Aitana Alberti, poet and daughter of the Spanish writers Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, has died in Havana at the age of 84.
A childhood in exile
She was born in Argentina in 1941, where her parents had settled after leaving Spain at the end of the Civil War. Growing up among exiled writers and artists, she absorbed her parents’ love of literature and the stories of the country they had been forced to leave.
Four decades in Cuba
In 1984 she moved to Havana, which became her home for the rest of her life. At the University of Havana she led the Rafael Alberti Chair, devoted to the study of her father’s work and of the Generation of ’27, the group of poets that included Lorca, Cernuda and Aleixandre.
For more than 15 years she also worked at the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Centre, where she led a project bringing the poetry of the Generation of ’27 to new readers and encouraging young people to read and write.
She was active in the World Poets Movement and, in Cuba, presided over the Proyecto Cultural Sur, a network linking cities in Europe and the Americas. She was also involved in organising the Havana International Poetry Festival.
Her own writing
Her poetry collections include Poemas de Aitana Alberti (1955), Pupila al viento (1998), Y volver a nacer (1999) and Amazona en la chispa (2016). She also wrote prose works recovering the memory of the Republican exile, among them Inquilinos de la soledad (2006) and Cuentos persas (2018), which has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, Romanian and Italian.
Tributes
The Cuban newspaper Granma described her as a “tireless defender of poetry, memory, peace and dialogue between peoples”.
Her death breaks one of the last direct links with one of the most important literary families of 20th-century Spain. Rafael Alberti, who returned to Spain in 1977 after almost four decades in exile, died in 1999.
