Severo secreto

Severo Sarduy was a hybrid of the various ethnic origins - Spanish, African and Chinese - that comprise Cuban culture. As impossible to pigeonhole as his roots would indicate, Sarduy left Cuba to study in Paris in 1960 and never returned. One of the leading lights of the Neo-Baroque movement in literature, his novel, Cobra, won the Medici Prize. The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid hosted a major retrospective of his paintings after his death from AIDS. The husband-and-wife tandem of Oneyda González and Gustavo Pérez (They Would All Be Queens) hail from the Cuban province of Camagüey, where Sarduy was born. Traveling from Havana to Miami and Paris, they set out to unravel the mystery that was one of the island’s most transgressive artists, gaining unprecedented access to the Sarduy archives from his longtime companion François Wahl. They succeed in their mission without violating the artist’s abiding enigma, that is, without betraying the essence of their subject. A remarkable achievement.