínez Villena National Award for Cultural Journalism 2021; La isla en peso (Guantánamo, poetry) in 2020; Casatintas (Sancti Spiritus, children’s fiction) in 2019; Cuentos Fríos (Matanzas) in 2018; Floral Games, Santiago de Cuba, 2014; Memoria Nuestra (Our Memory) 2014 (Holguín); Nuevas Voces de la Poesía (New Voices of Poetry) Holguín, 2014. He has received a Mention in the Celestino Short Story Award and the Emilio Ballagas Award.
With so many achievements, however, it is still a major surprise to learn that she was awarded by Casa Victor Hugo of Havana, the Cuba Cooperation Association France and the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. The objective of this contest is to stimulate research and artistic and literary literary creation on the contacts and influences between French and Cuban cultures. In the fourth edition of the contest, which was held as part of the celebration of Havana’s 500th anniversary, the theme was ‘Havana: 1519-2019. Five centuries of French contribution to the Cuban cultural movement.
The prize was awarded in two categories: Ruy Blas and Casilda, the former for young essayists and lovers of Cuban culture, and lovers of French culture in general, which precisely Erian won, and the second one for researchers recognized in the literary and academic researchers, with books and experience. The winner was the important essayist, narrator, poet, poet and professor Roberto Méndez Martínez, from Camagüey.
The award consists of a trip to Paris for about two weeks. Which, according to the call “…will follow a cultural route and will imply a contribution to the promotion of the award and a research program on a subject related to the theme of the award”. The awards were presented in November, in the framework of the International Colloquium Victor Hugo, Visionary of Peace and the 500th Anniversary of the the 500th Anniversary of the Founding of Havana.
Erian won the award with an essay titled The Cuban Gaze of Henri Cartier-Bresson, which deals with the stays of the famous French photojournalist in Cuba, the first in 1934, and the other one, and most broadly known, in 1963. Let’s leave it to the young journalist to tell us about his adventure, at times almost police-like, in the footsteps of the French photographer.
Tell me about this illustrious photojournalist?
“Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, on August 22, 1908. I got to know his work while I was studying journalism at the University of Holguin, where I graduated eight years ago. We studied photography for two semesters, and almost always the first classes of those subjects deal with his history and evolution. He is known as the father of modern photojournalism and his work is an obligatory reference.
“Throughout his career he portrayed characters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marie Curie, Édith Piaf, Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara. He was in India at the time of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, whom he had met with shortly before that. He also photographed his funeral. He participated in the Spanish Civil War, where he filmed a documentary on the Republican side entitled Victory of Life. As a reporter he was in the World War II. He witnessed the German occupation and the liberation of Paris, as well as Mao’s triumphal entry into Peking… Imagine that he was the first Western journalist to visit the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin.
“Cartier-Bresson also photographed part of the decolonization of Africa, May ’68 in Paris…. Shortly after he retired from the world of photography and resumed his youthful love of painting, until his death in 2004. He also founded, together with Robert Capa and other important photographers, the Magnum agency. In 2002 he created a foundation in charge of collecting his best works, in the Montparnasse district of Montparnasse (I was able to visit it when I was in Paris and also to work with the archives on Cuba, one of the most important ones and also a jewel for the amount of unpublished images, especially from 1963).
What can you tell us about his relationship with Cuba?
“I was aware of his visit to Cuba at the beginning of the Revolution, but it was a photo circulating on social circulating on social networks that caught my attention and made me investigate his work. The picture shows the corridor of La Periquera in the early sixties: a woman and two girls walk towards the camera, other people walk in the opposite direction; the shop windows with the mannequins and costumes; the awnings to hide from the sun; the magazines and newspapers…
“Many people on Facebook claimed that this photo was by Cartier-Bresson.
Cartier-Bresson’s authorship and that caught my attention, so I started to investigate.
He was in Holguín during his second visit to Cuba in early 1963?
Imagine that he was the first Western journalist to visit the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin.
That was the trigger, the starting point?
What sources did you consult?
“I knew about his visit to Cuba at the beginning of the Revolution, but it was a photo circulating in social networks that caught my attention and made me investigate about his work. The picture shows the corridor of La Periquera in the early sixties: a woman and two girls walk towards the camera, other people walk in the opposite direction; the shop windows with the mannequins and costumes; the awnings to hide from the sun; the magazines and newspapers…
“Many people on Facebook claimed that this photo was by Cartier-Bresson, so I started to investigate. Was he in Holguín during his second visit to Cuba in early 1963?
Is that photo really by the man who was named “the eye of the 20th century”? That was the trigger, the starting point?
What sources did you consult?
“Very little has been written about Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Cuban sojourns. Almost nothing. What has been published deals, with very little information, the 1963 visit, when he was already a personality in the world of photography and journalism. At that time, he was hired by the American Magazine Life. From that visit are his best known photos on Cuba: militiamen in the streets, workers, Fidel Castro, Che… But he took many more, not included in Life, which considerably broaden his vision of Cuba. He himself even wrote the text that accompanies the photoreport and left annotations (each photo, in the archives of his Foundation is accompanied by his notes).
“But almost nothing appears of his 1934 stay… At that time, he was not known by photography, and he was influenced in photography by surrealism, movement that would mark him throughout his life.
“I found some articles about his work, but they touched on known aspects. The critic and journalist Pedro de la Hoz wrote about his death in 2004, addressing the 1963 visit, the photos taken of Fidel Castro and the influence on Cuban photographers such as Korda and José Alberto Figueroa. Writer Lisandro Otero also published an article then, included in an anthology of his.
“The person who wrote the most about Henri Cartier-Bresson —and I believe who best addressed him in Cuba— was the researcher and art critic Adelaida de Juan. She and her husband, poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar, were his hosts in Havana, when he did the report for Life in 1963. Henri Cartier-Bresson took photos of Retamar, little Laidi Fernández de Juan, the burial of the singer and musician great Benny Moré…
“Adelaida de Juan published more than one article on Henri Cartier-Bresson, including an enlightening one in La Gaceta de Cuba. But she does not mention in any of them a possible departure of the photographer from Havana…
“I consulted, among other materials, a broad biography in English, a
documentary on his work called Henri Cartier Bresson Biographie eines Blicks (Heinz Bütler, 2003) and the Life report. In addition, there are editions of El Diario de la Marina, which describes his stay as part of the group commissioned by the Museum of Man in Paris, which was part of an expedition that would accompany the construction of a road from Mexico to Patagonia, but this was never carried out and the group was dispersed throughout the region.
“At first I could only access the photographed pages of Life magazine, then in Paris I had it in my hands. It includes photos taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in Camagüey (a militiawoman in front of a store) and Santiago de Cuba (some old men dressed in neat guayaberas, in front of a table in a commercial establishment).
“I asked myself: If he was in Camagüey and Santiago, could he have been in Holguín then? But the Holguin press of the time did not mention him (despite him being a well-known figure) and this brought me new questions… Friends from Camagüey confirmed to me that they had no information about his stay in that city, although the photo confirmed that he was there.
“At this point, the research was taking other directions and fortunately, it was not limited to local spheres, but to his visits to Cuba. Even so, after I was triangulating all the information, I kept asking myself about it: Has Henri Cartier-Bresson been in Holguín or not in Holguín in early 1963? That was the greatest difficulty and at the same time the most important motivation. From this foot, let’s say that the essay where I address the two stays in Holguin in early 1963 was born, where I address the two stays of the famous French photographer in Cuba.
Did you make a biographical study or was it more about his testimonial relationship with Cuba from the photographic image?
“I didn’t plan to do a biographical study, since his life and work is widely studied and known, especially in Europe and from the work of his Foundation in Paris.
“I intended to approach -as broadly as possible- his visits to Cuba, since there is still a kind of void within our studies on photography, important to know the work done here by a figure as important as Cartier-Bresson, his influence on the photographers of the “golden age” of Cuban photography….
“When he came in 1934 -imagine the political upheaval of those years- he was not a recognized photographer (he arrived in Cuba on way to Mexico) and, however, he took one of his most endearing works. A year before his death, on August 3, 2004, in Montjustin, in the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the National Library of France held a gigantic retrospective with 350 of his best photos, as a tribute to his 95 years. The snapshot he himself chose as the symbol and cover of that exhibition was the one taken in 1934 of the simple wooden horses on a merry-go-round in Cuba, which is also the photograph of his with the highest price at auction: it was sold on November 16, 1999 for 24,030 dollars. Entitled Cuba (1934), this photograph was among Cartier-Bresson’s favorites. In researching in his archives I was able to find other 1934 photos possibly taken in Cuba, from a study of the features and subjects, of the image itself.
“When he returned to Havana in 1963 he was interested in observing with his own eyes, those that had captured through the lens of his Leica the great moments of the 20th century, a Revolution different from those he had witnessed before: a “revolution without ideology”, as Jean-Paul Sartre had called it in 1960, but which by January of that year had already leaned towards socialism in the complex balance of world geopolitics.
“He himself considered himself a witness to “the succession of utopias” and Cuba, then, was the palpable dream of leftist utopias. But the Havana of berets and militiamen with rifles on their shoulders was not the same as the one he had known during his first stay: neither Cuba nor the photographer were the same. The island, which had decreed its socialist character in 1961, was undergoing a social revolution that was radically transforming it from its foundations, and Henri Cartier-Bresson was considered one of the most important photographers in the world.
“The photos published in Life -even the texts, as I told you, are his- under the title Inside Castro’s Cuba. A Penetrating Report in Pictures by Henri Cartier-Bresson, are much better known. They document the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution, its leaders, but also everyday moments: the workers, the peasants, the women, the people in the streets, the militiamen, various artist friends…”
What were the greatest difficulties you encountered?
“The greatest difficulties – as we have seen – were in the absence of information about it. The first visit was not documented, except for the famous photograph of the merry-go-round and the small notes in El Diario de la Marina, which did not focus on Cartier-Bresson but on the group of which he was part and which would leave for Mexico (on its way back from Mexico it touched Cuban soil again, on its way to the United States). And the second, being a recognized figure, like so many who visited us, was not much addressed either, except, sometime later, by those who knew him in those years.
“We still had pending if the photo of the runner of La Periquera was his or not… As far as we know from his photos, he was in Camagüey and Santiago and there was the possibility that he was passing through Holguín. That photo of La Periquera could well be a work of his, but in the Foundation it does not appear, it is not in the so taken care archives, not even as a film negative , without printing… For someone so meticulous and obsessive with the order, each image of his, with his notes, is well registered; which makes us confirm that it is not of his authorship and that if he arrived to pass by Holguin, he did not take images or if he did, he did not print them. Only those that he authorized in life can be printed”.
Adelaida de Juan, shortly before she passed away -thanks to the mediation of her daughter, Laidi Fernandez de Juan-, assured me that, according to what she remembered, he had not been to Holguin.
“That did not disappoint me at all, because that photo that circulated through social networks was the germ to investigate his two stays in Cuba. That was the most important thing. Also, knowing that the research gave me a prize like the Casa Victor Hugo makes me happy. The jury was made up of specialists Clémentine Renée Lucien, María de los Ángeles Pereira, Rafael Acosta de Arriba, who knows and has thoroughly researched photography in Cuba, Jesús David Curbelo and Gualfrido Hernández Vidal.
They awarded the essay The Cuban Gaze of Henri Cartier-Bresson for “the historical rigor of the research and the quality of the writing,” according to the jury’s own minutes. And the trip to Paris, with its museums, from the Louvre to the Pompidou or Versailles, has been one of the most beautiful moments that research has given me”.
What does photography in the press mean to you?
“Photography in the press – together almost since the emergence of the first one – is more than important for the development of journalism. And also for history. Cartier-Bresson’s, for example, is a cartography of the main moments of the 20th century.”
How have you used it?
“New technologies have conditioned its growing development and every day the use of photographs and other audiovisual elements in the press is more and more important. I have used photographs, both my own and those of photographer friends, to accompany my press articles. It’s already at your fingertips on a cell phone”.
Have you played the role of photographer?
“Many times I take the photos that accompany my texts myself, with my cell phone camera….
“I am a lover of the lens as an art and of good press photography, which is worth as much as an article, but since I don’t have a proper camera, apart from my cell phone, I prefer those of friends who know the lens and its mysteries better than I do.
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