Juan Bosch Gaviño: 1909-2001: Author, Politician

Gaviño was 21 when General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, one of Latin America's most notorious dictators, took control of the Dominican Republic in a military coup. In 1933 Gaviño was imprisoned for conspiracy against the regime. In 1937, following a Trujillo-ordered massacre of 15,000 Haitian squatters on the border between the two countries, Gaviño moved to Puerto Rico with his wife and children.

Gaviño modeled his life in literature and politics after the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican writer and patriot Eugenio María de Hostos. In 1939 he moved to Havana, Cuba, to oversee the publishing of Hostos's complete works. Gaviño also wrote two books on Hostos, Hostos, el sembrador and Mujeres en la vida de Hostos. In 1941 he married his second wife, the playwright Carmen Quidiello, who was from a prominent family in Santiago, Cuba. They had a son, Patricio, and a daughter, Barbarita.

A member of Cuba's intellectual and literary elite, Gaviño worked as a journalist and published in the Cuban magazines Bohemia and Carteles. For a time he was a medical representative for the Cuban Biological Institute and he continued to write short stories as well as nonfiction. Using a pseudonym Gaviño entered "El socio" in the Juegos Florales Hispanoamericanos of the Dominican Republic in 1940. This story about the plight of peasants under an evil landowner won first place. His story "Luis Pie," included in the collection Ocho cuentos, won the Hernández Catá prize in 1943. Trips to Bolivia inspired Gaviño's final novel, El oro y la paz, written in Puerto Rico in 1964, and his critically acclaimed story, "El Indio Manuel Sicuri," written in Chile in 1956. This story was made into a Bolivian film that played at the Cannes Film Festival.