OPINION | Goodbye to Delia Fiallo, the Cuban writer whose fictions went around the world

Editor’s note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International. The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) – Delia Fiallo died a week before her 97th birthday, surrounded by her family in Coral Gables, Miami-Dade County. He was born on July 4, 1924 in Havana, in the bosom of an upper-middle-class family (the father was a doctor), but he felt from Pinar del Río, since he lived a large part of his childhood in Los Palacios, a beautiful town from Pinar de Río, east of Havana.

She was lucid and committed to life until a few days before she died, according to the actress Lupita Ferrer. She was the most successful Cuban writer in the entire history of the island’s literature. Millions of viewers followed his fictions in hundreds of markets around the globe. In a sector eager for good scripts, they adapted their texts to very different realities in Japan, South Korea and Argentina. He finished 43 soap operas, among them: Lucecita, Esmeralda, Kassandra –His most famous international success-, Guadalupe, Marielena, Leonela and Cristal, his latest soap opera.

In an interview with Jaime Bayly, Delia Fiallo told how she had met Bernardo Pascual, her second and final husband, and father of her four children. She was unhappily married to her first husband, with whom she had had a daughter. Pascual, a senior TV executive, wanted to do television series, but the problem that existed was not knowing if the public was willing to wait a week to see another chapter of the same story. The radio allowed to transmit “the next day”, but that was impossible on TV. Delia supposed that Bernardo Pascual, also married, was “a fat old man with hair sticking out of his ears”, but it was not like that: “He is the most beautiful man.” The crush arose and since then they were together. Pascual died a little more than two years, after 67 springs happily married to Delia.

The titles of many of his soap operas give the measure of genre. They are novels written from the perspective of a woman, essentially for women, although many men were “hooked” on the plot. As he told Camilo Egaña in a memorable interview he did for CNN en Español, Delia used “emotions” rather than anecdotes, and these have remained unchanged since the beginning of time. “The emotions of human beings are the same,” he came to say.

Those soap operas, based on the adventures of a central protagonist to whom many negative things happen, generally contrary to her “impossible” loves (which later materialize) were the wickers with which the plot was woven that invariably works with the viewers.

Delia Fiallo was a very cultured woman, with a PhD in Philosophy and Letters graduated from the University of Havana in 1948, awarded the Hernández Catá Prize for short stories. Intuitively, he had discovered the structure of almost all successful narratives: young and good protagonists, generally beautiful, to whom terrible things happen that hinder their emotional relationships. At the end and after great struggles, they manage to overcome the inconveniences and love prevails.

Why “young and beautiful”? Because they were born with and alongside television. Delia Fiallo began writing for television in 1957. Joaquín Blaya, the man who took Spanish-language television to the top in the United States (he directed the two big networks, Univision and Telemundo), said something like television was an activity of graceful people. He was right.

In 1952, Fulgencio Batista had carried out a coup in Cuba, a violent act that interrupted the constitutional thread on the island, with which Delia did not agree. His co-workers and friends included Enrique Rodríguez Loeche and José Luis (Luisito) Gómez Wangüemert, the son of a notable Spanish-Cuban journalist. José Luis died trying to execute the dictator Batista, on March 13, 1957, in the event known as the “attack on the Palace”. 30 attackers died, including Carlos Gutiérrez Menoyo, the military leader of the attack, and José Antonio Echeverría, the president of the University Student Federation (FEU).

It was the early days of the Delia Fiallo rebellion. How did the writer rebel? Well, defending freedom in his soap operas. It was Soraya’s era: a flower in the storm, an Indian woman during the takeover of Havana by the English in 1762. It was a radio soap opera that Delia had adapted for television in 1957. The “trick” that inflamed the Cubans of the mid-twentieth century was useless against the communist dictatorship.

In 1962, three years after the revolution was established, Fiallo wrote a text against the colonial oppression of the Algerians at the hands of the French that had a Cuban reading. They forbade him to think with his head. Nor could he emigrate from Cuba.

Finally, he managed to leave with his family for the United States on December 23, 1966, due to the “flights of freedom” decreed by Lyndon B. Johnson. His ex-schoolmate Enrique Cuscó was running Venevisión at that time. He offered to buy her a soap opera. Soon they released Esmeralda with total success. Venezuelans shook with the adventures of a blind protagonist. From that point on, not everything was “easy and fast”, but almost. Delia Fiallo managed to live very well off her talent.