Héctor Zumbado

In 2000, he was the first person to be awarded the Cuban National Humor Award (Premio Nacional de Humorismo) (3).

In the year 2000, H. Zumbado was awarded the National Humor Award (Premio Nacional de Humorismo) of Cuba. Zumbado was the first to be given the award, since that was its first edition (3).

Between 1986 and 1988 H. Zumbado worked as chief of the humor page of Bohemia, and had some collaborations, in 1987, with the Cuban radio station Radio Rebelde (3). In 1988, he started working as chief editor of the Cuban tourism magazine Sol y Son.

The book ¡Esto le zumba! was published in 1981. The content of the book is twenty-five short stories.

He has published: Limonada (Lemonade), 1978; Amor a primer añejo, 1980; Riflexiones (a portmanteau word that could be translated as Riflections), 1980; Prosas en ajiaco (Proses on pottage), 1984; El American Way (The American Way), 1981; ¡Esto le zumba!, 1981; and Kitsch, Kitsch, ¡BANG, BANG!, 1988. He has written for several Cuban and foreign press publications, like Juventud Rebelde and the magazine Bohemia.

The articles were compiled in the book Limonada, published in 1978, by the editorial Letras Cubanas.

Later on, between 1971 and 1973, Zumbado was a chief editor at the magazine Cuba, and at La hiena triste (The sad hyena), a publication of the UNEAC (Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba) (3). Then he worked for the Institute of the Domestic Demand as an exportable funds publicity and promotion adviser of the integral promotion group (EMPI), where he worked together with his wife, Mabel (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 236).

Limonada (Lemonade, in English) is a series of short articles of manners, written by H. Zumbado for the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde. There were about forty published from May 1969 to March 1971, mostly on Sundays. (Limonada, p. 9).

In 1963 he wrote several stories for the magazine Bohemia, which was his initiation in literature. Between that year and 1967 he published about fifteen stories, in a humorous style and mood. Due to this, he was asked to work with La Chicharra, a humor publication of Juventud Rebelde. He accepted because, as he states, he wished to work as a writer (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 248). In La Chicharra he wrote the section Limonada (Lemonade), that would later be published in the newspaper on Sundays, between 1969 and 1970, to be compiled later in a book in 1978.

According to the author, the book is about all the stories that he had written in the last twenty years; from El hombre del teléfono (The man of the phone), written in February, 1963, to La croqueta (The croquette), written in early March, 1981 (¡Esto le zumba!, p. 7).

Between 1956 and 1961 he was a writer of publicity texts for tourism agencies (3). That was his job by 1959 with the advent of the Cuban Revolution. In 1961 he was appointed as a publicity chief at INIT (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 236), and then worked as a researcher of the demand, in a research department of the Ministry of Industries, until 1963 (3), when, he would start doing the same work for the Ministry of the Food Industry. That was up to 1967, when he moved to Juventud Rebelde.

He went to Haiti, in 1953 (3) and worked as an auditor for the electric company at Port-au-Prince. In his own words: "they were looking for a young person who could speak French and knew about accounting and I took the chance, though the one thing I had to fulfill the requirements was my youth, since I had no knowledge of French or accounting." (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 235).

From 1953 to 1956 (3), Zumbado worked at a North American Insurance company, as an archivist, and was fired after straying the policy of a Gómez Mena family aristocrat's jewels (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 235). He has also worked as an office systems seller (Prosas en Ajiaco, p. 235).

From 1948 to 1950, Zumbado resided in the United States (3) where he studied for the bachelor degree in the early 1950s. During that time, he wrote some works for a publication in English language. He took a commercial career at a university in Kentucky, which he left unfinished, because of, as he stated, hating numbers (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 236).

Héctor Zumbado Argueta (19 March 1932 – 6 June 2016), also known as H. Zumbado, was a Cuban writer, journalist, critic, humorist, and essayist. In his words, "humor is a weapon, because it criticizes and exposes at the same time, and does so with a smile. Then that who is targeted cannot get too angry."

Héctor Zumbado was born in the zone of Vedado, at Havana, Cuba, in 1932. His mother was born in Nicaragua, and his father was from Costa Rica. They met in Madrid, and married in New York City. In the decade of the 1930s, his father, who worked for a transnational company, was moved to the company's office in Havana (Prosas en ajiaco, p. 236).