Alejo Carpentier

Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to a French father and Russian mother who moved the family to Havana in his infancy, though he spent his life presenting himself as Cuban-born. Jailed briefly in 1927 for opposing the Machado dictatorship, he escaped Cuba on a borrowed passport belonging to the poet Robert Desnos and spent over a decade in Paris immersed in Surrealist circles.

A 1943 journey to Haiti, where he encountered vodou ritual and the ruins of Henri Christophe's fortress, convinced him that Latin America's history was already fantastical without any novelist's embellishment; he called the idea 'lo real maravilloso' in the prologue to The Kingdom of This World.

He later served the Cuban revolutionary government as a cultural official and ambassador to France, dying in Paris in 1980.