MIAMI, United States. – Despite attacks from critics, exile and official silencing, José Ángel Buesa’s poems continue to be read and recited by many Cubans.
Buesa, undoubtedly one of the most popular Cuban poets, was born in Cruces, former province of Las Villas, in 1910. His first book of poems, The escape of the hours, published it at the age of 22. From then on he would not stop publishing poetry although he also practiced journalism and wrote plays and radio soap operas.
His poetic success spread throughout Latin America, to the extent that he was the only Cuban intellectual of his time who lived from literary creation.
Oasis (1943) was his most successful book, republished more than 20 times. According to the Cuban critic Virgilio López Lemus in the prologue to a compilation of Buesa’s poetic work, published by the publishing house Letras Cubanas in 2011 with the title Nobody knows why…the “Renunciation Poem”by the poet from Cienfuegos, has traveled as much space as the famous Twenty love poems and a song of despair Chilean Pablo Neruda.
After his departure from Cuba in 1961, Buesa was attacked by critics and the revolutionary intelligentsia. Since then, and for more than 45 years, his work has been silenced on the Island. It was not until Carilda Oliver Labra he made a selection of his poems and managed their publication in the first decade of this century that Buesa’s name was never heard again in publishing circles.
After leaving his native country, Buesa made a pilgrimage through Spain, the Canary Islands, El Salvador and Santo Domingo, where he died on August 14, 1982. Later his remains were transferred to Miami, where they still rest.
Despite having been treated contemptuously by a large part of the Castro intelligentsia, his poems have been translated into English, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese and Chinese. But the most important thing is that, overcoming the wall of silence erected around his life and work, his poems are still recited in the most intimate and public spaces.
“When he was accused of being cheesy and it was even said that he was nothing more than an easy versifier, more than mistakes, injustices were committed, because Buesa represented in his poetry the sensitivity of a sector of the Cuban population, their ways of apprehending and expressing love, of being sentimental, of expressing emotional elements of their identity”, defended López Lemus.
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