Cuban · 1931–2005
Antonio Benítez-Rojo was a Cuban novelist, short story writer, and cultural theorist who taught at Amherst College after defecting from Cuba in 1980. The Repeating Island (1989, translated 1992) is his major theoretical work and one of the most original contributions to Caribbean cultural criticism, combining chaos theory with close reading of literature, music, and dance to argue for the distinctive cultural logic of the Caribbean.