María Luisa Enriqueta del Carmen Milanés García

She was born at the Hato Abajo farm (other researchers claim it was at the El Palmarito farm, which was later called El Sombrero and today belongs to the municipality of Cauto Cristo), daughter of the teacher María de la Luz García Lorente and the venerable General Luis A. Milanés Tamayo; she moved in 1895 with her family to Bayamo after her father joined the War of Independence; after the struggle ended, the Milanés-García family moved to Manzanillo.

María Luisa Milanés's education followed the customary path: primary education at the Colegio de Doña Margarita Yero in Manzanillo; secondary studies at the Colegio Juan Bautista Sagarra in Santiago de Cuba and later at the Colegio Francés and Sagrado Corazón in Havana; a religious and bourgeois path to arrive at an "appropriate" knowledge of history, philosophy, oratory, classical poetry, French, English, Latin, music, painting, and manual arts; she herself recalled that unmarried stage: "Exactly the same as that of all village women whose parents had a little money... days full of piano, painting, and embroidery."

The truth is that she read and wrote three languages and her literary vocation awakened in her a boundless curiosity; upon her return to Bayamo, her spiritual hunger for culture, when confronted with the limitations of her surroundings, would provoke in her an inexplicable anxiety. Using the pseudonym Liana de Lux, she began publishing in the magazine Orto of Manzanillo, which was directed by Juan Francisco Sariol, and she translated English and French poets. Perhaps seeking a change in her life, she married very young against her family's wishes, and from that moment on until her death, the most fruitful period of her poetic writing unfolded.

Her anguish intensified: "conjugal misfortunes" and "unfortunate circumstances" that have never been clarified with precision make one suspect problems in her family relations with her father and with her spouse and made her desperate life a torment.

Exceptional intelligence and acute sensitivity she demonstrated in her interest in unraveling the secret of the most intimate or private things. She cultivated her talent with passion and enriched her judgments, which impelled her toward the encounter with the beauty of reality, even when her verses presented themselves as a reaction against the unjust upheaval of not being well accepted by family and society.

Lightness and delicacy alongside the enormous weight of unease slid a tremor of emotions that fecundated her poetic thought. Lyric poetry of emotional tension and tragic sensitivity, whose theme was practically death along with others such as childhood, love, and a certain civil poetry, underscored an inclination to insist on the contradictions between her artistic nature and the world of mediocrity and weariness in which she lived. Her poetic work has been framed within a period after literary modernism, although the influence of the poetry of Amado Nervo is evident, present in a good part of the poetics of the early twentieth century.

Milanés did not find love in the life project she tried to forge away from her father, whom in her letters she called "The Kaiser." Like not a few young women—sometimes they still do—she married to escape a tyranny, and perhaps found another of similar incomprehension toward her artistic nature; a rebellious woman of "inner abundance," she also found no happiness in that matrimonial path she had to walk: pain and suffering marked her life of confinement and tears. I do not believe that the intention of her early marriage was to improve her social status, as she already had it; her decision was a hope that she would be understood, but with this attempt frustrated, anguish began to take shape as the most visible mark of her sorrow of incommunication, which she transferred recurrently to her poetry with full emotional nakedness.

Already in 1910, before her marriage, she sensed her destiny: "Worldly pleasures that along the path / you enamel of weary life, / flee far from me, for I only want / the beautiful peace of my tranquility." The heroic search for a peace that never came constituted her permanent rebellion; she confessed to having wept an entire night without knowing why; her tragic fate constantly weighed upon her shadow, as if true love and culture for a woman were impossible or a curse: "I have never dreamed of glory and power, / I have never desired riches or knowledge, / I have only wanted a love entirely my own, / a dream without images that disturb my rest, / a uniform life, tranquil and silent, / like the soft current of the gentle stream. / [...] / and I drank, fatefully, / from the cursed fountain of wisdom."

Under a burning desperation, she aspired to find a longed-for spiritual freedom that would emancipate her from the hypocrisy and morality of the era; in her intimate letters she showed herself as a woman dissatisfied with the role assigned to her by society. She possibly feared knowing more even though she desired it; she trembled with terror at the thought of her destiny with greater knowledge of the matter, but she drew ever closer to that future that left her more free; she struggled against the mediocrity and character of her social environment and, above all, against the incomprehension of men who could not understand her rebellion against submission and her thirst for knowledge. Creation was for her a process of emancipation and joy, of a space of infinite freedom, of religious ecstasy and at the same time of erotic overflow: "For me the pencil and paper have become a sanctuary, virgin forest, bed, psaltery, ship, wings; because with them I unite myself with whatever is, with whatever may be, and I abstract myself and give thanks, implore favors, hymn, give thanks, confess sorrows, ask for advice, I resign myself; because with them I withdraw to the elusive distances of my self, inaccessible in essence to the whole world, and there I find peace, oblivion, shadow, light, water, blue sky, stars...; because with them I fly to the region of the infinite, of the foreseen, of the dreamed..."

She began from a very young age to write an autobiography that has been saved in part; it can be verified that she was conscious of her future when she returned from Havana: "The time was approaching with giant steps when, having finished my studies, I had to abandon the convent. And my soul bled with sorrow and trembled with fear of the future." Her life was tragic and her writing foreign to the formal cares of style, which took a back seat before her strong temperament. In contradiction with her father, misunderstood by her husband, limited by the social life of a provincial province, uneasy because of a greater projection toward her spiritual appetites, her writing seemed to augur the consummation of a tragic destiny. She wrote and tore up or burned, beginning in her own literary creation a process of self-destruction; according to her confession, she would complete seven prose works that were presumably consumed by flames. She realized that what she had dreamed was unattainable, and she verified that the love and understanding she longed for were impossible: "I can bear no more and I will flee, the fear / that the happiness I have dreamed inspires in me / is so enormous and deep that I exceed myself / in my sorrow, weeping for what I could not reach."

She was convinced that she could not achieve her happiness, and in her nocturnes saved from fire she declares the approach to total darkness for a possible spiritual resurrection: "We do not die, we are reborn from death; / always a new path brings us fate / when we separate ourselves from inert matter. / [...] / An image pursues me that my lips do not name: / I see that dead and silent, I tread the carpet, / to comfort my mother who sobs in the shadow." And she awaits death as if it were an acquaintance: "Come, Lady, advance! / bring me the hope / that the continuous tears that bathe my cheeks / will be gathered by your pious and tranquil hands; / that your simple caresses will bring me oblivion / and no longer will tears cloud my eyes." Probably her best-known poem, present in various anthologies, has been "Jam noli tardare," a sonnet that begins in the tercets and concludes in the quatrains, as if turned backwards, although it can also be read from bottom to top: "Come toward me, do not delay, sweet lady / Of the blessed region with which dreams / The profound weariness that overwhelms me. // I have no strength left to call you. / Come toward me; tired of waiting for you, / Hear the voice of my supreme impatience! // What are you waiting for? You drive me to seek you / In the eternal silence that I envy / And constantly they come to announce you / The black butterflies of suicide! // Do not delay any longer, let no new daydream come / To disturb our love and our union, / I want your quiet sleep to sleep, / Without waking, the poor heart..."

After almost eight years of unhappy marriage and failures, she wanted to go to Mexico, change her surroundings and seek greater opportunities for her literary creation, but she did not receive from her father the support she hoped for with a thread of hope, and tormented by misunderstandings, on October 9, 1919 she shot herself; she was transferred from Bayamo to Santiago de Cuba, where she died on the 12th of that same month.

Her remains rest in the cemetery of Santa Ifigenia in Santiago, and on her sober tomb there is a gravestone without a cross, as she wanted, since according to her own confession: "a very large one I dragged in my life." María Luisa Milanés did not leave a published book; her fundamental poetic work appeared in Orto, which the year after her death published a commemorative issue in her memory, dated May 2, 1920; ten years later, the publication would dedicate a special issue to her in which is found almost all the poetry saved from the destruction of the author herself. Scholars such as Alberto Rocasolano have delved deep into her work, which today demands new editions and current readings of one who was one of the most ardent and unfortunate precursors of women's thought in the early years of the Republic.