Leandro Estupiñán, The Invitee

By Amauris Betancourt.

The friend and colleague Leandro Estupiñán had a full room in his book launching, with Cuban National Literature Prize Pablo Armando Fernández in the first row.The Invitee, presented first in Havana and then in Holguín during the last Cuban International Book Fair, belongs to the Holguín Publishing House’s City Award Prizes Collection. Leandro shows, besides a delicious coherence and a peculiar way of dealing with every-day life topics using a critical and diaphanous look, a mastership at writing short stories.

The Web site devoted to culture in Holguín put it this way according to journalist Carlos Melían:

“The young writer and journalist Leandro Estupiñán, author of The Invitee was there next to his presenter the also Holguín writer Gilberto Gonzáles Seik.

Leandro said the volume won the City Award Prize under a different tittle –Unconvinced People-; but his editor, Eugenio Marrón, talked him into changing the title.

“Well, if I keep writing and I become a studied writer let no one think that there is a book by me over there named thus”, Estupiñán added as a joke. “Most of these short stories were conceived during my last years of pre-university studies and during my military service time at Guantánamo Cuban Military Base. It is made up of eight stories that have grown out of difficult circumstances and others that were not so, but that they are there and they have, precisely, to do with people that are not very convinced of the moment that they had to live in.”