Gastón Baquero

Native of Banes, he was an important Cuban writer and poet of the twentieth century, who after the Cuban revolution lived in exile in Spain.

Baquero was born in Banes, a town belonging to the former province of Oriente, an area that today is part of the province of Holguín. He studied Agronomy, but never practiced the profession: he preferred to devote himself to literary and journalistic activities.

In the 1940s he became linked with the avant-garde group of poets and intellectuals that took its name from the magazine Orígenes (1944-1956), founded and directed by José Lezama Lima and in which, among others, Eliseo Diego, Virgilio Piñera and Cintio Vitier collaborated. Baquero also collaborated in the creation of the literary magazines Verbum (1937), Espuela de plata (1939-1941) and Clavileño (1942-1944).

The publication of Poemas, in 1942, followed the same year by Saúl sobre su espada, immediately placed him in the group of key poets of Cuban literature. In those years his main field of action is journalism, in which he excels. He becomes editor-in-chief of the influential and conservative Diario de la Marina. In the following decade he obtains official positions—he becomes connected with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista—and practically stops writing poetry, although his journalistic reviews—political, cultural and literary—are received with great acclaim and solidify his reputation as an eminent intellectual.

"They are the years of the distinguished and conservative man, of the refined bon vivant who has a chauffeur and official positions, and who continues to carry his intimate homosexuality with the discretion that he always carried it with," writes Luis Antonio de Villena in Gastón Baquero, magias de verso y cultura.

Opposed to Fidel Castro's revolution, he is forced to leave the country: escorted by three ambassadors accredited in La Habana, he takes a flight bound for Madrid, where the regime of Francisco Franco receives him and provides him with employment. He worked at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, the Escuela de Periodismo and Radio Exterior de España. At the same time, he wrote essays and literary articles for various publications, mainly for the magazine Mundo Hispánico.

Exile transforms Baquero, who in Cuba was an intellectual figure of powerful influence, into a gray and isolated man, ignored by his Spanish contemporaries and erased by Castro's government from Cuban intellectual history. But it is in exile that Baquero returns to poetry. Poemas escritos en España appears in 1960 and in 1966 Memorial de un testigo is published, one of his most acclaimed books. In 1984 Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose publishes in Madrid (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana) his complete poems up to that moment under the title Magias e invenciones. From then on, young poets and literature students seek his company and pay him tributes, to which Baquero reacts with his characteristic modesty.

In 1988 he was a candidate for the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras and in 1992, finalist for the Premio Nacional de Literatura in the Poetry category for his work Poemas invisibles. That year he also receives the tribute of the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares and is proposed for the Premio Reina Sofía. He participates, together with Octavio Paz and Luis Alberto de Cuenca, in poetry reading sessions at the Palacio Real. In 1993 the Cátedra Poética Fray Luis de León of the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca celebrates a week of tribute to his work and the following year collects in a volume, Celebración de la existencia, the contributions of the participants. In 1994, for the first time since 1959, a lecture on his poetic work is offered at the Universidad de La Habana, and in 2001 the publication of a poetic anthology is permitted, La patria sonora de los frutos (Editorial Letras cubanas), edited by Efraín Rodríguez Santana. In May 1997 the Círculo de Bellas Artes, the Residencia de Estudiantes and Radio Nacional de España convene a tribute to Baquero, a gesture that perhaps would have been the beginning of the recognition that he so deserved. But Baquero had already entered the hospital where he would die on May 15 of a cerebral infarction.

Baquero maintained until his death a rejection of Fidel Castro's government. However, Baquero desired the cultural union of the two Cubas (the one inside and the one outside) with the intellectual generosity that characterized him. In the dedication of his last book he wrote: "The common pride in our poetry of old, written in or far from Cuba, is nourished each day at least in me, by the poetry that those make today—and will continue to make tomorrow and always!—who live in Cuba as well as those who live outside of it. There are wonderful young people on both shores. Blessed be they! Nothing can dry up the tree of poetry."

Works
Poemas (La Habana, 1942)
Saúl sobre su espada (La Habana, 1942)
Ensayos' (La Habana, 1948)
Poemas escritos en España (Madrid, 1960)
Escritores hispanoamericanos de hoy' (Madrid, 1961)
Memorial de un testigo (Madrid, 1966)
La evolución del marxismo en Hispanoamérica (Madrid, 1966)
Darío, Cernuda y otros temas poéticos (Madrid, 1969)
Magias e invenciones (Madrid, 1984), complete poems to date, in charge of Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose
Poemas invisibles (Madrid, 1991)
Indios, blancos y negros en el caldero de América (Madrid, 1991)
Acercamiento a Dulce María Loynaz (Madrid, 1993)
La fuente inagotable (Valencia, 1995).*Poesía (Salamanca, 1995)
Ensayo (Salamanca, 1995)
Poesía completa (Editorial Verbum, 1998), collected by Cuban poet and editor Pío Serrano
The Angel of Rain. Poems by Gastón Baquero (Eastern Washington University Press, 2006), translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White
Geografía literaria. 1945-1996: crónicas y ensayos (Madrid, 2007), edition by Cuban-British writer and journalist Alberto Díaz-Díaz