She did not want for herself the destiny of those who must take a little bit of land as a charm to remember. She did not want to keep any bit of Cuba for herself. She longed for the entire homeland on her grave, to be rooted in its soil, to remain in the poetic substance of what was forever her shore.
And she succeeded. Carilda Oliver Labra unquestionably embodies the essence of the island in the first hundred years of her birth. Not only her words, which place her as an indispensable voice of Spanish-American literature, but also her personality, speak of the Cuban as a spiritual fabric and as an attitude.
Carilda wrote and existed with fierceness and courage. Her poems range from the sublime to the brazen, always from emotion as the supreme proof of living. Naturalness sprang from the south of her throat; and it made her a great poet, because there is no greater antagonist of poetry than imposture.
With her verses, she grieved for the blood that Batista's tyranny shed without shame, and she knew how to show how much the bones of the dead illuminated. Also with words, she cried when she lost a man, and to conjure him she wrote a capital book about love, loss and mourning.
In Calzada de Tirry 81, she resisted all the onslaughts and continued to speak for and to a country that seeped through her veins, and in which she was gently intertwined, like a myth sustained on the truths of genuine art.
It is necessary to delve into her books to find, in addition to the shudders of disorder, those of identity, the feminine and human condition, patriotism. To Matanzas, because she owed her life, she wanted and could have owed her death; and, since then, many songs to Carilda are still pending to pay the infinite debt with her wonder.
Translated by ESTI
