Lourdes Casal

Cuban-born writer, scholar, and activist

• Born: April 5, 1938
• Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
• Died: February 1, 1981
• Place of death: Havana, Cuba

As a public intellectual, Casal contributed scholarly research and literary production in the form of poetry, essays, and fiction. Widely anthologized, Casal’s work grappled with continuously evolving views on the tensions among gender, race, class, and nationality, expressing for many readers their own struggles.

Early Life

Lourdes Emilia Irene de la Caridad Casal y Valdés (LOHR-dehs kah-SAHL) was born into a middle-class family to a physician-dentist father and an elementary schoolteacher mother. As a china mulata of African, Chinese, and Spanish descent, Casal experienced firsthand the class and race tensions in Cuba under Fulgencio Batista.

An ardent and accomplished student at the Universidad Católica de Santo Tomás de Villanueva, her wide-ranging interests led her from the school of engineering to psychology and on to literature and political science. While a student at university, Casal supported Fidel Castro and the anti-Batista group, but after Castro took power, she became disillusioned with the revolutionary movement. Casal belonged to the El Puente literary group and publishing house, and when it was closed for publishing “bourgeois” literature, she was among those arrested. Although she initially was in favor of the Cuban Revolution, by 1962 she had changed her mind and was opposed to Fidel Castro’s government.

Casal traveled to Africa and ultimately moved to New York City, where she completed her clinical training, began teaching and writing, and became a naturalized citizen. She wrote Chinese Cuban history and anti-Castro essays and became politically active, arguing for open dialogue between the United States and Cuba. She wrote poems, stories, essays, and academic studies. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from New School for Social Research in 1975.

Life’s Work

In 1972, Casal published El caso Padilla, a critical review of Cuba’s imprisonment and censorship of dissident poet Heberto Padilla, in 1971. Many scholars assert that El caso Padilla signaled a change in Casal’s political trajectory from opponent back to sympathizer with revolutionary Cuba. She reached out to the Cuban exile community, establishing an unprecedented rapport.

At the invitation of the Cuban government in May, 1973, Casal became the first exile to return to Cuba. Upon her return to the United States five months later, she was doubtful about the viability of democracy in Latin America, given Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile and the problems inherent in the Cuban national process. In November and December, 1978, Casal gathered with other Cuban exiles to form the Group of Seventy-five in Havana. Castro and other Cuban officials met with the group for discussions in El Diálogo (The Dialogue), a discourse that led to the emancipation of thirty-six hundred political prisoners from Cuban jails.

Casal taught at Rutgers and the City University of New York, among other institutions. In 1972, she founded the Institute for Cuban Studies at Rutgers to promote free and open exchange between Cuba and the United States and serve as a clearinghouse for credible information on Cuba through publications, exchange programs, and art projects. Currently, the Center for Cuban Studies in New York documents Cuba’s intellectual, social, historical, cultural, and political changes since the revolution. It includes the Lourdes Casal Library, which houses research materials on the visual arts, including books, periodicals, and ephemera.

Casal was in Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in the summer of 1980, at an Institute for Cuban Studies conference. While in Cuba, her health rapidly deteriorated, and she died on February 1, 1981.

Significance

Cubans on the island and those in the diaspora face an artificial but no less divisive separation, a political and cultural border, but Casal determined there should be dialogue between the two groups, worked to build bridges between them. She searched energetically for alternate ideas about Cuba’s situation, believing that resuscitating communication among all Cubans, regardless of their location or politics, was paramount. To honor the memory of Casal, once a professor at Rutgers, the Department of Psychology faculty there each year select a graduating senior to receive the Lourdes Casal Memorial Award in recognition of both intellectual excellence and social commitment. It is a fitting tribute to a scholar, artist, and leader.

Bibliography

Casal, Lourdes. Revolution and Race: Blacks in Contemporary Cuba. Latin American Program Working Paper Series No. 39. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1979. This working paper represents the distillation of Casal’s scholarly reflection on the issues she also considered in her essays, poetry, and fiction.

“Lourdes Casal.” In Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis. Miami, Fla.: Ian Randle, 2003. The section on Casal includes several examples of her work along with critical analysis and a brief biography.

“Lourdes Casal.” In The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, edited by Ilan Stavans and Edna Acosta-Belen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Examines examples of Casal’s poetry in the broader context of Latino literature.

Negron-Muntaner, Frances, and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel. “In Search of Lourdes Casal’s ‘Ana Veldford.’” Social Text 25, no. 3 (2007): 57-84. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. This article reprints and explicates Casal’s most often anthologized and enduring poem, “For Ana Veldford.”