Emiliano Florentino Morales Hernández

Writer, poet, researcher

Florentino was a gift from the Three Kings to his first-time parents: Eulogio and Irene. The birth took place on the Dagame farm, located in the Yaguaramas neighborhood, although the couple lived on another nearby rural property called Diego. The Morales family would be somewhat nomadic, later enlarged with the arrival of the little ones Isabel, José, Úrsula, and Rolando. In the biographical testimony that Florentino left near the end of his days to Doris Era and José Díaz Roque for the Ariel magazine, he recalled the journey that took them during his early childhood to the Matanzas towns of Calimete and Cantel.

By 1919 they were living in Yaguaramas, where the future writer remembered the teacher Tirso Giraud, a very thin professor whom the students would exasperate by stepping on his numerous corns. Two years later they settled on the La Angelina farm, near Matún, where Don Eulogio bought a sugar cane plantation that supplied its cane to the mills of the Cieneguita sugar central. During a composition class at the Matún school, at age 13, the muse of poetry visited him for the first time. Two beautiful camels one day/ in a beautiful meadow they met/ and one to the other mockingly would say:/ what a large mountain they gave you. At the end, the moral: In your sight, gentlemen, do not trust/ for no camel can see its own hump/ even though it measures two meters in size.

From the year 1922 he kept an indelible memory. His father brought him to Cienfuegos. El Terry announced the Festival of Cuban Song and Martí Park was full of fountains with colorful little fish. While in his countryside of reddish soils he read Verne and Edmundo de Amicis, he continued trying his luck with verses and fables, until seeing his name in print for the first time. It was 1924 when the Heraldo de Aguada published his sonnet Bolívar and showered him with praise, which later the author himself would know were undeserved. But he had ceased to be an unpublished adolescent bard. The family's economic wandering took them to the workers' village of the now-defunct Laberinto sugar mill, in the Abreus area. Trying to investigate and compose the history of the old sugar press became the initial approach to what would later be the passion of his life.

In 1927 the family migrated again. This time to the Cienaguita central, in the same Abreus region, where the young poet worked as a bookkeeper and paying cashier, while also serving as a sports correspondent for the newspaper La Correspondencia. The following year the factory stopped grinding forever and the protagonist of this story found employment at the Municipal Electoral Board. The weekly El Damujino, founded in Abreus in 1930, has him as the person responsible for its literary section. That same year he tried to come to Cienfuegos on the occasion of a visit by Granada poet Federico García Lorca, but the savings pooled with other boys of cultural interests were not enough to cover the trip.

Before moving permanently to Cienfuegos in 1933, he founded Génesis in Abreus, a tabloid of eight pages that only had six editions. Florentino's intellectual life in the city resembles a torrent that overflows the channel of this column. Upon arriving, he published the poetry collection Zigzag at the Bustamante print shop, assuming its costs. He would repeat the experience in 1953 with Caracol. From his position as vice president of the Athenaeum, he stands out as one of the main cultural promoters of Cienfuegos from the late 1930s onward.

In 1948 he crossed the boundaries of the Island for the first time. By that time he had already united his life with Elpidia's and enjoyed a comfortable economic position as a trusted man in the Castaño company. He traveled to Venezuela and went as far as the Colombian border. He set foot on the land of the old New Granada, to say he had also visited it, he would later add with a touch of humor. The decade of the '50s would take him through several Central American countries, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

From 1960 to 1979 he was dedicated to studying literary theory and immersing himself in national archives and libraries, from which he extracted 50,000 note cards on the history of Cienfuegos. On Friday, December 16, 1966, the Cuban Academy of the Language, then presided over by Hispanist José María Chacón y Calvo, granted him a seat as a Corresponding Member in a ceremony whose words of exultation were pronounced by poet Agustín Acosta.

He headed the literary section of El Damujino (Abreus, Cienfuegos, 1930-1931) and La Correspondencia (1958-1959), founded the Génesis magazine in 1932, was editor of the Cienfuegos Athenaeum magazine and secretary of that institution, and contributor to several national magazines, member of the National Union of Historians of Cuba (UNIHC), the Committee for Monumental and Environmental Development, and the Provincial Commission on History of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) of Cienfuegos.

He taught numerous courses and lectures, and the Provincial Culture Administration awarded him the Jagua prize for his sustained cultural work (1998).