Between 1961 and 1965 they published each other's work, introduced dozens of new voices - among them poet and translator Nancy Morejón, playwright Gerardo Fulleda León, playwright-activist Ana Maria Simo and folklorist Miguel Barnet - and held readings and performances.
Accused, among other things, of fostering homosexuality, Black Power, publishing exiles, and consorting with foreigners,[1] some members were detained, and/or sent to the UMAP concentration camps.
Cuban literary critics are beginning to address the group, and in 2005, the Gaceta de Cuba published a series of pieces on El Puente.
"[Lunes de Revolución] only covered people connected to the director Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and they never reviewed books by young writers."
"[4] Gerardo Fulleda León remembered meeting José Mario in 1961 at a theater workshop that was also attended by playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
From that day forward, we scheduled appointments or met up in the afternoons in the gardens of the Writer's Union, in the park, at the entrance to a series of Soviet films at the Cinemateca de Cuba, at a theater function in Mella, in the hallways of an exhibit of Portocarrero, at a concert of Bola or Burke; the afternoon would turn into night and we would go to listen to a concert of filin at El Gato Tuerto, or jazz at the Atelier.
Self-subsidized[7] and publishing with editorial independence, even after they were persuaded to ally themselves with the Writers Union (Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba - UNEAC), El Puente introduced dozens of new voices to the literary scene, eventually publishing more than twenty writers and offering more than three dozen books of poetry, theater, fiction, and folklore.
Anthologies, such as La Novísima Poesía Cubana (1962) edited by Reinaldo Garcia Ramos and Ana María Simo, in part expressed this literary ethos that had less to do with rigorous craft or a common style, than fresh points of view.
Book covers were designed by young architecture students and visual artists, including Gilberto Seguí, David Bigelman and José Lorenzo.
At the time, critics such as Jesús Díaz, for instance, said they did not represent anything except a very small "dissolute" fringe, and charged not only that some of the writing was uneven, but that El Puente was "a politically and aesthetically erroneous phenomenon.
"It's true that El Puente had a lot of black writers, like Nancy Morejón, Ana Justina Cabrera, Gerardo Fulleda León, Eugenio Hernández, Georgina Herrera, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Pedro Pérez Sarduy and others.
While Che Guevara once reportedly threw a book across the room in disgust because it was written by gay author Virgilio Piñera,[13] Cuba didn't need the Argentine revolutionary to introduce homophobia.
"[15] After the revolution, one of the first occasions homophobia went from a private attitude to public policy was during the National Meeting of Poets (Encuentro Nacional de Poetas) held in Camagüey in 1960 shortly before El Puente was begun.
Colonel Alberto Bayo, a representative of the government, used the opportunity to launch an invective against homosexuals, calling them "bad seed," and warning they were going to "pervert the revolution."
[5] In January 1965, Allen Ginsberg, the openly gay poet, Buddhist, and drug-user, was invited to the island by Casa de las Américas to be part of the jury for that year's poetry prize.
Besides meeting writers like Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Camilo José Cela and Nicanor Parra,[5] Ginsberg found his way to members of El Puente who had been corresponding with him, and intended to publish a translation of Howl.
[6] "His visits to my house, and that we appeared together in various public places, like the Writers Union cafeteria and at a reception at the Casa de las Américas and his explosive declarations about current politics and the persecution of homosexuals, put us, as they say, on everybody's lips.
He used the La Gaceta, a magazine of the Writers Union, to publicly declare that members of El Puente were "generally bad as artists" but, more dangerously, "the most dissolute and negative segment of their generation" and "a politically and aesthetically erroneous phenomenon.
"[22] Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, another one of the editors, later defended El Caimán, blaming the Communist Youth for forbidding them, "to publish any young writer or artist which was homosexual.
For decades, Nancy Morejón was hesitant to speak out in groups: "I thought if I raised my hand to say something, somebody would be sure to say, "Shut up, those people from El Puente..." I can tell you that now, but before we didn't talk about these things..."[9] Scholars have begun to research the group, and in its July–August 2005 issue,[2] the Gaceta de Cuba published a series of related pieces in a first attempt to grapple with the history of El Puente.