Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés

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Cuban poet, part of the poetic triad par excellence of the first Cuban romanticism, alongside José María Heredia and José Jacinto Milanés. Of great popular ascendance and great improviser, a legendary figure in Cuban culture, he is the most published poet of the Island in the nineteenth century.

Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés was born in Havana on the Habanera street of Bernaza. His father, Diego Ferrer Matoso, a barber, was a black Cuban. His mother, Concepción Vázquez, a Spanish dancer from Burgos, left him after only a few days of birth at the Casa Cuna or Real Casa de Beneficencia y Maternidad de La Habana. The name Gabriel de la Concepción is said to have been written on a note that accompanied the abandoned baby. As with the rest of the children who were baptized under such conditions, he was given the surname "Valdés" there, in honor of Bishop Valdés, founder of the Casa Cuna. In the baptismal record the name of the captain of Militias D. Joaquín de Cárdenas appears as godfather, although it seems that in reality it was Plácido Fuentes (from where, evidently, he took the pseudonym by which he is identified). His father took him out of the Casa Cuna and shortly after entrusted him to his paternal grandmother for his upbringing.

From his earliest childhood he knew poverty, aggravated by his condition as a mulatto in the midst of a society where the slavery of blacks constituted the basis of production and imposed an entire universe of prejudices, devaluations, and outrages.

Although he did not have a continuous and stable education, he attended some schools during his childhood (the Colegio de Belén, the school El Ángel). In 1821 he was forced to start working as a carpenter's apprentice and that same year he entered as a student in the workshop of Vicente Escobar y Flores, a prestigious figure in the plastic arts of the time, and under his patronage he learned drawing and calligraphy. His first poem "Una hermosa" dates from this time.

In 1823, two years later, he began working as an apprentice typographer at the printing house of José Severino Boloña and there his passion for poetic word was unleashed, but soon he had to resign, pressed by material need, to devote himself to carving tortoiseshell combs, a much more lucrative trade.

In 1826, he moved to the city of Matanzas accompanied by his master of peinetary, Don Nicolás Bota, who had opened his workshop on Jovellanos street where he remained until 1832.

He returned to Havana, following the success of his drawings and works with tortoiseshell, already with a reputation as a versifier and composer of letters for hire. He worked in several silversmith shops and began his friendship with Ramón Vélez Herrera, Ignacio Valdés Machuca and other intellectuals. From this moment on, and with a failed attempt to establish himself in Las Villas, he alternated his stays between Matanzas and the capital.

During one of his seasons in Matanzas, he was visited by José María Heredia, who is said to have invited Plácido to go with him to Mexico – this fact largely discredits an entire current of critical judgments that opposed them.

Of Plácido's romantic adventures, it is known that he never married Fela, a freedwoman, who died during their engagement in the midst of the cholera epidemic in Havana. A few years later, in 1836, he married Celia –thus known through his poems– which proved unsuccessful and, therefore, brief. Finally, he married in 1842 María Gil Morales.

In 1834 he participated in a poetry contest in honor of Francisco Martínez de la Rosa and won with "La Siempreviva".

In Matanzas, in mid-1836, he became known as an improviser. He collaborated in various periodical publications such as the Matanzas publications La Aurora and El Pasatiempo, the Havana publications La Cartera Cubana and Noticioso y Lucero, the Villa Clara publication El Eco de Villaclara and El Fénix de Sancti Spíritus. His works were very popular and were published in Mexico, the USA and Europe since the first edition of his Poesías appeared in 1838 in Matanzas.

In 1841 the booklet of poems El veguero was published in a Matanzas edition, which the following year had a second edition. On a trip to Villa Clara in 1843, during which he is known to have been in Sagua la Grande, Remedios and Cienfuegos, he was arrested for six months in the Trinidad jail, accused of being a conspirator. As these charges could not be proven, he was released. That same year in 1843 he published his legend El hijo de maldición in a booklet.

After the event that occurred in Trinidad he returned to Matanzas to devote himself to his literary work, but was again imprisoned at the end of January 1844, when he was 34 years old. He was included in the events sadly known as "La represión de La Escalera" unleashed by the Captain General of the Island Leopoldo O'Donnell to make an example to the masses before the danger of a slave rebellion in the way it occurred in Haiti. Although sufficient evidence did not appear to demonstrate the existence of this conspiracy, and Plácido's presence in it, he was accused of being one of its leaders. He was held in the small fortress "La Vigía", located in Matanzas Bay, and from there he was transferred to the Hospital Santa Isabel, in Versailles, until the day of his execution.

On June 28, 1844 he was shot before thousands of spectators. In prison he composed "Plegaria a Dios", "Despedida" and "A mi lira".

Plácido wrote poems of a popular character and for family and friends' celebrations, as well as to satisfy commissions; there were also many improvisations to which he devoted himself. Some critics have characterized these works as minor from an artistic point of view, in line with the standards that had been set for the literary evaluation of the period.

Despite the controversy that the critical evaluation of this author has always aroused, there were many of Plácido's poems that received praise from his contemporaries and from later poets. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, severe, conservative, but lucid scholar of Spanish poetry, did not hesitate to praise him.

José Martí made evident in his notes the intention of writing a book about Plácido.

Plácido was a victim of the white society of his time. With great poetic talent, he could not have either literary formation, nor even sufficient general instruction. In addition to performing various jobs, he had to sell his compositions to survive. Hence many of his bad poems, or his tributes to queens and ladies of society.

Even Milanés, who was so sensitive to the poverty of others, reproached him for prostituting his talent. Despite these drawbacks, Plácido was the most published poet of the first Cuban romanticism (at least, eleven editions of his poems in the nineteenth century), and enjoyed great popularity among the popular sectors, especially those of blacks and free mulattoes.

Criticism has attributed to a good part of his work inaccuracies (limited vocabulary, repeated images, erroneous meaning of words, etc.), but it is undeniable that he had a great sense of poetic rhythm and great facility of versification. It has been said maliciously that he is an anthology poet, by the necessity of despising many of his works.

He was not only a skillful artisan with tortoiseshell, Plácido was also with the word, and this is demonstrated by his poetry collections, from that first notebook published in 1838, to verses, such as those of "Plegaria a Dios", written during his imprisonment, while he denied legitimacy to the confession that the colonial regime imposed on him, obtained according to some, through torture, in which he supposedly implicated and compromised other Cubans of high culture such as José de la Luz y Caballero and the equally controversial Domingo del Monte.

Plácido's poetry can be catalogued in two large blocks: poems arising from his inspiration and those he made by commission. Among the various zones of Placidian poetry, we find:
1) Epic-historical poems, with American themes such as "Jicotencal" or "Tlaxcala" and others inspired by literary works such as "La muerte de Gessler".
2) Poems that deal, in some way, with matters related to the Cuban situation, such as "Juramento", a youthful poem where he says he will dedicate his life to the struggle against slavery; "El cólera en La Habana", violent, moving, with a very rapid rhythm, which is linked to the treatment given at the time to the 1835 cholera epidemic (for example, by José Antonio Saco y López and Ramón de Palma); or "El eco de la gruta", a poem dedicated to Heredia, of which only fragments are preserved (he also wrote "La malva azul", on the occasion of the death of the great poet); in this zone can be included the poems he wrote when he was about to die, especially "Plegaria a Dios", in which he cries out his innocence.
3) Love poems, such as "A una ingrata" or "A mi amada".
4) Letrillas, anacreónticas, such as "La flor de la caña" or "La flor del café", light and fresh letrillas, with rural or peasant muses, humble women.
5) Satirical poetry, almost always against himself and his economic situation, as in "A mi cumpleaños", "Regálame un quitrín; dame dinero", "Un loco cuerdo"; the best example is "Mi casa", which not only demonstrates Plácido's facility for versification, but also indicates the terrible misery in which he lived.

Plácido did not possess the exaltation of Heredia, nor the soft melancholy of Milanés; his work is marked by simplicity and by a very Creole expression, in which Lezama recognizes "the jesting grace" that he brought to letters in the nineteenth-century origins of the construction of the Cuban.

Source: EnCaribe.org