Кубалық жазушы, ақын және режиссер Зоэ Вальдес туралы

Cuban novelist, poet, scriptwriter, film director and blogger

Zoé Valdés (born May 2, 1959 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban novelist, poet, scriptwriter, film director and blogger. She studied at the Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona, but did not graduate. From 1984 to 1988, she worked for the Delegación de Cuba at UNESCO in Paris and in the Oficina Cultural de la Misión de Cuba in Paris. From 1990 to 1995, she was an editor of the magazine Cine Cubano. She lives with her daughter in Paris. She has been married three times: with Cuban writer Manuel Pereira Quintero, Cuban government official José Antonio González and Cuban independent filmmaker Ricardo Vega.

Zoé Valdés was educated by her mother and abandoned by her father when she was a child. Valdés began writing when she was nine or ten years old, thanks to her grandmother who would constantly read poetry to her. She published her first lyrical novel, Sangre Azul, in 1993. She studied at the Instituto Pedagógico Enrique Varona until her fourth year.

Valdés was officially exiled from Cuba in 1994 for political reasons. In 1991, she received an award that was asked to be donated to the Castro regime, which she refused to do. She also signed a publishing deal for her novel La nada cotidiana with a French publishing company, without consulting the government. In 1995 she left the country and moved to Paris with her husband at the time, the filmmaker Ricardo Vega, and her daughter Attys Luna, who was one and a half years old. She published two other poetry collections in Spain titled Vagón para fumadores (1996) and Cuerdas para el lince (1999). Another character, Rubén, resides in New Jersey and remembers his time in Cuba. Valdés' first novel Sangre azul (1993) written during 1987 1991 in Paris and Cuba, is the only one of her novels that was published in Cuba. In this novel, Attys a young and beautiful Cuban woman lives with her step father since her father abandoned her when she was young. The paradise promised by the revolution turns into a trap characterized by hopelessness and frustration. Patria relies on her writing to find any sense of real hope. The novel explores the memories and life of a woman in exile. The novel is somewhat autobiographic. It is a historical fiction novel about two female Caribbean pirates. She published an article in El Mundo about Fulgencio Batista where she declared that he was an antifascist and argued that rather than carrying out a coup d'état, he started a revolution. She has received a lot of backlash for her political views. She shows on social networks her support for the conservative Spanish political party Vox, considered as a right wing to far right party by academics, political analysts, and many media outlets. Since February 2022, she began collaborating with La Gaceta de la Iberosfera, a VOX newspaper. She has also supported Trump's re election in the United States, of which she said in an article: "Let us pray that Donald Trump be re elected in the next elections on November 3th a patriot, a humanist, a peacemaker "

In 2020, she became a signatory of the Madrid Charter launched by Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, to fight communism around the world. The appeal is also understood as a first step towards the creation of a conservative international to wage a "cultural battle against the left". She has generated great controversies publishing dozens of articles attacking several authors and public figures, and even opponents of the Cuban regime such as multi awarded blogger Yoani Sánchez, artist and activist Tania Bruguera, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, Spanish author Almudena Grandes, and others.