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Born in Havana in 1953, Alejandro Lorenzo studied painting at Cuba's renowned San Alejandro Art Academy. After graduation, he joined with a group of artists and writers known as "The Funeraries," because they met at a funeral par... More

Born in Havana in 1953, Alejandro Lorenzo studied painting at Cuba's renowned San Alejandro Art Academy. After graduation, he joined with a group of artists and writers known as "The Funeraries," because they met at a funeral parlor-one of the few places in socialist Cuba that served real coffee. In these circles, Alejandro was given the nickname "El Rom�ntico" when he asserted that in a just society, "even humble people would wear dress gloves."

This generosity of spirit pervades "Mateo's Progress / Jornadas de Mateo". The first two stories, issued in a limited Mexican edition in 1992, managed to gain the approval of official Cuban reviewers. But the book was never published in Cuba, and was never available to readers there.

In 1993, as Cuba's economy and society deteriorated, Alejandro came to live in the United States, where he worked as a literary critic and artist. Ten years later, Pureplay Press, a Los Angeles-based publisher dedicated to the rescue of Cuba's history and culture, discovered Alejandro's work and agreed to produce a bilingual edition with translations by Kaori, a writer of Japanese origin, who lives in California. This publication represents the first appearance of Alejandro's work in English. The author of an oeuvre that spans poetry, narrative, painting and illustration, Alejandro today lives in San Francisco, while his twin sons remain in Cuba.