Gaston Baquero

Gastón Baquero (Banes, Cuba, May 4, 1914 - Madrid, May 15, 1997) was a Cuban writer and poet of the XX, exiled in Spain after the Cuban Revolution.

Biography

Baquero was born in Banes, a town belonging to the former province of Oriente, an area that is now part of the province of Holguín. He studied Agronomy, but never practiced the profession: he preferred to dedicate himself to literary and journalistic activities.

In the 1940s, he joined the avant-garde group of poets and intellectuals that takes its name from the magazine Orígenes (1944-1956), founded and directed by José Lezama Lima; Likewise, he collaborated in the creation of the literary magazines Verbum (1937), Espuela de plata (1939-1941) and Clavileño (1942- 1944).

He became known with the publication of Poems, in 1942, which was followed the same year by Saúl sobre su espada, although in that period his main field of action is journalism, as editor-in-chief of the Diario de la Marina. In the following decade he obtains official positions in the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista—and his literary production decreases substantially.

Contrary to Fidel Castro's revolution, he left Cuba escorted by three accredited ambassadors in Havana on a flight to Madrid, where the Francisco Franco regime welcomes him and provides him with employment. He worked at the Institute of Hispanic Culture, at the School of Journalism and at Radio Exterior de España. At the same time, he wrote essays and literary articles for various publications, mainly for the magazine Mundo Hispánico .

He returned to literary activity with Poems written in Spain appeared in 1960 and in 1966 he published Memorial of a witness, one of his most acclaimed books. In 1984 the Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose published in Madrid (Institute for Ibero-American Cooperation) his complete poems up to now under the title Magic and Inventions. Since then, young poets and literature students have sought his company and paid tribute to him, to which Baquero reacted with his usual modesty.

In 1992 he was a finalist for the National Literature Award with Invisible Poems. In 1993, the Fray Luis de León Chair of Poetry at the Pontifical University of Salamanca paid homage to her work, later collected in Celebration of existence , together with the contributions of the participants. In 1994, for the first time since 1959, a conference on his poetic work was offered at the University of Havana, and in 2001 the publication of a poetic anthology was allowed, La patria sonora de los frutos (Editorial Letras Cubanas), edited by Efraín Rodríguez Santana.^{[citation required]}

He died on May 15 of a stroke.

Works

• Poems (Havana, 1942)
• Saul on his sword (Havana, 1942)
• Tests (Havana, 1948)
• Poems written in Spain (Madrid, 1960)
• Hispanic American Writers Today' (Madrid, 1961)
• Witness Memorial (Madrid, 1966)
• The Evolution of Marxism in Hispanic America (Madrid, 1966)
• Letters to Gerardo Diego1968.
• Darío, Cernuda and other poetic issues (Madrid, 1969)
• Magic and inventions (Madrid, 1984), complete poetry to date, by the Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose
• From San Salvador to Ayacucho1974, essays.
• Letter to Simone Lerch1990, essays.
• Invisible Poems (Madrid, 1991)
• Indians, whites and blacks in the Caldero de América (Madrid, 1991)
• Approach to Sweet Mary Loynaz (Madrid, 1993)
• The inexhaustible source (Valencia, 1995).
• Poetry (Salamanca, 1995)
• Essay (Salamanca, 1995)
• Complete poetry (Editorial Verbum, 1998), collected by Cuban poet and editor Piío Serrano
• The Angel of Rain. Poems by Gastón Baquero (Eastern Washington University Press, 2006), translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White
• Literary Geography. 1945-1996: chronicles and essays (Madrid, 2007), edition of Cuban-British writer and journalist Alberto Díaz-Díaz
• Fabulations in prose, 2014.