The International Gramsci Society has lost one of its founding members: José Aricó, died in Buenos Aires in August 1991. Aricó widely known work attracted the admiration and appreciation not only of Gramsci scholars but also of everyone with an interest in Latin American political thought and practice. His contributions greatly enriched the development of Marxist democratic politics in the sub-continent. He will be remembered for his valuable published work as well as for his organizational skills, his initiatives and above all for the selfless help and friendship he extended to his colleagues and students. In some of his recent work, Aricó demonstrated why and how Gramsci's ideas continue to play a significant role in the current political and cultural scene. Of special importance in this regard is his book, La cola del diablo. Itinerario de Gramsci in America Latina (Buenos Aires: Puntosur editores, 1988).
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Until his death on 29 April 1991, Gustavo Trombetti was one of the very few[!]and certainly the most important[!]living links with Antonio Gramsci. Trombetti was born in Bologna in 1905 and at the age of fifteen, when he had his first job as a waiter, he joined the Socialist Youth Federation. In 1921 he became a member of the Communist Party and nine years later secretary of its Bologna section. Clandestine party duties required him to spend time abroad and when he returned to Italy in 1932 he was arrested, tried before the Fascist regime's Special Tribunal and sentenced to ten years in prison. While he was serving his sentence at Turi di Bari, the prison authorities asked him to assist Gramsci who was in extremely poor health. For nine months Trombetti and Gramsci shared a cell at the Turi prison. When Gramsci was told to pack his belongings on the eve of his transfer to the Cusumano clinic in Formia on 19 November 1933, Trombetti surreptitiously moved Gramsci's notebooks from the prison storeroom and slipped them into the trunk containing the clothes and other personal items that Gramsci was allowed to take out of prison with him when he departed for Formia. That was the last time Trombetti [END PAGE 42] and Gramsci saw one another. Trombetti left prison following the amnesty of 1934 and he immediately resumed his political activity. As a communist partisan he participated in the Italian war of liberation. After the war he administered the co-operative movement in Bologna. His accounts of Gramsci's life in prison have shed important light on the material conditions and circumstances within which the prison notebooks were composed.