Regino Pedroso Aldama

Cuban avant-garde poet, initiator of social poetry on the Island.

He was born in Unión de Reyes, a municipality in the Cuban province of Matanzas. He completed his primary education in various public schools and abandoned his studies at age thirteen. He worked as a carpentry apprentice, in various agricultural labors, in a steel foundry, and in a railroad workshop. He was a member of Pro Unidad, the most radical sector of activism within the Railroad Brotherhood of Cuba.

From 1919 onward, his first poems began to appear in periodicals of significant circulation such as El Fígaro, Castalia, and Chic. In 1927, the literary supplement of Diario de la Marina published his poem "Salutación fraterna al taller mecánico," with which social poetry of class orientation was initiated in Cuba. In 1930, after having been laid off from the railroad workshop, he worked in the editorial office of La Prensa, was an editor at Ahora, and a proofreader at La Palabra. That same year, 1930, his first book, Nosotros, was published.

His contributions also appeared in magazines and newspapers such as Bohemia, Social, Revista de Avance, Carteles, El Mundo, El País, Unión, and Anuario L/L; New Masses, The Survey Graphic, Opportunity, The West Indian Review, Poetry Quarterly (American publications) and Le Journal des Poètes (Belgian). He was part of the editorial board of the magazine Masas, an organ of the Anti-Imperialist League of Cuba. In 1935, he was sentenced to six months in prison, jointly with the other members of the Masas leadership, for his anti-imperialist activities. He was active in International Workers' Defense. Until 1959, he worked in the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education. After the revolutionary triumph, he was a cultural advisor for Cuba in the People's Republic of China and in Mexico. He traveled throughout Europe and North Africa.

In 1939, he won the national poetry prize for his book Más allá canta el mar. That same year his Antología poética (1918-1938) was published. In 1955, he published the verse book El ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu, in which he pays homage to his Chinese ancestors.

He is the author of short stories and the essay "Rubén Martínez Villena: el poeta y el hombre." His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Czech, Italian, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Yiddish. In 1975, all of his poetry was compiled in Obra poética, with an introductory study by Félix Pita Rodríguez. He died in La Habana on December 7, 1983.

The work of Regino Pedroso is representative of Cuban avant-gardism of the 1930s, and his work fully initiated one of the three main directions (in addition to pure poetry and Black poetry) in which this movement would be expressed: social poetry, in which figures of the stature of Nicolás Guillén and Manuel Navarro Luna would also stand out.

Cuban avant-gardism was characterized by the abandonment of strophic 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 distinctive stamp with which it proposed to express the new and tumultuous times.

With the poem "Salutación fraterna al taller mecánico," published in 1927, Pedroso initiated poetry of a social nature and political intention, from an approach and with the spirit proper to avant-garde aesthetics. In Nosotros (1933), which would include that inaugural poem, Pedroso gave expression to his socialist ideas. With fervent accent, he sang of the manual worker in a work legitimate not only for its open militant interest, but because the poet was then a proletarian. Nosotros was considered by Juan Marinello as "the most robust contribution of social poetry given in Cuba."

As happened to most poets of his generation, in his later work Pedroso went about restraining and refining his expression, until reaching, with El ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu (1955), one of the landmarks of Cuban poetry of the twentieth century. Removed from the openly militant tone, this book seems to sum up the tone, between disillusioned and philosophical, that the poet assumed after the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. Among his anthology poems are "Five O'Clock Tea," "Canción de los barcos náufragos," and "Yuan Pei Fu despide a su discípulo."

Félix Pita Rodríguez has stated that "for having known how to gather the concerns and hopes of his time, and for having been capable of constructing with them the harmonious poetic architecture of his work, Regino Pedroso reaches the heights of artistic perfection."

Active Bibliography
Nosotros, poems, Editorial Trópico, La Habana, 1933.
Antología poética (1918-1938), Imp. Molina, La Habana, 1939.
Más allá canta el mar..., poem, Imp. La Verónica, La Habana, 1939.
Bolívar, sinfonía de libertad, poem, P. Fernández, La Habana, 1945.
El ciruelo de Yuan Pei-Fu, Chinese poems, P. Fernández, La Habana, 1955.
Poemas, anthology, prologue by Nicolás Guillén, Eds. Unión, La Habana, 1966.
Obra poética, prologue by Félix Pita Rodríguez: "Regino Pedroso y la nueva poesía cubana," Editorial Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 1975.

Source: En Caribe.org