Looking for Casal and the difficult friendship of the poet and the novelist

March 10, 2020

An important film in the tradition of Cuban cinema inclined toward historicism, "Buscando a Casal" recovers some essential themes in any biography of the always controversial poet, namely: the freedom of the artist, rebellion against the dictatorial power of the Spanish government, and the validation of friendship with three characters, named César, Felipe and Enrique and interpreted with notable dedication by Armando Miguel Gómez, Enmanuel Galbán and Marlon López. These three constantly observe and judge Casal, so that they represent, with different nuances, the multiple feelings that the poet awakened in life.

Casal's friends constitute a fairly effective dramaturgical way of placing the film's protagonist in a social space, concretely historical. The Felipe played by the young and talented Emmanuel Galbán is evidently inspired by Ramón Meza (1861-1911), a friend in real life for a time of Julián del Casal, and author of the novel Mi tío el empleado, published in 1887, three years before the poet published his first book of poems Hojas al viento. Considered along with Cecilia Valdés among the best of nineteenth-century narrative, especially for the use of irony, humor, satire and caricature to distance itself from Spanish customary realism, Mi tío el empleado was misunderstood in its time and José Martí was among the few who recognized it as "a grimace made with bloodied lips", "procession of pale and boneless ghosts", with a style so precise it seems a sword blade in its sheath.

An authentic fresco of illicit enrichment, bribery, theft and shady dealings, a clear reflection of the ills that afflicted Cuban colonial life in the nineteenth century, Mi tío el empleado was valued as a remarkable novel not only by José Martí, but also by José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier and Lisandro Otero. However, its author has paid the price of being a man of success, born into a bourgeois family, and licensed in Civil and Canon Law from a very young age and Doctor of Philosophy and Letters, both degrees achieved at the University of La Habana. He was also a recognized journalist and meritorious teacher, as well as secretary of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country of La Habana.

Judging by appearances, the friendship between a pragmatic, comfortable and mocking Ramón Meza and a dreamy Julián Casal, always poor and with an eminently tragic destiny, must have been difficult. In the film the two characters are elaborated from their incompatibility, although Felipe in the film protects him and even gives him employment in his newspaper. According to the study Casal a Rebours by Francisco Morán, Ramón Meza begins his essay "Julián del Casal, biographical study" (1910) with an affirmation: "I knew a poet, I treated him intimately", but a few pages later he acknowledges that "Casal ceased to be my visitor", making clear that the authors of Mi tío el empleado and Hojas al viento took completely different paths.

If in 1889 Ramón Meza published Don Aniceto el tendero, Casal returned to Cuba, disillusioned once again because he traveled to Europe but found it impossible to visit his beloved Paris. If Ramón Meza combats with gymnastics and fencing the cough and fever caused by "that overwhelming mass of reading", Casal continues increasingly immersed in the vigils of confinement that cause him, finally, illness, because, as he wrote, "a healthy and robust person is not capable of feeling the fever of inspiration, and to create something artistic it is necessary to be quite ill".

Meza was, apparently, that type of healthy person to whom Casal denied the possibility of creating. According to Calvert Casey in "Meza literato and the Havana sketches", "he dies soon as a literary creator and becomes an amateur urbanist, university professor, municipal councilman and treasurer of the City Council. When he returns from exile, he does not return to literature which he abandoned long before. He dedicates himself with the best of intentions to the urgent tasks of building a Republic that will soon be frustrated". According to Morán, Casal sees the future of his friend Ramón Meza and separates from him, as he had allowed himself to be dispersed by the realities of life. Casal stops visiting him and it is Meza who must frequent his modest dwelling with Japanese airs.

The irresolvable contradiction between Meza's apparently pragmatic and accommodating temperament and surely dreamy and provocative Casal is expressed in detail in Buscando a Casal, whose creators clearly knew and handled the aforementioned essay by Meza about Casal, in which the future functionary and journalist notes the enormous effort it cost them to "dissuade him from his purpose of walking through the streets of La Habana in luxurious pajamas, embroidered with gold".

Despite the multiple differences in temperament and ways of behaving or expressing themselves, both friends coincided in their contempt for the debased colonial society, and over time their names have remained linked (ironies of history) when forming a rich image of the great contributions to national letters in the second half of the nineteenth century. Essayists such as Roberto Méndez, Luisa Campuzano, Enrique Saínz, Antón Arrufat, Reynaldo González and Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel have contributed to spreading the contributions of two creators of singular talent and significance in the evolution of the spiritual history of the Cuban nation.

Meza and Casal remained united in a book published by the Cuban Academy of the Language titled Ramón Meza on the centenary of his death and Julián del Casal on the sesquicentennial (150th) of his birth; the first, one of our most notable narrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the second, one of the essential voices of Cuban poetry and initiator of the modernist movement, as Enrique Saínz said during the presentation of the Ediciones Boloña book. In Buscando a Casal, the history of friendship and incompatibilities between the two characters is also revisited.

"Casal was always seen marked by anguish and in antithesis with Martí, when both one and the other should be a constant presence in the formation of young people for the enrichment of their spirit", Enrique Saínz said on that occasion. The antithesis with Ramón Meza should not be manipulated in favor of one and to the detriment of the other, but as the natural differentiation between creative, contributing and talented human beings.