Matanzas: Student leader, career philosopher, delegate of the Popular Power, university professor, animalist; in short, a young man with a million good ideas in his head and desires to eat the world. He is Randy Perdomo García, who preaches by example and who is loved and respected in a very special way in the 78th constituency in the head municipality, where he serves as delegate since 2017, with an original and very practical philosophy.
Born in 1992, and a graduate of Maxist Leninist Philosophy, he was president of the Federation of University Studenta (FEU) of the University of Havana and had the joy of holding a very close conversation with Fidel in 2015.
His admirers now thank him for his incursion into literature, since the Matanzas Book Fair is presenting the volume he prepared together with Marlenis Pérez Valdés, entitled Frei Betto al borde de una paradoja, one of the two new releases of Ediciones Aldabón in this festival of literature in the povince also known as Cuba's Athens.
Daniel Cruz Bermudez, director of the publishing house, said it is an excellent compilation of writings by the great intellectual and friend of Cuba, Frei Betto, a prolific author who is very close to young people because of the freshness and contemporaneity of his articles.
The book also includes an extensive interview by the compilers and texts of appreciation of Frei Betto by Cuban and foreign personalities and narrators such as Fernando Martinez Heredia, Leonardo Padura, Lucia Topolansky Saavedra, Gabriela Ramirez Cruz, Paquita Armas, Rebeca Chavez, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Atilio A. Boron, Stella Calloni, Homero Acosta and Magda Resik, among others.
For the director of Aldabón, the enthusiasm of these outstanding thinkers to participate in the literary project is one of the greatest virtues of the volume and its creators. He also highlighted Johann Trujillo's design work on the cover, based on a caricature by Manuel Hernández.
The book was born from the interest to make a gift to Frei Betto in his 75th anniversary, admitted Randy Perdomo via telephone, from Santiago de Cuba, where he is in a habitual visit. He said that they were motivated by the desire to get closer to this renowned political scientist, communicator par excellence, who has dedicated his life to the libertarian causes. To get young people get to know him better, beyond his transcendental work Fidel and religion, he said.
Thanks precisely to Fidel, to Dalia, and to Chela, who was Armando Hart's chief of office, he recognized, was his first contact and approach with the outstanding Brazilian intellectual, occasion in which the idea of this literary project arose.
As a brief prologue to this compilation, the poet Roberto Fernández Retamar wrote that "for Cubans, Frei Betto, with all his virtues, is, above all, one of Fidel's great friends, comparable to another exceptional Latin American: the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. It is beautiful that Brother Betto has contributed so that the Cuban Revolution does not exclude from its ranks religious men and women who also fight for the advent of a world of full justice."
The Book Fair in the territory starts Thursday and will last until April 5th, and on this occasion will pay tribute to Alfredo Zaldívar, a fundamental creator in the literary destiny of this province in recent decades, as well as the Matanzas and Aldabón publishing houses.
Commenting on his first literary project, Randy Perdomo expressed his passion for poetry and, especially, for the interview genre. He noted that, in literature, he finds inspiration for his other social commitments.
Translated by ESTI
