Dies in Havana César López: Word in the voice of absence

April 7, 2020

In his personality coexisted the writer and man of letters, for alongside pure literary creation he cultivated, furthermore, translation, editing, and intellectual promotion.

He was a cultured and engaging lecturer who, likewise, worked as a diplomat. In 1959, he obtained a doctorate in Medicine in Spain from the University of Salamanca and, previously, had completed studies in his native city in philosophy and letters.

One of his most beautiful hymns were the pages of Silencio en voz de muerte (1963) that he dedicated to drawing the profile of his friend, a martyr of the dimensions of the young Frank País. That elegy sang, moreover, as few did, of the heroic stage of Santiago during the rebellion there flourishing once more.

Through the centuries, Santiago de Cuba has been an emblem of the millenary Cuban independence history. César López is its poet, the singer of that heroic condition that characterizes and defines it.

In his verse, free and discursive, the city of Frank and Josué was reborn, as a splendid poetic art, converted forever into a pyramid of his writing.

Not by chance, many years later, César placed in the hands of researcher and critic Daisy A. Cué Fernández an old manuscript that held his first poems, framed in the tradition that had been founded by two greats of our poetry such as Regino Boti and José Manuel Poveda.

Prefaced by her, Ediciones Caserón, of Santiago, placed in readers' hands his first literary testimony. With his customary sagacity, poet and critic Marino Wilson Jay indicated: "Here are pronounced the sustaining edges of all the poetics of the man from Santiago… which allows him to forge his own testimony of the facts… He is a mystic who does not believe in mysticism."

Having attained in his expression a unique category, not only Santiago populated his inventory of themes, because beyond the passion for his native land, César was a globetrotter around many other cities where he found the necessary inspiration to write and leave the mark of an unequal world, beyond the reach of justice.

Creator of countless titles, his books as significant as Circulando el cuadrado (1963) and Apuntes para un pequeño viaje (1966), thus demonstrate it. The theme of enjoyment and, consequently, the search for urban spaces in the midst of the construction of adventurous fictions configured these works, each in its own way, realized in prose or in verse. A somnambulistic poetry allowed his invaluable sensitivity to be glimpsed.

The manifestation of speech, local or cosmopolitan, runs through countless verses, the most important ones, in César López. Our author loved poetry and it was his joy to have found the best channels for its most fitting dissemination. I recall as a great proposal of his the literary workshop taught at the UNEAC by the Chilean Nicanor Parra.

In the same way, perhaps few today remember that the author of a collection of poems such as Quiebra de la perfección was he who created the bases and logistics of what we still today know as the Premio David of the UNEAC, conceived by him in 1967, for emerging writers. Its first edition crowned Lina de Feria and Luis Rogelio Nogueras.

In the sleeping city, I can resort to verses of his that explain the circumstance of his impending absence:

A bitter taste

makes my hands fill with words

("A bitter taste")[1]

Let us pay tribute to his work, to his oeuvre, to his memory.

[1] See César López: Manos de un caminante (1956-1958) Prol. by Daisy A. Cué Fernández. Back cover note by Marino Wilson Jay. Santiago de Cuba, ed. Ediciones Caserón, col. Poesía, 2006, p. 11