UNEAC/Ediciones Unión (cover designer: Francisco Masvidal, editor: Reynaldo González, author: José Rodríguez Feo), "Mi correspondencia con Lezama Lima," 1989.

Mi correspondencia con Lezama Lima (My Correspondence with Lezama Lima) is an epistolary memoir by José Rodríguez Feo documenting his decades-long friendship and intellectual partnership with José Lezama Lima, Cuba's most celebrated baroque poet and novelist, published by Ediciones Unión in 1989. The book presents letters exchanged during the founding and operation of Orígenes (1944-1956), one of Latin America's most important literary journals, offering intimate insights into Cuban literary life during a transformative period.

Cover designer Francisco Masvidal creates an elegant composition on a rich teal-blue background featuring overlapping cream-colored envelopes with red-and-blue airmail striping, topped by a vintage marbled fountain pen with a gold nib. Handwritten script reading "José Rodríguez Feo" appears on the envelopes, emphasizing the personal, epistolary nature of the work. The decorative spiral binding motif appears at the top as a graphic element. The design captures both the materiality of letter-writing—the physical pen, paper, and envelopes—and the international dimension suggested by the airmail striping, reflecting how these letters sustained an intellectual dialogue across distances and decades.

The book opens with "Primera carta de un joven burgués" (First Letter of a Young Bourgeois), dated Sunday, October 21, 1945, written from Central America—then "Free America"—and addressed to the Fernández Casas family, of which Rodríguez Feo's mother was a member. The letter reveals the tensions of a young man from the haute bourgeoisie attempting to navigate between his privileged background and his literary and intellectual ambitions. At 25 years old, days spent in the countryside "could only be extremely pleasant," yet the young man perceived them through a lens shaped by his reading and cultural aspirations, from observing workers to witnessing baseball games in small-town Contramaestre.

The section "Encuentro con el poeta y aparición de Orígenes" (Meeting the Poet and the Appearance of Orígenes) describes a winter day in 1944 when Lezama and Rodríguez Feo sat on a bench in Martí Park in the heart of Havana, conversing, when it occurred to Rodríguez Feo to propose publishing a literary magazine. They had met weeks earlier in painter Mariano Rodríguez's studio at 360 Empedrado Street in Old Havana, where they gathered every Sunday to contemplate Mariano's paintings and discuss literature.

The back cover explains: "The creative friendship of José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo is reflected in this dazzling epistolary, written when both were protagonists of an intellectual adventure, the journal Orígenes. From a plane of intimacy never before achieved, we come to know the psychological complexities of the author of Paradiso. Lezama Lima and Rodríguez Feo learned that distance gave another path for mutual knowledge. Whoever now benefits is the reader, since this book constitutes a possibility to approach the intimacy of two important names in Spanish American letters and the era when both were uncovering the permanent dazzlement of literature."

José Rodríguez Feo (1920-1993) was a crucial figure in Cuban letters, co-founding Orígenes with Lezama Lima using his family's financial resources while maintaining editorial independence. Their eventual split led to Rodríguez Feo founding the competing journal Ciclón (1955-1959). This correspondence, published just before the Special Period following the Soviet collapse, represents an important documentary record of Cuba's literary golden age and the complex personal dynamics behind one of Latin America's most influential literary movements.