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Arnaldo Correa is a Cuban author, best know for his collection of short stories and his two english novels, Spy's Fate and Cold Havana Ground. He is heralded as one of the fathers of Cuban crime-fiction, making impactful contributions to the genre throughout the mid-to-late 20th century and into the early 21st century.

Early Life
Arnaldo Correa was born in 1935 in the Escambray Mountains, east of Havana, Cuba. He spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in a rural environment, visiting Havana for the first time when he was seventeen to collect payment for his first published short story, for which he received 50 dollars, and his student visa. He attended the University of Alabama for his undergraduate education, graduating in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering. During his time in college, Correa published a series of short stories in a leading Cuban magazine called Bohemia y Carteles.

After graduation, Arnaldo returned to Cuba to look for oil in the Sierra Maestra, eventually working for the Cuban government to improve the water conservation and irrigation systems in rural regions. Correa spent time in Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, and finally Cuba, working on a variety of economic development programs. He continued to write throughout his early adult life, publishing his first collection of short stories in 1966, entitled Asesinado por Anticipado, a combination of crime-fiction and science-fiction, which earned him personal praise from Fidel Castro.

He currently resides in Havana, Cuba.

Career
Correa was recognized as one of the two main founders of the Cuban crime-fiction genre by the International Association of Crime Writers in 1986. His books have received widespread critical acclaim throughout Latin America, the United States, and Cuba. His novels embark upon intense and incisive explorations of international political relations and national identities, often examining culture from multiple class-related perspectives. He possesses a disorienting but commanding style, incorporating sophisticated narrative elements reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, one of his influences.

He has published a total of five short story collections and one novel in Cuba, in addition to two novels published in the United States by Akashic Books. He has also written for television, authoring an hour long episode of Dia y Noche, a Cuban crime show; the episode was based on the same, true police investigation that inspired his novel Cold Havana Ground.

Works
The following is a list of notable published works written by Arnaldo Correa:

Asesinato Por Anticipado (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1966)

El Primer Hombre a Marte (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1967)

Aventuras Insolitas (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1988)

La Espantosa Muerte del Baron de Shitland (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1997)

Spy’s Fate (Akaschic Books, 2002)

Cold Havana Ground (Akaschic Books, 2004)

Style & Themes
Arnaldo Correa’s pieces immerse the reader in complex narratives, using mystery to provoke interest, inviting his audience to step further into his labyrinthine stories. His novels often include nonfictional subject matter, often requiring large amounts of research prior to writing. For example, Cold Havana Ground tells the true story of a crime committed by followers of Santería, an Afro-Cuban and Catholic syncretic religion. In order to write the novel, Correa spent months researching the religion at the Guanocoa Municipal Museum, interviewing adherents of the faith and looking over the police reports of the investigation. His knowledge of the story’s subject matter is reflected in the incredible amount of cultural information presented: the book includes an exhaustive glossary of terms related to the religious practices of Santería, Palo Monte, and the Abakua Secret Society. Spy's Fate, a story involving Cuban and American intelligence agencies, also demanded in-depth research. Correa traveled throughout the United States to gain a firmer understanding of the administrative sector of United States's covert operations, interviewing officials from several different agencies; Correa jokingly refers to how he was almost extradited from the United States due to the invasive nature of his research in an interview with Raul Deznermio of Akaschic Books.

Correa explores the interplay of religious, national, and cultural identity throughout his works. One of the main characters in Cold Havana Ground, Lorenzo, is a nasako, a high priest of a chapter (usually of the Regla Mayombe sect). The character provides the reader with a window into the religious culture of Santería, which helps to illustrate the opposition between mainstream Catholicism and the ancestral African religions, brought to Cuba by hundreds of thousands of slaves.

The distinction is heavily class based, with lower classes practicing Santería and upper class adhering to mainstream Catholicism; however, throughout the story we see that this delineation is mostly an illusion, engendered by the stigmatization of a “black”, "barbaric" faith. Santería is practiced by many wealthy individuals, yet few openly admit to its practices due to the possibility of being ostracized. He explores the dialectal struggle between upper and lower class culture, discussing the long, important, and often ignored history of Santería in Cuba.

He also examines the influence of Chinese immigration of Cuban society, using the Chinese community in Havana as a microcosmic representation of a cultural trend, elucidating the profound effects the Chinese-Cuban population had on the island’s culture. The cultural synthesis between Chinese and Cuban culture, brought about by the tendency of Chinese male immigrants to marry female Cuban natives, is interwoven into the details of the novel's crime, which involves Cuban Abakua Secret Society members stealing a casket that contains the body of a dead Chinese immigrant because they consider Chinese magic to be the strongest form of mysticism.

Correa has also been interested in the American-Cuban sociopolitical relationship, an international dynamic he represents in his novel Spy’s Fate, a story about a Cuban ex-intelligence officer, Carlos Manuel, who returns to Cuba after years of service in Africa. Manuel returns to a very different Cuba than the one he left, observing the economic damage wrought by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and therefore its political and economic support. Correa portrays the history of the Cuban intelligence operations and depicts the Miami exile community in 1994, offering a fresh perspective on the long, tumultuous political relationship between the United States and Cuba.