Miguel Otero Silva: Distinguished man who dedicated his prose to social defense (+birth)

Published at: 26/10/2025 09:18 AM

On October 26, 1908, Miguel Otero Silva was born in the city of Barcelona. This Anzoatiguan was part of the “Generation of 28" that rose up against the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, which earned him his exile in Curaçao from where, together with Gustavo Machado, José Tomás Jiménez and Guillermo Prince Lara, he was part of a contingent of 39 men under the command of Rafael Simón Urbina who stormed Fort Amsterdam in Willemstad and arrested the Dutch governor Leonard Albert Fruytiera.

After this fact, they boarded the steamboat “Maracaibo” with which they sailed to Venezuelan shores to disembark in the Choir Sail where they began a movement to overthrow the Venezuelan dictator, a movement that failed, so they had to flee to Colombia.

His ideals of freedom and anticapitalist led him to join the ranks of the nascent Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), becoming one of the 17 delegates participating in the First National Conference of the Rooster Awning on August 8, 1937.

This life of agitated militancy did not prevent him from writing as founder in 1942 of the left-wing magazine “Here It Is” and later the newspaper El Nacional. In the same way, it was during this time that he began his career as a writer that he managed to publish seven novels throughout his life where his vocation for the defense of the humble prevailed, as well as countless beautiful poems and essays.

In 1979, all this work earned him the Lenin Peace Prize awarded to the circle of intellectuals of the extinct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Miguel Otero Silva died on August 28, 1985 at the age of 76, leaving an immense literary legacy that qualifies him as one of the great Latin American writers of the 20th century.

Mazo News Team