Guillermo Rosales

Who was Guillermo Rosales?

Guillermo Rosales was a Cuban novelist. A double exile, writing in reaction both to Cuba's totalitarian regime and to the indifference of Cuban-American exiles bent on achieving the American Dream, Rosales created some of the best Cuban literature of the second half of the twentieth century, garnering comparisons to Carlos Montenegro and Reinaldo Arenas.

Born in Havana, Rosales was a lifelong misfit diagnosed with schizophrenia. A journalist and writer while still in Cuba, he had an early brush with fame when his novel "El Juego de la Viola," was a finalist in the reputable "Casa de las Americas" contest. But in 1979 he fled Castro's regime and went into exile in Miami, where he disappeared from public view. He ended up in halfway houses, 'those marginal refuges where the desperate and hopeless go'. The time he spent there provided the author with the material to write his most famous and viscerally haunting novella, The Halfway House. He was the winner of the prestigious 1987 "Letras de Oros" contest, judged by the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Rosales committed suicide in Miami in 1993, at the age of 47. Before doing so, he destroyed most of his work. Two novels survived: '"El Juego de la Viola"' and '"The Halfway House"'.