Early life and education

Carpentier was born on December 26, 1904 in Lausanne, Switzerland, to Jorge Julián Carpentier, a French architect, and Lina Valmont, a Russian language teacher. For a long time it was believed that he was born in Havana, where his family moved immediately after his birth; however, following Carpentier's death, his birth certificate was found in Switzerland.

In 1912, Alejo and his family moved from Cuba to Paris. He also spoke French and as an adolescent, he read Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. In 1921, Carpentier attended the School of Architecture of the University of Havana. When he was 18, his parents' marriage broke up and his father abandoned the family. The following year, Carpentier left his studies and tried to find work to support his mother. He turned to journalism, working for the Cuban newspapers Carteles and Social. He also studied music.

Cuba and exile in France

In 1921, while studying in Havana, Carpentier became a cultural journalist, writing mostly about avant-garde developments in the arts, particularly music." He contributed columns to La Discusión, a daily journal from Havana. His journalistic work, which was considered leftist, helped establish the Cuban Communist Party.During 1923 and 1924 he continued to work as a columnist and also edited musical and theatre reviews for La Discusión and El Heraldo de Cuba. In 1927, with the help of Jorge Mañach, Juan Marinello, Francisco Ichaso, and Martí Casanovas, he became a founding member of Revista de Avance, a magazine devoted to nationalism, radicalism and new ideas in the arts. The first issue appeared on March 15, 1927; it lasted until September 15, 1930, and became the "voice of the vanguard" and the primary voice of expression of the Cuban movement. Because of his involvement in such projects, Carpentier was often suspected of having subversive and ultramodern cultural ideas. Carpentier was arrested in 1927 for opposing Gerardo Machado y Morales dictatorship and had signed a democratic and anti-imperialist manifesto against Machado's regime and, as a result, spent forty days in jail. During this brief period in jail he started working on his first novel, Ecué-Yamba-O, an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor of the island. (The book was eventually completed in 1933.) After his release, he escaped Cuba with the help of journalist Robert Desnos who lent him his passport and papers. Carpentier decided on a voluntary exile to France and arrived in Paris in 1928; he remained there until 1939, when he returned to Havana. When he left Cuba, he was fortunate enough to avoid the political conflicts which had occurred during the 1930s. During this time certain positions were unacceptable to the authorities and Cuban intellectuals were forced to define their political position and for these and other political reasons he decided to leave.

During this time abroad, his disconnection from Cuba and the interaction with different groups of intellectuals and artists in Paris helped with his ‘critical vision’. Carpentier felt that it was important for him to remain outside of the influences of movements because he believed in maintaining a “balance against the insularity of his homeland”. Upon arriving in Paris he immediately began working on poems and editorials in Parisian and Cuban magazines. Contributions to the Parisian Journal such as the short story "Cahiers du Sud" (1933), in French, were an effort to acquire European readers as a way to improve his recognition. He also contributed to the magazines Documents and L’Intransigeant. Carpentier was familiar with the activities of the Comité de Jeunes Revolutionnaires Cubains, a group of exiled Cuban leftists who had published La Terreur á Cuba, a brochure against the Machado government. He documented the latest news about this group and their activities in his book Homenaje a nuestros amigos de Paris. It was also during this time that, with the help of Robert Desnos, Carpentier became part of the surrealist movement which became a positive influence in his work. While in France, Carpentier also founded a literary magazine called Imán in 1931, for which he became editor-in-chief. Most of the authors who worked with him in La Revolution Surrealiste also contributed works in Imán under the title “Conocimiento de America”. Carpentier contributed the short story Histoire de Lunes (1933); it was experimental for its time as it contained elements of fantasy and folklore characterized as magical reality.

Surrealism helped Carpentier to see contexts and aspects, especially those of American life, which he did not see before and after working among the leading artistic figures for some time, Carpentier did not feel overly enthusiastic about his work within surrealism and had felt that his “surrealist attempts ha[d] been in vain” describing his frustration, as he felt he had “nothing to add to this movement in France".

As Carpentier became acquainted with those among the arts community he had several encounters to meet other famous authors such as Pablo Neruda, who had sent him a draft of his book “Residencia el la Tierra” to review; Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose work on pre-Columbian mythology influenced his writing; and Pablo Picasso, an introduction made possible through Carpentier's connection with friends in the arts.

Throughout his time in France Carpentier was occupied with not only literary works, but also other projects that kept him engaged within the arts. He collaborated with French composer Marins François Gaillard on the musical Yamba-O, “a burlesque tragedy”, that was presented in the Théâtre Beriza in Paris (1928); and with composer Amadeo Roldán helped organize the Cuban premieres of works by Stravinsky and Poulenc. In film, Carpentier wrote text and edited music for the French documentary Le Vaudou. He continued to earn his living by writing on contemporary culture, both in French and Spanish. He also began working for a French radio station as a sound-technician and producer. From 1932 until 1939 Carpentier worked on several projects produced by Foniric Studios. He directed the production of Le Livre de Christophe Colomb and collaborated with Desnos on arranging readings of Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Walt Whitman’s Salute to the World. Although abroad, Carpentier still maintained contact with Cuba by sending articles and poems to contribute to Havana publications such as Ensayos Convergentes.

When the Machado regime came to an end in 1933, Carpentier decided to make plans to return to his native land to visit, and in 1936 he made the trip back to Cuba. The time he had spent in Paris for over eleven years had enriched and "oriented his expressive abilities". Carpentier himself inidicated that he was tiring of Paris, and "...in 1939 without any other reason than the nostalgia of Cuba, I vacated my apartment and started the return to La Havana".

Return to Cuba and years in Venezuela

Carpentier returned to Cuba and continued to work as a journalist at the outbreak of World War II. He worked on a history of Cuban music, eventually published in 1946 as La música en Cuba. He also wrote short stories which were later collected in The War of Time (1958). While in Cuba, Carpentier attended a santería ceremony that was to further deepen his interest in Afro-Cubanism.

In 1943, accompanied by French theatrical director Louis Jouvet, Carpentier made a crucial trip to Haiti, during which he visited the fortress of the Citadelle Laferrière and the Palace of Sans-Souci, both built by the black king Henri Christophe. This trip, along with readings from Oswald Spengler's cyclical interpretation of history, provided the inspiration for his second novel, El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of this World) (1949).

In 1945, Carpentier moved to Caracas. From 1945 to 1959 he lived in Venezuela, which is the inspiration for the unnamed South American country in which much of his novel The Lost Steps takes place. In 1949, he finished his novel The Kingdom of this World. This novel has a prologue that "outlines Carpentier's faith in the destiny of Latin America and the aesthetic implications of its peculiar cultural heritage."

Later life

Carpentier returned to Cuba after Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in 1959. He worked for the State Publishing House while he completed the baroque-style book, El Siglo de las Luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) (1962). This novel discusses the advent of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution in the New World. It has twin leitmotifs of the printing press and the guillotine and can be read as a "meditation on the dangers inherent in all revolutions as they begin to confront the temptations of dictatorship." After reading the book, Gabriel García Márquez is said to have discarded the first draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude and begun again from scratch.