Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces

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Poet and playwright. One of the great Cuban dramatic authors of the nineteenth century. He is considered the finest comic playwright of the period. A lyric poet of very diverse and opposing judgments, despite his precarious health he was a tireless worker and promoter of letters.

Together with José Jacinto Milanés and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Luaces makes up the triad of romantic playwrights in Cuban theatrical and literary history, although romanticism is not expressed in him in a full manner, since he belongs to the second romantic generation, that which links neoclassical poetry with modernist poetry of Parnassian character. He was a student of Domingo Delmonte and a supporter of Cuban independence.

He studied Latin in Puerto Príncipe, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Colegio Seminario de San Carlos in La Habana in 1844 and achieved the degree of Bachelor of Law from the Real Universidad de La Habana in 1848.

Some of His Works
Nature
Last Love
The Last Day of Babylon
Fall of Missolonghi
The Light
The Death of the Bacchante
Your Fault
Childhood Memories
Fishing
The Forbidden Fruit

He frequented the literary and scientific salon at the house of naturalist Don Felipe Poey Aloy, where he made known his first poetic compositions and translations from French.

From 1849 on, he collaborated in various literary journals, such as Brisas de Cuba, Floresta Cubana, Revista de La Habana, among others, and in the newspapers El Regañón, Prensa de la Habana and La Aurora.

In 1856, he edited the literary newspaper La Piragua together with his friend José Fornaris, a notable figure of siboneyist poetry, which Luaces also cultivated. In 1857, he published a volume of his poems and, in 1859, he organized and published, together with Fornaris, the anthology Cuba poética, a selection of works by Cuban poets from Manuel de Zequeira to the present.

In this stage, his dramatic production began. He wrote El mendigo rojo (1859), although it was published in 1866; Aristodemo, published in 1867; Arturo de Osberg, El fantasmón de Aravaca, El becerro de oro, A tigre, zorra y bulldog, La escuela de los parientes, El conde y el capitán, Una hora en la vida de un calavera. His known theatrical work consists of five comedies, three dramas, one tragedy and a sainete. During the author's lifetime only this last one (Una hora en la vida de un calavera) managed to reach the stage (Teatro Tacón, 1865). In 1872, Baltasar Torrecillas' dramatic company would premiere the comedy El becerro de oro in the same place.

Although, like some of his contemporaries, he made use of parable, employing themes and characters from other times and cultures, to develop his critical thinking about Cuban society and, in particular, about colonial politics, the frequent presence in his work of the theme of freedom, rural traditions, creole motifs and the link with the siboneyist movement attracted the attention of colonial power and censorship was particularly alert with respect to his work.

On the other hand, critics, who held him in high esteem as a poet, only valued in his theater the serious aspect, while they undervalued his comedies which, today, instead, are appreciated as the most interesting area of his dramatic work.

These deal with domestic and local life from an amusing and sharp critical perspective. Luaces reflects on the construction of identities, the processes that erode the national being when he mocks the eagerness of his contemporaries to imitate foreign patterns, their yearning for noble titles and their obsessions with Italian opera.

With his examination of false values and his pedantic character, he becomes a precursor of the parodic world that Cuban bufos would later develop.

Scholars of his theater agree in highlighting in this part of his production his careful verse, the grace of his dialogues, the creation of characters and atmospheres with marked national color.

Curiously, during the second half of the twentieth century, he was the most performed playwright in the country among all native authors corresponding to the nineteenth century. A good part of his theater reached the stage. This is the case of El becerro de oro (Teatro Estudio, 1967), El fantasmón de Aravaca (Centro Dramático de Cienfuegos, 1970), A tigre, zorra y bulldog (Teatro Rita Montaner, 1984), La escuela de los parientes (Teatro Estudio, 1985) and Aristodemo (Teatro Estudio, 1990).

He was among the cultivators of siboneyism and creolism, because above all he became a devoted singer of the land that saw him born.

"Una hora en la vida de un calavera" was the only one of his theatrical works that came to be premiered during the author's lifetime.

Source: EnCaribe.org