Gastón Baquero, poet and journalist

February 1, 2020

# Gastón Baquero, Poet and Journalist

Gastón Baquero is, without a doubt, one of Cuba's greatest poets. His work, acclaimed both within and outside the Island, shone with its own light even amid the brilliant generation of the Orígenes group, of which he would be one of its most significant figures.

One cannot conceive of Cuban poetic and intellectual discourse in the first half of the twentieth century without his writing, on par with such illustrious contemporaries as Lezama Lima, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marrúz, and Lorenzo García Vega.

Nor could one understand the vast panorama that is Cuban culture throughout the past century without his cultured and wrenching voice, uncomfortable and controversial, a dynamiter of boundaries, which from outside the Island—he settled in Spain in 1960 after having previously been associated with Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship and opposed the revolution against it led by Fidel Castro—came to receive tributes and nominations for prizes such as the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, while in Cuba he was almost unknown.

In the course of years, Baquero's literary work (Banes, 1914–Madrid, 1997) would be published again in Cuba and become the subject of panels and lectures, in an act of justice toward one who was a central Martían figure and dedicated one of his most important books, Poemas invisibles (1991), "to the boys and girls born with a passion for poetry anywhere in the plural geography of Cuba, both within the Island and outside of it."

However, little is still said in his native land about his other prominent work: journalism, for which he was also recognized on the Island and beyond the seas.

Although his first publications appeared in literary magazines such as Verbum and El Clavileño, his professional debut in the press came at the newspaper Información in the mid-1940s. Shortly thereafter he moved to the conservative yet influential Diario de la Marina, to which he remained attached until his departure. There he became managing editor and cultural commentator through two regular columns: "Panorama" and "Aguja de marear."

Art criticism, journalistic essays, chronicles, and feature articles were his preferred genres, and they earned him such important laurels within the profession as the Justo de Lara and Juan Gualberto Gómez awards. From outside Cuba, he worked for decades at the Radio Exterior de España station, contributed to publications such as the magazine Mundo Hispánico and the newspapers ABC, La Vanguardia, and El País, and was a professor at the Escuela Oficial de Periodismo in Madrid.

Carlos Espinosa, a Cuban critic and researcher based in the U.S. and compiler of a book on Baquero's journalism, stresses the elevated level of his journalistic prose and the undeniable connections between it and his literary work.

"It seems admirable to me," Espinosa writes, "that, knowing that the next day that newspaper would be used to wrap fish, Baquero would write articles full of suggestions, personal visions, vast culture, excellent command of language, and prose whose quality is not diminished alongside his poetry."

As an example of this other work by the author of such memorable poems as "Testamento del pez," I propose to you an article dedicated to another great Cuban intellectual whom Baquero fearlessly classified as "our thinker": Enrique José Varona.

This approach to Varona, published in Información in 1943, won the Justo de Lara prize, but beyond that, it justly appraises a capital figure in Cuban culture and shows the perpetual tribute that the poet and journalist always paid to the foundational sources of Cubanness. Those from before and those of his time, those from within and those from without, those of all Cuba.