As a greeting to March 8, International Women's Day , I propose to readers a brief approach to two Cuban women who were writers and translators in different stages of our history, and who left, each in their own way, lasting traces in the culture national. Distant in time, they are close in their interest in issues related to women and their rights.

1. Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga, Tula , was born in Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, today Camagüey, on March 23, 1814. In 1836 she had to move with her family to Spain; During the sea voyage she wrote two of her most famous poems, the song "Al mar" and the sonnet "Al parte" , in which she expresses her sorrow for leaving Cuba.

At the beggining

Sea Pearl! Star of the West!
Beautiful Cuba! your brilliant sky,
the night covers with its opaque veil
as pain covers my sad forehead.

I'm going to leave... The diligent rabble raises the sails
to tear me from the native ground
, and promptly wakeful,
the breeze comes from your burning zone.

Farewell, happy country! Dear Eden!
Wherever fate impels me in its fury,
your sweet name will flatter my ear.

Ah, the turgid sail creaks,
the anchor rises, the ship, shaken
by the waves, cuts and silently flies.

Already on Spanish soil, he began to publish in Sevillian magazines and newspapers. His first drama, Leoncia , premiered in 1840, and the first edition of his Poesías de él was published in Madrid in 1841. No fewer than thirteen of his plays were premiered in Spain, some with great success. La Avellaneda also published poetry, novels, short stories, essays and translations, and directed the magazine Cuban Album of the Good and the Beautiful , whose twelve issues appeared between February and August 1860. A compilation of interesting texts that came to light in said magazine It was published in 2005 by the Ácana publishing house in Camagüey, under the title Cuban album of the good and the beautiful: a gender lunge .

La Avellaneda is a forerunner of feminism, both for her personal attitude and for the emphasis on female conflicts in her work. For example, her novel De Ella Sab , according to essayist Evelyn Picón-Garfield, is the only one among anti-slavery narratives in which "the theme of slavery is unfolded into a tyranny that affects both the black race and the female sex" [1] . This double theme will appear again in the drama Baltasar (1858), in whose preface Avellaneda herself states that "the play deals with two important problems: slavery and the social situation of women" [2] . She draws attention in Sab to the frankness with which both aspects are questioned, in stark contrast to the norms of nineteenth-century society.

The colonial authorities did not allow the entry into the Island of the novels Sab and Dos mujeres , censored for containing "subversive doctrines of the island's slave system and contrary to morality and good customs" [3] . As has been rightly pointed out, the author «had reached the height of daring in that book [ Sab ], not only had she questioned slavery as a social institution, but had also defended intimate relationships at the interracial level, to which she did not no other writer of his century would dare, as far as we know» [4] .

As a translator, Avellaneda translated into Spanish poems by the French Víctor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, the English Lord Byron and the Portuguese Augusto Lima. The researcher Carmen Suárez León, in her book The joy of translation (Social Sciences, Havana, 2007), analyzes the "imitation" that Tula made of the poem "Les djinns" (the goblins) by Víctor Hugo, where the Cuban moves with Master the metric games of the original. Let's see the final fragment of the poem in Avellaneda's free translation:

Everything stops…
no noise reaches
my ear anymore. Everything is silent and silent repose will return. Already benign sleep pours its henbane over my temple, and in such deep calm the world sleeps... and so do I!











 

Tula returned to Cuba in November 1859, lived five years on the island, and died in 1873, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, in Madrid. The Havana Book Fair in 2014 highlighted in a special way the celebration of Avellaneda's bicentennial, since his valuable literary legacy continues to be of interest to scholars and readers in general.

2. Renee Mendez-Capote

«The Cuban girl who was born with the century», Renée Méndez-Capote y Chaple [5] , came into the world in Havana on November 12, 1901. She was the daughter of Domingo Méndez-Capote, Brigadier General in the 1995 war, and his wife Maria Chaple. From a very young age, Renée began writing for magazines and newspapers; she defended the socialist ideal and maintained an active political life.

"I was born immediately before the Republic: I in November 1901 and she in May 1902, but from birth we differ: she was born amended [alludes to the Platt Amendment] and I was born determined not to let myself be amended," he commented with irony the writer Her Memoirs of her of a Cuban girl who was born with the century are a classic of Cuban testimonial literature. In her literary work, Domingo Méndez Capote also stands out. The Civilian Man of '95 , biography, 1957; Heroic Tales , 1965, and Kind Figures of the Past , 1981.

He published his first article at the age of 17, thus beginning his journalistic collaboration in numerous Cuban publications, such as Diario de la Marina , El País , Grafos , Social , Mañana , Correo Musical and Surco . In the 1930s she was in charge of the direction of Fine Arts in the Secretariat of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, and later she was head of the General Culture section in the same Secretariat. In 1933 she joined the strike against Machado; due to such actions she was imprisoned several times. As part of her social and political activism, she founded, along with other intellectuals of the time, a group that advocated for women's suffrage and organized various feminist events.

He participated in the clandestine resistance movement against the Batista tyranny. After the triumph of the Revolution, he worked at the José Martí National Library, and directed its magazine between 1962 and 1964. Later he went to work at the Editorial Nacional de Cuba, and belonged to the permanent group of literature advisers for children and young people of the Ministry of Education. He was a jury of the contests The Age of Gold and UNEAC in different genres. He visited the United States, Mexico, France, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the USSR; His travel experiences were reflected in the book Many years ago, a young traveler (1983).

The Gente Nueva publishing house published in 2012 Locura de amor , a selection of texts by Renée Méndez-Capote that includes the story of the same title, reviewed by the journalist Madeleine Sautié [6] :

He is alone in the institution that is his entire existence. […] Only among the books that know the tenderness of his lonely soul, the sweetness of his loving hands, the despair of his failures, the pain of his weaknesses and the strength of his passion […] Like someone possessed by love, covered With his old cape and equipped with a lantern and flashlight, tormented and wanting to take in everything, he went through the fortress again and again, in case it was necessary to close a window violated by the gusts.

This fragment belongs to a story entitled "Locura de amor" in which the writer Renée Méndez Capote accurately describes a moving episode starring Carlos Villanueva Llamas: on the night that the 1944 hurricane hit Havana, he chose to stay in the Library —then located in the Castillo de la Fuerza— to save the literary fortune that was stored there from disaster.

Since 1959 Renée collaborated as a journalist in Bohemia, El Mundo, La Gaceta de Cuba, Revolución y Cultura, Unión, Cine Cubano, Verde Olivo and Mujeres , among other publications. She was in charge of executive tasks at Juventud Rebelde and Pionero . She translated from English and adapted Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1965) and James Fenimore Cooper 's The Last of the Mohicans (1966). She also translated unpublished documents on the taking of Havana by the English in 1762 , preserved in the Cuban Room of the National Library.

For his literary contribution and political commitment, he was awarded the Distinction for National Culture, the Alejo Carpentier Distinction, the Félix Varela Order, the José Joaquín Palma Order, the medal for the 20th Anniversary of New People and the Replica of the Máximo Gómez Machete. . In 1985 he received the La Rosa Blanca award from UNEAC, in its first edition.

This remarkable writer passed away in Havana on May 14, 1989. Cubanness and intellectual honesty characterize her literary work, which deserves to be revisited by new generations.