House of the Americas

This guide to the House of the Americas in Havana follows the annual literary prize run out of this Art Deco building since the late nineteen fifties, and the writers who judged it. Julio Cortazar arrived in January nineteen sixty-three to sit on the jury, joining a rotating panel that over the years included Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama Lima and Martinez Estrada, who won the essay award himself. Voting in the Manuel Galich hall split rooms and ran hot, and it still does every January, decades later.