Delia Fiallo

Delia Fiallo (4 July 1924 – 29 June 2021) was a Cuban author and screenwriter who lived in Miami, Florida. She was one of the most distinguished representatives of the contemporary romance novel, dabbling in various genres which appeared in her literary output.

Due to the contributions she made to the rise of the melodrama genre in the late 1970s and mid–1980s, she is considered to be the "mother of the Latin American telenovela". By the late 1980s, her shows had over 100 millions viewers combined. Fiallo studied philosophy at the University of Havana, graduating in 1948. She began writing radionovelas in Havana in 1949, making her first adaptation to a telenovela with Soraya, which was released in Cuba in 1957. She left the country, together with her family, in 1966, for exile in Miami, where she would write most of her novels.

She lived for a time in Venezuela, to supervise productions of her works by Venevisión and later Radio Caracas Televisión. Thanks to her compatriot Enrique Cuscó, she was able to contact the owners of the former, who broadcast her first telenovela in that country, 1967's Lucecita.Fiallo had not written an original telenovela since Cristal in 1985, since the last project she worked on, La Felicidad, was never completed and she decided to retire. At that time, she sold the rights to her works to Televisa. Their adaptations, as she had declared on several occasions, she had not liked.