César González-Calero: "The 'damned circumstance' of its insularity has influenced Cuba's fate on a number of occasions"
The Madrid-born journalist César González-Calerohas won the sixth Eurostars Hotels Prize for travel writing, organized by the UB, the Hotusa Group and the publisher RBA Libros, for his book Cuba a cámara lenta. César González-Calero has spent his entire career working as a journalist in a range of publications in Spain and Latin America, including Diario 16, El Mundo, El País, Expansión, The Washington Post, El Universal, Cambio and Milenio. He now lives in Buenos Aires, where he covers international stories for the daily newspaper La Nación. As a correspondent in the United Kingdon, Mexico, Central America and Cuba, he has covered International forums, political crises, social revolt and natural disasters. In 2009 he published the novel Humano (Inéditor). In his prize-winning book, González-Calero takes readers on an original and entertaining journey across Cuba, where he spent five years working as a correspondent for various publications.
The Madrid-born journalist César González-Calerohas won the sixth Eurostars Hotels Prize for travel writing, organized by the UB, the Hotusa Group and the publisher RBA Libros, for his book Cuba a cámara lenta. César González-Calero has spent his entire career working as a journalist in a range of publications in Spain and Latin America, including Diario 16, El Mundo, El País, Expansión, The Washington Post, El Universal, Cambio and Milenio. He now lives in Buenos Aires, where he covers international stories for the daily newspaper La Nación. As a correspondent in the United Kingdon, Mexico, Central America and Cuba, he has covered International forums, political crises, social revolt and natural disasters. In 2009 he published the novel Humano (Inéditor). In his prize-winning book, González-Calero takes readers on an original and entertaining journey across Cuba, where he spent five years working as a correspondent for various publications.
The urgency of modern journalism and the growing prevalence of new technologies often leave little scope for reflection. Some stories cannot be told in 100 lines of print. Daily reporting places excessive constraints on the amount that can be written, and this increases the risk of producing superficial coverage. Narrative fiction, on the other hand, requires greater space and a different timeframe. A book offers writers this possibility, which the media - with very few exceptions - no longer affords. The trend is moving in the opposite direction, towards a flood of brief snippets of information that are updated every minute. But Twitter and its 140 characters cannot describe reality in the way that narrative journalism has always done. The book Cuba a cámara lenta is a tribute to that style of narrative journalism, a genre that, in Spain, emerged from the work of writers such as Manuel Chaves Nogales in the 1930s and has produced celebrated exponents in the English-speaking world, such as Gay Talese and Joseph Mitchell, among others.