María Villar Buceta

Born in Pedro Betancourt, Matanzas, María Villar Buceta managed at age 16 to astonish critics when, from her native corner, formerly called Corral Falso, she published her first poems and journalistic articles in capital newspapers. Some thought it was a pseudonym behind which a veteran creator was hiding. No one believed that a teenager from a small town on the margins of artistic and literary spaces could break into Cuban cultural life with such poetic vigor and force of character. Agustín Acosta had to refer to the prodigy girl for the mystery to be cleared up.

Full of dazzling purity, in 1921 she moved to La Habana with the hope of working in journalism and continuing to develop her poetic work. Since her mother's death, the girl had to take the reins of the house and care for her siblings. And I in the midst of all, Lord, with my lyricism/ how my spirit exhausts itself from living within itself/ and always seeing these pensive and surly faces/ And so pass the days, the months and the years!

In La Habana, María Villar Buceta joins the editorial staff of the newspaper La Noche, and there, in 1922, she meets Rubén Martínez Villena, with whom she would maintain until the death of the author of La pupila insomne the closest friendship. Shortly after she moves to Heraldo de Cuba as editorial secretary, but when this newspaper becomes a mouthpiece for general Gerardo Machado, she is dismissed. The cronies of the future Asno con Garras did not forgive the young poet and journalist her relations with Villena. With the help of Fernando Ortiz, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring and Enrique José Varona she begins to work at the Biblioteca Nacional, which allowed her to discover the great vocation of her life: librarian.

In the midst of the machadato she joins the Partido Comunista de Cuba, collaborates in the magazines Bohemia, Social, Antena and other publications. In 1927 she publishes Unanimismo, the only book of poems she gave to the press.

It would take January of 1959 for Editorial Arte y Literatura, in 1979, to publish an important selection of her texts, carried out and with a prologue by researcher and critic Helio Orovio. In this work appear the poems from Unanimismo, the poems not collected in a book, written from 1922 to 1958, her unpublished poems from 1959 to 1976 and a collection of her prose works. Also various assessments and opinions about her life and work from a group of critics, poets and writers and her bibliography. The title of that selection: María Villar Buceta, poesía y carácter.

Due to her intellectual projection, her political activity and her power of influence within youth, the machadistas positioned in the Biblioteca Nacional watch her and follow her every step. Helio Orovio says: "Every step of the librarian, every book in her hands, every conversation with some visitor, are followed by the hounds of the regime". Nevertheless, she subscribes to the Grupo Minorista and does not interrupt her work within the group of anti-machadista combatants and in artistic and cultural spaces.

With Machado overthrown, when facing the groups that finally made it possible for the Revolution of the 30 to go awry, as Raúl Roa would say, she was separated from her work at the Biblioteca Nacional. And she faces a long period of hardship.

In 1934 Federico de Onís includes her in his Antología de la poesía española y latinoamericana. And María writes her essay Vida y muerte de Rosa Luxemburgo. In 1938 she manages to work as a librarian at the Escuela Nocturna Popular del Cerro, but appears on the payroll as a laborer in municipal ditches.

Years later, she returns to the Biblioteca Nacional, and there she must also work as a librarian, listed on the payroll as a laborer in school construction. She finally leaves this situation when the Escuela Profesional de Periodismo "Manuel Márquez Sterling" is founded in 1943 and she is called to found and direct the Library of that institution. Around that time she publishes Contribución a la bibliografía de Rafael María de Labra.

Invited by the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, she offers a master lecture in the Aula Magna of the Universidad de La Habana about Rubén Martínez Villena. In 1951 she concludes her notable monograph Contribución a la bibliografía del periodismo.

With the triumph of the Revolution her life transforms. She translates the prologue of the work Ideología del colonialismo by Nelson Werneck Sodré. She writes for the magazine Política Internacional of MINREX.

Helio Orovio recounts the following: In 1962, following a course on archive organization that she would teach to diplomacy students, we learned that the professor's name was María. A person of solid cultural preparation, of supreme kindness and human quality. With the greatest interest, afternoon after afternoon, she was taking us deeper into the world of books, analytical summaries, archival techniques. Suddenly, in the margin of a class exercise, almost as if she didn't want to, questioned by a student, she pronounced her surnames. I was bewildered to learn that that elderly lady, quiet, humble, elusive, was one of the most important literary figures in our country.

Both journalism and library techniques owe much to María Villar Buceta in our homeland. She dedicated her last years to the Centro de Documentación of MINREX. Her activity in the semicolonial stage, facing the governments and representatives of the criollo oligarchy, always standing upright in the struggle, a criollo of profound love for the life and work of José Martí, for her companions of the generation of the 30, for the dreams of a Cuba with all and for the good of all, her passage among us cannot be forgotten, and much less her poetry, her human quality, her combative tenacity.

Colillas was a poetic prose that she published in the magazine Social. Raúl Roa defined it this way: "The purest, profound, cultured and rebellious feminine voice of the generation of the new is María Villar Buceta. Her book of verses, Unanimismo, denotes an ultrasensitive temperament, a rich poetic vein and a keen penetration into the deepest and most painful depths of life. (...) She handles irony with the lightness of a stinger dipped in honey".