Alfonso Hernández Catá

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Narrator, journalist, essayist and diplomat. One of the best Cuban writers of the first republican generation.

Son of a Spanish military officer and a Cuban woman, he was born in Aldeadávila de la Ribera, Salamanca, Spain, and after a few months began to reside with his family in Santiago de Cuba. At age 16, he entered the Military Orphans' School of Toledo, although shortly thereafter he moved to Madrid, where he began a life of literary bohemia. He was an apprentice cabinetmaker while studying languages, psychology and history, and translated books.

In 1905, at only 20 years of age, Hernández Catá was cited in the lyric anthology La corte de los poetas (Madrid, 1905). Two years later he settled in La Habana and began working as a tobacco factory reader as well as connecting with young Cuban intellectuals of the first republican generation. Among them was Jesús Castellanos, with whom he established a close relationship.

During the first decade of the century, Hernández Catá began working as a journalist for El Diario de la Marina and La Discusión and, later, was a contributor to Gráfico, El Fígaro and Social. Within his journalistic work stand out texts such as the series of fourteen articles published in 1921 under the title "Crónicas de Hernández Catá", motivated by the struggle of Moroccans in favor of their independence from Spanish rule. This attitude prompted the Spanish government to request his expulsion from Madrid.

In 1909 Hernández Catá entered the diplomatic service. He was consul in places such as El Havre (1909), Birmingham (1911), Santander (1913), Alicante (1914) and Madrid (1918-1925). Until 1933 Hernández Catá was in charge of affairs at the Cuban Legation in Lisboa, and after the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship he was appointed Ambassador of Cuba in Madrid. He was also minister in Latin American countries where he conducted notable cultural outreach work, for example in Panamá (1935), in Chile (1937) and in Brazil (1938), where he died in an aviation accident while flying over Botafogo Bay in Rio de Janeiro on November 8, 1940. After Hernández Catá's death, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and Austrian narrator Stefan Zweig, until then his friend and mentor, delivered respective funeral orations during a solemn session dedicated to his memory, sponsored by the Brazilian Commission for Intellectual Cooperation and the Brazilian-Cuban Institute of Culture.

In honor of Alfonso Hernández Catá, a national short story prize was established in Cuba bearing his name, which from the 1940s onward was won by the most notable Cuban narrators. Furthermore, between 1953 and 1954, eight volumes of a magazine titled Memoria de Hernández Catá were published, edited by Antonio Barreras.

In this publication, which gathered articles, commentaries, bibliographies, iconography and reproductions of Hernández Catá's work, the sustained epistolary exchange he maintained with intellectuals of his time was also documented, such as Mariano Aramburu, Jesús Castellanos, José Antonio Ramos, Max Henríquez Ureña and José María Chacón y Calvo. Likewise, Barreras reproduced the lecture titled "Cuba después de 1908", delivered by Hernández Catá at the Sociedad Libre de Estudios Americanistas.

Author also of poetic work, Hernández Catá published in 1931 his book Escala, which brings together a large part of his lyric production. Furthermore, he authored poems with insular themes, such as "La negra de siempre", composed as a rumba, and "Son", which was incorporated by Ramón Guirao in his Órbita de la poesía afrocubana of 1938. He wrote, together with his brother-in-law Alberto Insúa, some theatrical works such as the comedies El amor tardío (1913) and En familia (1914), set in Hispanic spaces. He was the author of the zarzuela Martierra (1928), with music by Jacinto Guerrero. His most notable scenic creation was Don Luis Mejía, written with Catalan poet Eduardo Marquina, in which they penetrate sharply into the psychology of the antagonist of Don Juan Tenorio.

Around the 1920s and 1930s, in the work of Hernández Catá there would be seen with increasing force an explicit interest in Cuban themes and in the sociopolitical problems of the neocolonial republic. This was a consequence not only of the radicalization taken by the political events of those years, but of the relationships he maintained with some intellectuals of the Grupo Minorista –such as Juan Marinello, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Jorge Mañach and Rubén Martínez Villena– as well as the publication in Cuba, from 1913 onward, of the works of José Martí. In relation to this last point, it is significant that that same year, in the newspaper El Fígaro, Hernández Catá wrote an article titled "La sombra de Martí", where he started from the contrast between Ariel and Caliban, as José Enrique Rodó had conceived it, to offer some considerations on Martí's poetry and the transcendence of his message. This would be the germ of some of his later books, such as Mitología de Martí, published in Madrid in 1929; as well as other actions to promote Martí's work, such as efforts to publish in Brazil a volume of Páginas escogidas de José Martí, which was accompanied by his own prologue in Portuguese.

Despite the versatility of his work, which moved through genres such as the essay, journalism, the zarzuela and theater, it was really the narrative genre that earned him the enormous recognition of his time, as well as the praise of the most prominent critics of Spain and Latin America. In that sense, he stands out for the awareness he had about the genre itself, within which he was a defender, above all, of the short novel. However, his best works were short stories, although in some of these techniques more proper to playwrights than to narrators have been noted, and in others a pronounced essayistic character. A writer of numerous tales and more than twenty novels, he was one of the most prolific Spanish American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907 Catá had published his first short novel, El pecado original, in El Cuento Semanal, of Madrid, and later, in that same city, his first book, Cuentos pasionales, with great success with critics and the public.

Beyond the distinction of identity elements regarding what is Cuban or Spanish, even when the stories are set in national spaces, in the short stories of Hernández Catá there is evident a concern for social contradictions and human conflicts in all their drama and universality. In that sense, his work represented a more cosmopolitan line, free from nativist or costumbrista ties, within Cuban narrative of this period. The convergence of modernist and naturalist traits in the work of Hernández Catá can be seen in the precious prose of strong sensual atmospheres and in the tendency toward a psychologism that explores universal humanity.

Hernández Catá's bookplate, which read "passionately toward death", in a certain way synthesizes his tragic feeling of life and art: in his works, sad endings of anguished, temperamental or hypersensitive characters frequently appear, which often lead to madness or total destruction. Some of his narratives are inspired by ethical poverty or events of the spirit, so that they are, for the most part, psychological cases bordering on the morbid and pathological. All this led to his work being studied in the volume Literatura y psiquiatría (1950), where Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera dedicates a chapter to examining several of Hernández Catá's short stories, described in these pages as "the modern literary figure who has most carefully speculated on his cases within clinical reality".

On the other hand, the interest in probing human behavior led Hernández Catá to venture into stories or tales of animals, through which different behaviors could be presented, and with which he also demonstrated his good command of dialogue. This tendency appears from his first book, with a story like "El milagro", and later is also seen in other better-achieved expressions such as the books Zoología pintoresca (1919) or La casa de las fieras (1922), to which belong stories like "Nupcial" and "Dos historias de tigres", which have been compared with those of Rudyard Kipling and Horacio Quiroga.

Among Hernández Catá's first books stand out Cuentos pasionales (1907), where the influence of Guy de Maupassant and other French narrators is perceived, and Los frutos ácidos (1915), which includes "Los muertos", a novella of somber atmosphere that exposes the transition toward death as liberation for a group of lepers, as well as "La piel", another novella that tells the story of the mulatto Eulogio Valdés, stalked and beaten by racial prejudices. Other of his best volumes are Los siete pecados (1920), distinguished by its confessional and melodramatic tone, by the indulgence in the morbid and by a fatalistic conception of existence. In El ángel de Sodoma (1928) he addresses the theme of male homosexuality. Mitología de Martí (1929) and Un cementerio en las Antillas (1933) are volumes where he penetrates the sociopolitical destiny of Cuba and denounces the tyrannical regime of Gerardo Machado. In Manicomio (1931) he offers a broad gallery of psychopathological problems; it is perhaps where the best short stories of Hernández Catá within the thematic profile of madness are found, such as "Los ojos" and "Los muebles".

One of the most anthologized short stories of Hernández Catá is "Don Cayetano el informal", due to the Cuban and Martí-related themes that characterize it. In his work also stand out short stories such as "La quinina", originally published in 1926 in the magazine Social under the title "Mandé quinina", in which many autobiographical elements are evident, especially those related to childhood memories around the beginning of the independence war of 1895. Another of his best short stories is "Los chinos", a hallucinatory narrative based on the use of Antillean, Spanish and Asian braziers in the expansion of the sugar industry following the First World War.

Hernández Catá died in an aviation accident while flying over Botafogo Bay in Rio de Janeiro on November 8, 1940.