Manuel Navarro Luna

Cuban poet and journalist, representative of the avant-garde movement of the 1930s.

He was born in Jovellanos, Matanzas. His father, a captain in the Spanish army, was assassinated by his fellow soldiers when they discovered that the young officer embraced the cause of Cuban independence, which is why his mother, Martina Luna, moved then to Manzanillo (Granma), with her five children in search of family support. Navarro Luna, who was barely six months old, spent his childhood and almost his entire life there.

He studied his first letters in a humble neighborhood school founded by his mother. At thirteen years old, he began to study music and learned to play the cello and the bombardon. He was one of the founders of the Children's Music Band of Manzanillo and, later, a member of the Municipal Band of the city.

The precarious family economy prevented him from continuing his studies, but he read and studied intensely, until becoming a true autodidact.

He performed the most diverse jobs, such as shoeshine boy, cleaning assistant, barber, night watchman and diver without a diving suit, to fish copper pieces from the bottom of Manzanillo bay that he later sold to a foundry.

From a young age, he became involved in labor struggles and was imprisoned on several occasions.

In 1915, he began his recognized poetic work when he published his first verses in the Manzanillo magazines Penachos and Orto. His first book, Ritmos Dolientes, appeared in 1919.

He was director of La Defensa and La Montaña. He also founded the "José Martí" Public Library and a branch of the Press Association.

In 1921, he participated in the founding of the Manzanillo Literary Group. In 1929, through great personal effort, he obtained the title of Procurador. That year he joined the anti-imperialist organization International Workers' Defense and, in 1930, the Communist Party.

Navarro Luna deployed extensive political activity against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He was part of the Committee for Aid to the Spanish People following the civil war.

In 1940, following the election of Paquito Rosales as mayor of Manzanillo (Cuba's first communist mayor), he worked in the city's Department of Culture.

In 1949, he was prosecutor in the case against the murderer of sugar leader Jesús Menéndez and, that same year, attended the Continental Congress for Peace, held in Mexico.

During the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958), he actively collaborated with revolutionary groups. Following the death of young revolutionary Frank País, his poem "Santiago de Cuba", which circulated in mimeographed flyers throughout eastern Cuba, prompted an order of persecution against him and he went into hiding.

After the triumph of the Revolution, he enrolled in the National Revolutionary Militias and participated in the fight against bandits in the Escambray mountains and in the Battle of Playa Girón. He collaborated tirelessly in radio and print media, and gave lectures and recitals in army and militia units. In 1962, he traveled to the Soviet Union as part of the Cuban delegation to the World Congress for Disarmament and Peace.

He died in Havana on June 15, 1966, shortly before turning 72 years old.

He collaborated in Letras, Revista de Avance, social, Renacimiento, Hoy, bohemia, Verde Olivo, La Gaceta de Cuba and union-de-escritores-y-artistas-de-cuba-uneac.
He was an intimate friend of poet and essayist Juan Marinello, with whom he maintained abundant correspondence for over 50 years, still unpublished.

Manuel Navarro Luna is representative of Cuban avant-gardism of the 1930s and his work moved, initially, in one of the three main directions (in addition to pure poetry and Black poetry) in which this movement would be expressed: social poetry, alongside Nicolás Guillén and Regino Pedroso.

The avant-garde was characterized by the abandonment of stanzaic forms, rhyme and meter; altered typographic arrangement, and the preponderant role of metaphor. By bringing together in a surprising way logically irreconcilable entities, or by using different parts of speech in an unusual manner, the avant-garde established a considerable variety of metaphors with its own seal with which it proposed to express the new and convulsive times.

Navarro Luna was the author of the most typically avant-garde book of Cuban poetry: Surco (1928), after which, from Pulso y onda (1932) onward, he would move decisively toward social poetry. The verse, strong and impetuous, and the ingenuous audacity of the images, reveal the continued presence of avant-gardism, in a book that is already positioned in the political direction and in which stand out "Song of the Black Child and the White Child", "Country Song to be Sung in the City" and "Raise Your Eyes…", among others in which Navarro denounces injustices and invokes a better world.
His next book, La tierra herida (a long poem in four cantos) is also within the political direction of social poetry. The theme of the poor peasant provokes the wrath of the verses. According to Roberto Fernández Retamar, a breath of deep sincerity gives meaning to the emphasis of these cantos, saved from the exclamation of the proclamation by the avant-garde freedom in which they are expressed.

In Poemas mambises, Navarro Luna does not depart from social poetry, but focuses on historical themes and exalts the heroes of Cuban independence: Martí, Maceo, Masó. With his customary spirit —Retamar affirms—, propitious for great themes, he achieves a civil poetry of vigorous tone, underlined by the sincerity we feel alive in the depths of the broad hymns.

In Doña Martina, he departs from his social poetry to write an elegy, in décimas, to the death of his mother. An emotional work in a minor tone, it merited the praise of José María Chacón y Calvo, who dedicated a penetrating commentary to it.

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Navarro Luna immersed himself in the multiple political and cultural tasks that the new times demanded. In Odas mambisas (1926-1960) and Odas milicianas (1961-1962) are again the sincerity and the force of clear and direct expression of his poetry, which becomes deliberately plain in order to dialogue with factory workers and peasants, with soldiers and militiamen, among whom, on numerous occasions, he read, vibrantly, his poems.

Enrique José Varona wrote that the importance of his verses lay in the spirit that gave them life. Of Pulso y onda, Rafael Alberti said that it placed him at the meridian of his time, and Juan Ramón Jiménez declared: "great poetry of his, where the incredible wealth of images runs parallel with its august and resonant musicality"; Cintio Vitier for his part valued that "Cuba is whole in his word and in his gesture as a great poet"; and Juan Marinello, that he was the poet of the Revolution.

Source: EnCaribe.org