Pablo de la Torriente Brau

The life of Pablo de la Torriente Brau was as brief as it was intense: he was born on December 12, 1901, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and died in combat—also in December—on the 18th of 1936, in Majadahonda, Spain.

Like the hero of Greek tragedy—destined to die young—he possessed outstanding qualities: intelligence, bearing, joy, and overflowing passion.

Thirty-five years were enough for Pablo to leave an indelible mark of his work in the field of creation (journalistic and literary) and politics, beyond the borders of Cuba, his rightful land.

Everything was quick and perhaps premature in his life: he arrived second, to be the only male among his sisters Graciela, Lía, Zoe and Ruth, the children of the marriage of Graciela Brau Zuzuarragui and Félix de la Torriente Garrido.

At three years old, he travels with his father to Santander, Spain. There he meets his grandmother Genara, and hears talk of Francisco de la Torriente Hernández, the recently deceased Cuban grandfather, a reason, certainly, for that strange atmosphere inside the house. But he lives in freedom, in the patio, where he experiences his first scares and perhaps learned to tame his first fears. Adults sometimes say strange things; he frequently hears conversations about his mother, about the sudden reunion of the family, which will not be in Puerto Rico, but Havana, in Cuba. Far, very far from Santander, on the other side of the immense sea, the most incredible spectacle he has witnessed in his short existence, a stage larger, infinitely greater, than his grandmother Genara's magnificent patio.

The return trip—two years later—brings him new experiences: he meets his sister Zoe, attends Professor Lima's school in the Quinta de los Molinos. And in the midst of that whirlwind, when he barely feels he is in his definitive city: another trip to Puerto Rico, which if it were not also beyond the sea, but closer than Santander, would be like Havana, although it is not, because there is Grandfather Brau, of whom everyone speaks with respect "for being cultured and patriotic". José Martí must have been very great, when Grandfather does not tire of lavishing praise upon him, and not satisfied, he gives his grandson a copy of the Edad de Oro, so he can learn to read on those pages.

It is now 1909. Time to pack the suitcases again. Another departure and the sadness of saying goodbye to grandfather, who knows so much. But the destination is not Havana, but El Cristo, in Oriente, a beautiful place, different from the capital, with great mountains, where his father will work in the International Schools and he will happily immerse himself in the adventures of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza.

And since he has already done so many things at an age when other children have barely visited the nearest town, and since he has already read the Edad de Oro and Don Quixote, and Grandfather Brau writes books and his father does so in the newspapers, he tries his luck and publishes his first text in El Ateneísta. Go up

And so the days and years pass. And he learns in school and learns on the street, on the corner, with the neighborhood boys, where the males—because the girls are not allowed—learn so many things about life; where he has seen with his friends many things, even the pool of blood left by a man after another stabbed him "treacherously" in the back and for that reason is in prison. And he has heard his father speak of prison, of how terrible it is. But that should not worry him, because he would never kill anyone and much less in the back. He is studying at Colegio Cuba, and from there will go to the Instituto de Santiago. And he wants to be someone, to write, hopefully like Emilio Salgari.

With these ideas he packs his bags again: the family moves once more to Havana. Eighteen years is the age to begin working: he does not want to study anymore, or rather: to attend classes. The world escapes him while he is in the classroom. Every time he has his high school diploma, goodbye school—he thinks—but he does not follow through on this intention: the urgency to roam the world prevents him.

He undertakes a trip with engineer José María Carbonell to Sabanazo, there in Oriente, as a draftsman, and lives adventures even more intense than those of his grandmother Genara's patio or those he shared with his neighborhood friends, on the corner: this is life, with its wonderful gifts and its ever-present challenges. He meets Teté Casuso, who is still an "ugly and spoiled" child, and returns with another indelible vision: that of a man, a companion, devoured by a crocodile, without him being able to prevent it, when they were clearing land for the supposed construction of the sugar mill.

"Because my eyes have been made to see extraordinary things and my little machine to tell them...," he would write later, but he thinks now, back in Havana, when he begins to collaborate with Diario Nuevo Mundo and the magazine El Veterano. Every subject is intriguing for this man. An athlete himself, he breaks canons when he writes a sports column. And he experiments—consciously or unconsciously—to make a different kind of journalism that, without ceasing to be journalism, is closer to literature. A journalism that many years later they would call new journalism or literary journalism, and of which he is in Cuba, as of testimonial writing, one of the precursors.

Writing short pieces, news items, columns, fills his soul, but not his pockets. He takes a position in the Accounts Payable Department of the Ministry of Finance. The salary is magnificent for the time: 170:00 pesos, but after two months he resigns, because that was an outrage or—as was usually said—"a bottle". And then he applies to a call for the Naval Academy. He passes the exams one by one. By then it could almost be said he had the admission assured. He answers correctly, if not the last, then one of the last Grammar questions: cenador with a c and senador with an s, but he cannot resist the temptation, and in that style of his, as if it were a joke, he writes the truth that leaves him out of the academy: "Senator in Cuba is synonymous with bottle-man."

This is the Pablo who, in 1923, arrives at an office at San Ignacio 40, in old Havana, which will leave a deep mark on his trajectory: the office of Ortiz-Giménez Lanier, where he meets, among other extraordinary men, Doctor Fernando Ortiz and the young law student, Rubén Martínez Villena, a fellow "serious, reserved, thoughtful, with a tongue sharp as a barber's razor", according to accounts from Conchita Fernández, the blonde girl in the office, who would be his great friend and would also have a place reserved for her in the history of Cuba. Eighty pesos is Pablo's salary as a typist, but he is happy there, not only because of the wisdom of Don Fernando, of the illustrious visitors who frequent the place, of Rubén's captivating personality, but because of the nourishing conversation and the clarity in analyses regarding the country, because of that atmosphere of high culture, almost solemn, which only he transgresses with his quips, often at the top of his voice, as if he were crazy, which everyone laughs about behind Don Fernando's back, because this De la Torriente Brau is very sensible, the thing is he says it, writes it, and does it all at the same time with an uncommon joy, from playing football to attending a concert, preferably if they play the New World Symphony by Anton Dvorak. Go up

And since he always needs more of himself he dares to try a difficult genre: the short story. He writes "The Hero", which he publishes through Martínez Villena, with the help of José Antonio Fernández de Castro, in the Diario de la Marina, in 1928. And then a poem "Motifs of the Journey Under the Lunar Night", followed by a more ambitious project, Batey, co-authored with his friend Gonzalo Mazas. From then on he never stops writing reports, columns, stories, letters...

He is twenty-nine years old, the age to marry that girl, who is now an attractive young woman of twenty "who always does what she wants": Teté Casuso, the woman who will accompany him always: to the stadium or theater, in the struggle, prison, exile... from whom only war and premature death separate him.

"The sugar cane is cut into three pieces" in the country: the tyrant Machado, baptized by Rubén as "the claw-footed ass", overreaches himself more and more in his oppressive politics. He is suffocating the nation and the youth, the people, will not allow it, Rubén and Pablo among them. As will this new character who is beginning to be his friend: Raúl Roa, another singular fellow, who as a child played ball and read Martí in the middle of a field improvised in any barren lot; who also had a patriot grandfather, and as if there were not already enough coincidences, he speaks in a whirling, thunderous and completely free manner; he writes and lives at full speed, and loves another girl—rather a young woman—fine and cultured: Ada Kourí. What a marvelous spectacle it must have been to witness through a door crack a dialogue between Rubén, Pablo and Raúl, or with Juan Marinello and Zacarías Tallet, all young, all exceptional. What novice and revolutionary intellectuality toiled, together with their elders, together with the master Enrique José Varona, in healing the wounds of the vilified Republic.

Pablo, Raúl... are part of the Left Wing Student Group. They go on "tangas" through the streets surrounding the University of Havana, to protest, to shout once more, Down with Machado! Repression falls on the youth with demolishing force: they wound Pablo, Rafael Trejo, who dies in the Emergency Hospital a few hours later. From then on, increasingly hard and difficult days will follow.

On January 3, 1931 they take him prisoner to the prison known—what irony—as Castillo del Príncipe. When released, he writes the series of articles "105 Days in Prison", published in the newspaper El Mundo.

A short time later he is detained again along with Raúl Roa and other comrades. The group is taken to Castillo del Príncipe, from where they are transferred to the Nueva Gerona prison, and then confined to the misnamed Presidio Modelo de Isla de Pinos.

He spends two years in Presidio Modelo. Two years—as José Martí would say—of "infinite pain", from which experiences emerge the series of thirteen articles "The Island of 500 Murders", which he publishes in the newspaper Ahora, and which later serves as the basis for writing Presidio Modelo, in which he denounces the horrors committed by Captain Pedro Abraham Castells. A significant book not only in Pablo's literary work, but in Cuban literature, and which Doctor Ana Cairo says in the prologue of its most recent edition by Ediciones La Memoria: "The political prison... [of José Martí] illustrates the romantic canon; Presidio Modelo, the avant-garde..."

It is 1933, Pablo goes into exile in New York. He writes. He participates in the founding of Club Julio Antonio Mella, from which he continues fighting the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, who is finally overthrown on August 12. Go up

Pablo returns to Cuba. He publishes on the pages of Ahora "Land or Blood", a series of reports—also of denunciation—about the abuses committed against Cuban peasants. He contributes on diverse topics, preferably sports and social, to El Mundo, Bohemia, Social, Carteles, Alma Mater, Línea and Orbe.

The fall of the tyrant has not meant a change for the life of the country: the struggle continues. It is 1935, a strike is called, but it fails. Pablo must leave once more. His destination is again New York. Writing and fighting for a better future for Cuba continue to be the center of his life. And he does it in the only way possible for him, tirelessly, even though he is, as he writes to his friend Pedro Capdevila: "sweeping, mopping and scrubbing spittoons and toilets like any other immigrant"...

He founds the newspaper Frente Único, mouthpiece of the Cuban Revolutionary Organization Against Imperialism (ORCA). He sends and his criticism "Peasants in New York" is reproduced in Bohemia. Nothing and no one makes him lose his joy, his optimism, his confidence in the future.

On July 18, 1936 the Spanish Civil War breaks out. Pablo goes from shock to delirium. The idea of going to Spain obsesses him. And there is not a minute in which he does not think and speak of it, nor a letter in which he does not announce it to all his friends in Havana. He will go as a correspondent: there—he is convinced—the future of humanity is decided. While he painfully gathers money for the trip, one part of his head has already flown to Spain; the other, fills the blank pages from which his only novel has begun to emerge: Adventures of the Unknown Cuban Soldier, a relative—why not—of what years later would be known as "the marvelous real", and bearer—as few are in Cuban literature of the twentieth century—of a razor-sharp sense of humor, which he leaves unfinished when he finally manages to leave as a correspondent for New Masses and El Machete, but not before stopping in Brussels to attend the Congress for Peace.

In Barcelona, first, and Madrid later, Pablo gathers testimonies, writes memorable columns and communicates with his friends in letters where not only does he tell them how things are going on the front, but in which he is also interested in the fates of Cuba. One would say he is happy, if only because the war were not harsh and cruel. After all, he got his way and is there watching what his eyes have the mission to tell. Go up

Having said certain things, it is not enough for him to give Spain, the world, the cause of Cuba, the best of himself: he wants to go to the front, to be one more combatant. On October 10 he polemicizes with the enemy at Peña del Alemán, a month later, on November 11, he is war commissar. A week later, he enters Madrid with the emotion of being "one more militiaman". On the 28th, he recounts his meeting with poet Miguel Hernández. The war becomes an amalgam of conflicting sensations: the pleasure of meeting the young Spanish poet, the anguish over so much innocent death, so much destruction... they must prevent them from taking Madrid. It is cold, "a cold that is worse than hunger". And he has an immense desire to see Teté, his family, his friends... But today, the 17th, when the devotees of San Lázaro light candles for him all over Cuba, to ask him to give them health or help them get a little job, "because yams are expensive", the order, there on the front, is to march toward Majadahonda, where the next day the Cuban Pablo de la Torriente Brau, member of the General Staff of the 109th battalion of the seventh division, falls mortally wounded.

And it happens—as other times in history—that officially another day (the 19th) is decreed as that of his death; perhaps because only then could his comrades believe the news was true.

And four days later they went out to recover his remains, to leave them in a safe place. And Miguel Hernández wrote his "Second Elegy". And it was not until the 23rd, Christmas Eve Eve, that the news became known in Havana, so that those who loved him most never again had comfort from his absence. So that in the future other young people would learn to love forever the eternally young, irreverent, and talented revolutionary, Pablo de la Torriente Brau.

Source: CubaLiteraria.cu