Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo

A great figure of Cuban Siboney and Creole poetry; the most important cultivator of the décima in the nineteenth century of the Island.

He was born in Las Tunas and lived on his parents' estate, El Cornito, twenty-nine of the thirty-two years of his life, son of Manuel Agustín Nápoles Estrada and Antonia María Fajardo, a family of wealthy white landowners with large extensions of land, as well as the sugar mill El Cornito on the outskirts of the city, of which his father was a landowner of properties belonging to the estate. He later moved to Santiago de Cuba and accepted the position of Paymaster of Public Works offered to him by the governor there, Vargas Machuca.

While Domingo del Monte gathers and makes known his Romances cubanos around 1929 and Pobeda writes his creole décimas, this poet of decisive importance is born, not only for the nativist and romantic poetry of the time but for national literature and its popular creole strain. By the hand of his paternal grandfather, the presbyter Fajardo, he translated Horace, Virgil's "Georgics", Theocritus in French translations. He also read the Eclogues of Garcilaso, which undoubtedly marked his future poetry.

He grew up on the El Cornito estate, among trees and country folk, which served as pillars to his rustic rural outlook. He also learned something of rhetoric and poetics from his brother Manuel Nápoles Fajardo, a collaborator of La Piragua.

He published his first décimas in El Fanal de Puerto Príncipe, which would later form the collection of texts of Rumores del Hórmigo (1856), the river of his native province. At that moment the political sense of his décimas, masked behind the music of pure rural poetry, went unnoticed, otherwise a newspaper of such reactionary Spanish sentiment would not have accepted them. There at El Cornito he married the Camagüeyan Rufina, muse of the poet in the famous décimas of the "First and Second Invitation", like so many other creole muses that came to replace, in this same process of literary cubanization, the worn-out Phyllises and other Greek women of romantic poetry.

Within this process that Cintio Vitier calls "external cubanization of poetry", the book by Nápoles Fajardo finds a distinguished position, individualized from the whole by its indisputable literary quality. Although he enlisted in the ranks of the Siboney school, he is a poet with sufficient literary quality and authenticity to shine with his own light.

Samuel Feijóo endorses this idea in his essay On the Movements for a Cuban Poetry until 1856 by dedicating a separate chapter to him, with which he wants to symbolize in El Cucalambé the crucible of this poetry of popular inspiration and most Cuban genius, laden with patriotism, which constituted the best of the nativist school, both in its creole and Siboney expressions. El Cucalambé can then rightfully appear, apart from schools, tendencies and literary fashions, among the best of the Cuban nineteenth century in the domains of poetry, and he is also, although many critics have not wanted to acknowledge it or have reduced him to the derogatory title of popular singer, improviser or epigone of Fornaris, one of the great Romantics of the Island.

While the poetry of a Fornaris passes and fails to overcome, except in some compositions, the limitations of his time and the presuppositions of his own poetic system, the verses of El Cucalambé retain to this day their weightlessness, their grace, their pristine creole and sometimes jocular lightness, because he did not need to pretend to be the peasant as Domingo Del Monte or Fornaris did, but rather merged with the voice of his people by touching its essences. Vitier had already pointed out in the prologue to Flor oculta de poesía cubana that much Siboney poetry, "if you remove the theatrical props of the skirt and the canoe, what remains is pure Spanish formality", that is, all that scaffolding of localisms, indigenous nomenclatures, creole turns of phrase, Indians and country folk, and all those "vegetable academies" of so many worn-out poems did not manage to penetrate the true essence of the Cuban soul, but rather contented themselves with scratching its surface.

The problem, says Vitier, is not the theme but the tone. The word in the cucalambeana work is not rhetoric but a living organism, capable of penetrating deep into the popular soul and amalgamating with it to the point of losing its own authorship to be sung by all. For Vitier, the logical destiny of Cucalambé was to have disappeared absorbed by the masses, into the anonymity of a people. Poetry invades with Nápoles Fajardo the entire Island, and brings the flavor of small intimate scenes of rural life, the daily and apparently trivial details, which had already appeared in that delightful scene of "El veguero" by Plácido.

El Cucalambé appropriated the décima as no other before him to extract its juices and convert it into the refined Cuban décima, heir to the Spanish espinela décima, which Cuban popular poetry has always preferred over the romance, which did take root instead in other parts of America like Argentina. The Cuban peasant of the cucalambeana mountain décimas forms a unity with the natural landscape, within light scenes, constructed on the basis of fresh adjectives, which immediately won full popular acceptance. The patriotic utility of Nápoles Fajardo lies in the public success he had, in the easy popularization of his stanzas that came to be socialized to such extremes that they were sung as anonymous songs in the wilderness, as the mambises preferred them.

The poetry of El Cucalambé anticipates the synesthetic effects of symbolism, even in visual rumors such as this from the poem "Love to Cuba": "I look from the mountain / the incessant rumor". Poetry of the ear (island landscape of the ear, as Vitier calls it) that characterizes each sound of nature as a kind of obsession that integrates through the liquidity of sound all the elements of the poetic scenes. Some rumors had been present in earlier verses of other poets but never with the force and expressive intention of the cucalambeana scenes. One would perhaps have to wait, to find another passage of lyrical sonorities, for the writing of José Martí's second Campaign Diary, which seems to drink from the sober enumerations of Pobeda and these finest noises, rumors, creaks and other sound filigrees of El Cucalambé. Rumores del Hórmigo tries varied stanzas and meters: Cuban quintillas, creolized octavas, also Cuban romances, the décimas already so socialized, and there is also in the book a zone of more cultured poetry, inspired by certain Quevedesque areas, such as his sonnet "Self-Portrait", or the satirical letrillas and epigrams.

He is par excellence the singer of the charms of Cuba, the one who engraved in the lyric tradition images such as those of the graceful country horseman who rides a mare along the margins of a river, as a kind of scene that repeats endlessly in three outstanding poems: "The Jealous Lover", "The Surrendered Lover" and "The Spurned Lover". In them stand out the same compositional procedures, the same expository development in which enamored country folk sing their loves or their troubles and, finally, in an abrupt and untimely manner that sometimes provokes comedy, they depart at a gallop abandoning the scene.

The décimas of Rumores del Hórmigo have found continuity in some later twentieth-century Cuban authors like Eugenio Florit, who pays homage to him in his décimas of Trópico. Also in the work of the great scholar and cultivator of the décima that El Indio Naborí was, there is a deep-rooted influence of Nápoles Fajardo, who, if not properly appreciated by his contemporaries (although Aurelio Mitjans judges him "the most inspired cultivator of popular poetry among us") and of the same twentieth century, found in some of the greatest poets like Gastón Baquero phrases such as this: "in El Cucalambé is the primitive, uncontaminated image of Cuba". The important researcher on the Cuban décima Virgilio López Lemus, in La décima constante, states that the décima reached with his work its "first popular classic", a poet who "knew how to situate part of the lyric roof of Cuban popular poetry, while remaining himself a marvelous column of poetic grace and facility".

Many critics and poets contemporary with Nápoles Fajardo did not know how to see in him the great gains that his work represented for Cuban poetry, and consequently they branded him a "cook of wild herbs", "vulgar verse-maker", "savage cook in an apron" (in allusion to the anagram of his name, composed from the English word Cook, cook, and calambé, an Indian word, and according to others African, which means savage apron, and which when reconstituted form the expression Cuba Clamé). However, revolutionaries called him a patriot.

In the poem "Hatuey y Guarina" appear décimas of fervent Cubanism, even a bold cry of rebellion, of a call to the conquest of independence for the Cuban homeland.

Contrary to the criticism that only recognizes value in the most creole, rustic and folkloric zone of El Cucalambé, thus stigmatizing him as exclusively nativist and popular poet, it is worth noting the poetry of violent contrasts and fantastic images of the letrillas, sonnets, epistles and fables in which another Cucalambé emerges, also personal in this cultured vein, which inquires influenced by Quevedo and the Archpriest of Hita in Cuban grotesque. Thus he produces that jewel of hasty anti-poetry that is his self-portrait. It is also worthwhile to approach more philosophical sonnets that teach the bitter vein of the poet, such as that of "Nothing", or the one of "Seven Truths", where he apostrophizes against the human types of the time that formed a local menagerie of revolting mediocrities, base passions, corruption and vices: the plagiarizing poetaster, the bureaucratic secretary in which one intuites the future tints of a Ramón Meza, the opportunistic little lawyers, the flighty women and the mothers-in-law.

He mysteriously disappeared in Santiago de Cuba in late 1861. Suicide is considered a possible cause.