Manuel Pereira

Manuel Leonel Pereira Quintero was born in Havana on 31 October 1948 to Galician immigrant parents, and he always stressed that he was a child of Old Havana. In 1968 he studied fine art at the San Alejandro Academy, where he became a friend and disciple of the painter Wifredo Lam. As a student he won the National University Prize three years running, for chronicle, reportage and interview, and he earned his journalism degree from the University of Havana in 1978. From around 1969 he was a regular visitor to the Trocadero Street home of José Lezama Lima, attending the informal literary sessions Lezama called the Curso Délfico.

Pereira worked as a journalist from 1968, contributing to Cuba Internacional, El Caimán Barbudo, Bohemia, Revolución y Cultura and Casa de las Américas. His first novel, El Comandante Veneno, written between 1972 and 1974 about the literacy campaign in the Sierra Maestra, was rejected by a military jury for supposedly foreign influences and was held back for three years before its publication in 1977. Alejo Carpentier wrote to him that he was a born novelist, Julio Cortázar praised the book, and Gabriel García Márquez called it the novel he would have liked to write about Cuba. His second novel, El Ruso, followed in 1980.

In the early 1980s he wrote screenplays for the Cuban film institute ICAIC, including the documentary Habana Vieja, and served as editor and later deputy director of the magazine Cine Cubano. From 1984 to 1988 he was Cuba's cultural attaché to UNESCO in Paris and lectured widely in Europe and beyond. His essay collection La quinta nave de los locos (1988) won the National Critics' Prize.

After resigning his UNESCO post he left Cuba in January 1991 for Berlin, then moved to Spain, where he edited the Barcelona magazine Quimera, translated from French and English and ran workshops in Cadaqués and in a Mallorca prison. Anagrama published his novel Toilette in 1993. From 2004 he lived in Mexico, teaching at the Universidad Iberoamericana and other institutions, and publishing Insolación (2006), Mataperros (winner of the Cortes de Cádiz International Prize), Biografía de un desayuno (2008), Un viejo viaje (2010), El ornitorrinco y otros ensayos (2013), El beso esquimal (2015) and La estrella perro (2018). His fiction was translated into German, English, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Czech.

Pereira took Spanish citizenship in 1993 and made Mexico his home from 2004, describing the country as one that embraced him. He was also a painter, producing a series called Correspondencias that drew connections between works by famous artists, and he kept a personal blog titled El Azogue de La Habana Vieja. He described his fiction as largely autobiographical, telling the story of a generation that believed in many things and was disappointed by many of them.

Manuel Pereira died in Mexico on Saturday 10 October 2026, three weeks short of his 78th birthday. His death was first announced on social media by the Mexican poet and academic Tania Favela, who wrote that she hoped he was now with his beloved Lezama Lima, resuming the Curso Délfico. Obituaries followed in Diario de Cuba, CiberCuba and 14ymedio. The cause of death was not made public.

Pereira is remembered as a singular voice in contemporary Cuban fiction, a link between the generation of the Latin American boom and the writers of the Cuban diaspora, and one of the last direct witnesses of Lezama Lima's circle. His novels carried the life of Old Havana into exile, and he asked to be remembered as an essayist who wrote novels rather than the other way round.