Cuban Embassy as a proofreader and translator. While in Argentina, he forged friendships with Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Graziella Peyrou, and José Bianco. Bianco contributed the foreword to Piñera's collection of short stories, El que vino a salvarme (The One Who Came to Save Me), published by Editorial Sudamericana. Piñera also became friendly with Witold Gombrowicz and presided, with the help of Cuban writer Humberto Rodríguez Tomeu, the committee that translated Ferdydurke into Spanish. During this period, he wrote his plays Jesús and Falsa alarma (False Alarm). Piñera's first novel, La carne de René (René's Flesh), was published in 1952. Three years later, after a bitter dispute among the co-founders led to the closure of Orígenes, he founded his final magazine, Ciclón (Cyclone). He would also occasionally contribute to Sur, as well as to the French magazines Lettres Nouvelles and Les Temps modernes. In 1958, he left Argentina and settled permanently in Cuba. He arrived there shortly before the Cuban Revolution and contributed to the newspaper Revolución and its supplement Lunes de Revolución. In 1960, he staged Electra Garrigó once again and published his complete plays. In 1968, he received Premio Casa de las Américas for the play Dos viejos pánicos (Two Old Panics), which would not be performed in Cuba until the 1990s. Beginning in 1971, Piñera was ostracized by the Cuban government and literary establishment because of his sharply divergent ideological beliefs and his homosexuality. He died on October 18, 1979, and his remains were buried in his native Cárdenas. Further reading Anderson, Thomas F. Everything in its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. Mea Cuba. In Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff (eds.) The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Duke University Press (2004). Chichester, Ana Garcia. "Virgilio Piñera and the Formulation of a National Literature." CR: The New Centennial Review, 2.2 (2002): 231-251. Jambrina, Jesús. "Virgilio Piñera: poesía, nación y diferencias". Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2012 López Cruz, Humberto, ed. Virgilio Piñera: el artificio del miedo. Madrid: Hispano Cubana, 2012. Molinero, Rita (ed). Virgilio Piñera: la memoria del cuerpo. Editorial Plaza Mayor, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2002. Rosario, Felix M. “Natural Traps in “La isla en peso” by Virgilio Piñera: Towards a Narrative of the Persecution of Cuban History-Hysteria”. Visitas al patio: Revista del Programa de Lingüística y Literatura, vol. 0, no. 14, 2019,