NEW YORK (AP) -- Justo Rodriguez Santos, a poet who became disenchanted with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and exiled himself from his native Cuba before becoming an advertising executive in the United States, died April 7. He was 83.
Rodriguez Santos was a member of Origenes, a group of painters and writers founded in the 1930s and linked to U.S. poet Wallace Stevens.
In 1959, after the Cuban revolution, Rodriguez Santos wanted to stay in Cuba. His wife and children left in 1963, and he asked to leave four years later. Instead, he was sent to work on a tobacco farm and his books were removed from libraries. He was banned from the Cuban Writers Union.
He was allowed to leave in 1968. He settled in New York and was hired as director of advertising for Goya Foods in Secaucus, N.J., in 1972.
Rodriguez Santos' books of poetry include ``La Belleza Que el Cielo No Amortaja'' (``The Beauty the Sky Will Not Shroud,'' 1950) and ``Las Operas del Sueno'' (``Dream Operas,'' 1989). He also wrote ``The Moncada Epic: Poetry of History'' (1963), a nonfiction account of the Cuban revolution.
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