This is an essay written by José R. Echevarría about Surrealism and the creative life. He believes that all creative acts are a protest against a “given” reality. He adds that dreams, delirium, fantasy, and memory are all means of accessing reality. Echevarría sees an upwelling of protest and liberation in the Surrealist group El Mirador Azul [Blue Lookout Point] as they immerse themselves in the search for a “super-reality that could enrich everyday reality.” In his opinion, the group should express Surrealist ideas by means of innovative works, updating the past and changing the present. Echevarría mentions the Surrealist manifestos written by André Bretón, and acknowledges Eugenio Fernández Granell’s influence and teaching on every member of the islander group. 

Eugenio Fernández Granell (1912–2001) left his home town of La Coruña in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He spent some time in the Dominican Republic where he had a life-changing experience in 1941—he met André Breton, the founder of the European Surrealist movement. Granell arrived in Puerto Rico in 1950, not long before he joined the faculty of the humanities (Department of Fine Arts) at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1956 he and some of his students formed the group, El Mirador Azul [The Blue Lookout Point], as a vehicle for promoting Surrealism, which at the time they saw as the only means of breaking completely with both the establishment and the avant-garde. Following Surrealist ideology, the group invented games and organized events. They gathered at different places to pose random questions that they answered with whatever occurred to them at the time as though the answers were supplied by the unconscious, in imitation of “le jeu du cadavre esquís…” [the game of the exquisite corpse].