Holguín Publishing house presents new book on Electa Arenal
- Written by Claudia Patricia Domínguez
- Published in Culture
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The book “Electa Arenal. The absolute image”, by Abel Sastre Matos, is one of the most recent proposals of the publishing house La Mezquita, belonging to the Union of Historians of Cuba in the province of Holguín.
Sastre Matos, who began in 2003 with the investigation on Electa Arenal with the aim to help a friend to complete the information to conform the file in which she proposed as National Monument the Mural Song to the Revolution Located in the town of Puerto Padre, assured that he never imagined that those two pages would occupy a large part of his research work.
He explained to the digital newspaper ¡ahora! that he was so interested in investigating the cultural traces of the Mexican artist and her husband Gustavo Vargas during their stay in the cities of Holguín and Puerto Padre in the 1960s, that he decided to take on her sculptural work as the subject of her Master's thesis in Cultural Development.
"I was passionate about the life story of a woman who was capable of firmly following her ideals, she arrived in Cuba convinced that helping to form the Cuban Revolution was what she had to do as a young leftist," he said.
The Mural Song to the Revolution, among his first projects in Cuba, was followed by others in Holguín, such as the Infancia bas-relief at the Manuel Díaz Legrá polyclinic, the Monument to the Bloody Easter and the Revolution, the first pictorial mural of the eastern city that is preserved in the second floor of La Periquera.
He specified that the book, now available in digital format, not only addresses the life of Electa Arenal from her childhood until the unfortunate accident that ended her life on June 12, 1969, since it includes photographs, letters, poems, testimonies from friends and relatives of the artist as well as samples of homage from Cuba and Mexico to her figure and imprint.
