José Angel Buesa

José Ángel Buesa, a neo-romantic writer, was in the mid-twentieth century "the most popular poet of Cuba". Harshly criticized in the following decades, his legacy is being revalued today.

He was a romantic poet with a clear tone of melancholy throughout his poetic work, which is primarily elegiac. He has been called the "poet in love."

He has been considered the most popular of the poets in Cuba of his era. His popularity was largely due to the clarity and profound sensitivity of his work. Many of his poems have been translated into English, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese. Many others have been set to music or recited on about 40 long-playing records.

He was also a novelist and writer of scripts for Cuban radio and television, and was also a director of celebrated radio programs at the stations RHC-Cadena Azul and CMQ, which no longer exist.

Buesa was born in Cruces, near Cienfuegos, Cuba. At age 7 he began to write his first verses. In his adolescence he moved to Cienfuegos to continue his studies at the Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas. The people, the sugarcane fields, and all of the Cienfuegos environment cast a spell on the poet's soul, who began to capture in his verses the magic of the landscape that surrounded him. While still young, he moved to Havana, where he joined the literary groups that existed at that time and began publishing his verses at age 22 (1932) with immense success.

After a first very productive period, Buesa was forced to abandon Cuba to begin a painful pilgrimage through Spain, the Canary Islands, El Salvador, and finally Santo Domingo. The last years of his life he spent in exile, and he dedicated himself to teaching, serving as a professor of literature at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in the Dominican Republic, where he died on August 14, 1982.

In the poem he dedicates to his mother, Buesa clearly reflects the suffering caused by having had to abandon his native land.

Buesa was a thin but athletic man, about 5'9" tall with very attractive features. He always had luck with women, but he was dominated by a need to suffer in his loves. He loved intensely, but for short periods.

When he arrived in Santo Domingo around 1974, he arrived single and married a Dominican woman of low education who perhaps was very useful to him at home, but who did not help him intellectually at all. He spent approximately 10 years in Santo Domingo before dying at age 72.

During that time he worked at Universidad Pedro Henríquez Ureña as Secretary of the Board of Directors and head of the advertising and creativity department. When the university closed the campus #1 where Buesa worked, he was left without a job.

A few years later, he died. Apparently he was buried in Santo Domingo for a few years, but a group of devotees of his poems from Puerto Rico came and managed, with the consent of his widow, to have his remains taken to Miami, where they are supposedly buried.

His main works are:
La fuga de las horas (1932), Misas paganas (1933), Babel (1936), Canto final (1936), Oasis, Hyacinthus, Prometeo, La Vejez de Don Juan, Odas por la Victoria and Muerte Diaria (all from 1943), Cantos de Proteo (1944), Lamentaciones de Proteo, Canciones de Adán (both from 1947), Poemas en la Arena, Alegría de Proteo (both from 1948), Nuevo Oasis and Poeta Enamorado (1949).

His book Oasis (1943) was reprinted more than 26 times, as was Nuevo Oasis. His books sold out as soon as they came out. It is said that one of his poems contained the first verses heard on Cuban television in the year 61.

Cataloged by some critics as a minor, affected, and facile poet, nevertheless it could be affirmed that no Cuban poet has better displayed American neo-romanticism.

Juan Nicolás Padrón, Cuban researcher, writer, and editor, who prepared the anthology Pasarás por mi vida, offers us the perspective of a misunderstood Buesa, and even one hidden from young generations.

"Poemas prohibidos was one of his books. It is a poetry that reinforced his youthful eroticism, but it was not only that; from the first reading I noticed that his poems possessed a special effect of communication linked to orality or the art of recitation. The messages were rebellious to morality, but they were wielded with a gallant tone that guaranteed seduction."

His devotees have called him the "poet in love" and considered him the most popular of the bards in Cuba of the 1940s and 1950s, and he was even awarded the National Literature Prize in 1938; on the contrary, detractors have called him a "minor poet," affected.

He is one of the authors with the most copies in the history of books in our country... By the late 1980s, José Ángel Buesa had not been published on the Island for more than twenty years and the Letras Cubanas Editorial proposed him to the Advisory Council; he was not accepted. I reread him and realized that an injustice had been committed; moreover, they forgot about an audience that openly demanded him and accessed him through "pirated" editions.

"When they called me in 1997 to correct that absence, I gladly made a rigorous selection. My prologue might seem somewhat disqualifying; however, it is the contrary. I tried to break a tradition of criticism. I do not consider Buesa to be a flawless poet, nor audacious in some stylistic resources that the avant-garde movements were working on; but he is a correct poet, and sometimes more than that, when it comes to the theme of erotic reverie and elegy."

He still enjoys popularity outside of Cuba today. Almost 65 thousand websites are dedicated to commenting on his life and reproducing his poems. What is happening on the Island?

It turns out to be curious. In the revolutionary period, after 1959, when the so-called neo-avant-gardes erupted, the public considerably expanded its capacity to assimilate different types of poetics and authors felt stimulated. From the late 1960s and throughout much of the 1970s, this path was exaggerated to a level of populism; bad colloquialism turned anything into a poem, and demands concentrated on political issues. Not a few poets of the 1980s rejected that line, and the public had also grown and was more culturally demanding.

"When erotic literature and love poetry began to be recovered around the 90s, Buesa's language was only assimilated by a captive reader who had disengaged from 'modern poetry'."

For some years now, an audience has been building that appreciates eroticism in literature, without barriers or classificatory prejudices. Although certain aspects of Buesa's facile language have fallen behind, universal and eternal matters are expressed in his poetics in a way that is increasingly accepted. There is a receptor that demands the updating of erotic discourse, and although many may not share my opinion, I include Buesa among the best Cuban references for achieving it. Pasarás por mi vida has had four reprints and is still selling."

He was always closely linked to radio media, was a prominent script writer, like Alejo Carpentier, Onelio Jorge Cardoso, Dora Alonso; he worked for RHC-Cadena Azul and CMQ Radio, broadcasting stations that transmitted very successful episodes written or adapted by him: The Adventures of Tarzan and Raffles, the silk-handed thief, among others. In the 1950s he directed a radio station in El Salvador and he is still remembered there. Furthermore, he had contacts with the written press, here in BOHEMIA itself, and in Vanidades. He never left teaching, and spent his final days as a professor at Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in the Dominican Republic.

"These experiences enhanced his gifts as a social communicator, which he incorporated naturally into his poetics, and he insisted on participation, that is, on the flow of exchanges with the reader; precisely for this reason he gave readings on the radio and was very interested in reception. He possessed a plain language, without formal complications or experimentations. To those who accused him of writing facile and simplistic poetry, he responded: 'The only unappealable fault against a poem is oblivion,' and his were not forgotten."

The musicality of his lyric, supported by a deep knowledge of Spanish versification. Buesa's handling of rhetorical figures, especially those used to emphasize feeling, constitutes an example of creative talent; it suffices to review the antitheses, similes, euphemisms, metonymies, and synesthesias, but also the figures of construction, diction, and repetition, although sometimes he abused the latter.

"Equally versed in French poetry, he penetrated into the intimacy of the couple to achieve a confessional atmosphere that few authors achieve. Likewise, these verses have transcended because, regardless of whether they deal with pleasurable and sought-after subjects, close to the forbidden or the illegal in relation to eroticism, they are in line with the tradition of a taste inherited from romanticism and modernism, two literary movements among the strongest and most permanent of the Hispanic American legacy.

"Buesa is well received by people from different social strata, occupations, races, ideologies, gender, sexualities, and ages. At several Latin American book fairs, a good part of the public approaches the Cuba stand in search of his poems."

The controversies have centered around his amorous creations; collections like Odas por la victoria are barely mentioned.

The reduction of Buesa's poetry to amorous subjects is part of a schematization propagated by not a few poets at the beginning of the Cuban revolutionary process, which aimed to counteract his successes. He had obtained certain recognition even among the most rigorous critics: he was included in Juan Ramón Jiménez's anthology Cuban Poetry in 1936 and Cintio Vitier selected him for his Fifty Years of Cuban Poetry (1902-1952). Cintio greatly appreciated the sonnet I Saw the Night Burning, a text of impeccable craft that allows for various readings, like other excellent sonnets of his that have not captured critical attention. The best example of the breadth of themes in the poetry of José Ángel Buesa is Babel, from 1936, a collection that offers the various directions his poetics took from the following decade onwards.

"During the 1940s, a time of blood and death, Buesa established himself as one of the most critical authors of modernity, through an indirect diatribe against World War II, but this projection has not been seen by most of his admirers or detractors; everyone mentions Oasis (1943), but few refer to Lamentaciones de Proteo (1947), of careful structure, style, and coherence, denouncing what the conflagration left in the common citizen, in my opinion his best book. In Canciones de Adán, from that same year, the poet achieves a rare solidarity with the first human being.

"Odas por la victoria (1943), his tribute to the heroic resistance of the heroes of Stalingrad against German invaders, in my opinion is not among his best texts; Buesa did not have an epic temperament, his string was elegy. Nevertheless, I agree that the study of his other books should be encouraged, which would make him grow as a poet concerned with his time."