The news did not make it to the newspapers. The most intimate, upon learning of the fact, conspired, tacitly, in a kind of pact of silence. Only many years later the Dominican poet Osvaldo Bazil, then diplomatic representative of his country in Cuba, would recount the incident: Rubén Darío , in 1910, tried to commit suicide in Havana.

Round trip

The author of Azul occupied room 203 of the Sevilla hotel. The Nicaraguan government had appointed him as its representative at the festivities for the centenary of the Grito de Dolores, but he was prevented from fulfilling his mission when the president who extended the appointment was overthrown and left, already in Veracruz, without any official support. The poet had to return to Havana, where he made a stopover on his trip to Mexico, on the same ship that he took to that country, when Cuban intellectuals entertained him with a banquet at the Hotel Inglaterra.

Something Byzantine was happening to me. The civil governor told me that he could stay in Mexican territory for a few days, waiting for the United States delegation to leave for his country, and that then I could go to the capital; and the military governor, whom I had my reasons to believe more, gave me to understand that he approved my idea of ​​returning on the same steamer to Havana (...) I did the latter.

He came very depressed, morally defeated, prey to great spiritual torture and short, very short, of funds. He drowned his sorrows in alcohol; he gave himself, says the poet Osvaldo Bazil, "to the demon of all alcohols and to the fury of all the storms of dipsomania."

Accurate:

Rubén was prey to a deep moral depression, which according to what they told us he had tried to drown in spirituous libations. She was able to answer, however, with enough serenity and calm, the questions that Paco Sierra asked her about the political situation in Nicaragua, for an interview that was published in La Discusión. But when we left the ship, his face revealed great mental torture and his gait was unsteady. We continued with him until we installed him and his companions in the Sevilla Hotel, and there he suddenly fell into a deep torpor. He sometimes launched hoarse moans (...)

A doctor had to be found urgently. Darío , who was a big boy, was treated on that occasion by a children's doctor. He improved his health, but his stay in Havana would last until the end —two months later— away from parties and commitments. It was his fourth visit to the Cuban capital, "the most expensive city in the world," he would say in a chronicle.

walks

"Under a scorching sun in a clear and miraculously blue sky," the poet admires, "old Havana, semi-colonial, semi-Moorish, and the modern city that grew into El Vedado at the end of the curved strip of the Malecón." 

In one of the chronicles about Havana that he published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación , he does not overlook the North American influence that denotes the city.

The trams, automobiles, first-rate hotels, the cleanliness of certain parts of the city demonstrate the excellence of the dollar and of the American doll. The great Martí who fought the blue-eyed danger so much does not know what to do in his mediocre marble, in a public square (...) The press has two newspapers in English. The Yankee super-millionaires usually come to spend the winter on the Island. The former Spanish-Creole lordship either lives in Europe or remains isolated.

At the beginning of his chronicle, the poet recalls a fragment of an old Spanish coplilla:

I'm going to Havana
I come to tell you,
they made me a sergeant
of the civil guard.

And he concludes: "How far is all this!"

Dario rides by car. Dinner at the Miramar Graden. He has one or two gallant dates. Good friends accompany him. But the alcoholic crises are repeated and one afternoon, at the Sevilla hotel, he wants to throw himself off the balcony into the street. She wrestles with him, tooth and nail, Bazil for stopping her; Dario is about to achieve his goal, but Rubén 's secretary and an employee of the facility come to the aid of the Dominican . They finally manage to reduce him and put him to bed.

"With all the doors locked, all the windows closed, I breathed easy," recalls Bazil. The poet continued to drink whiskey, from his bed, incessantly. After three liters of whiskey he was mad, and I didn't dare leave him alone. I spent the night next to him. He didn't sleep at all. So, it dawned. He continued to drink. Visits that cannot be received. Flowers of fine gallantry arrived at the hotel.

Darío finally recovers his senses, intelligence and good humor. He attends to his journalistic commitments, writes poems. He is at the grave of his friend the poet Julián del Casal on the anniversary of his death. The large hotel bill worries him, but the Havana magazine El Fígaro assumes all the expenses, and installs him in the Maison Dorée, a French pension in El Vedado, together with his secretary, and the Mexican painter Ramos Martínez , who has accompanied him. from Mexico. The poet is delighted at his withdrawal.

black honorary

One night when he drank heavily in the company of Bazil and the poet Mondello, Italian ambassador to Cuba, he abandons his companions without realizing it. He is seen appearing, beaming, the next morning.

«I come from a circle of colored men where I entered because it was the only place where I saw light at dawn and they have treated me admirably. They presented me with champagne, and named me an honorary black”, Dario confesses to Bazil and shows him, with joy, the curious diploma. Bazil notes: "This adventure always tasted good to him, and he remembered it many times as one of his most amusing Havana pranks."

The poet wants to leave Cuba, but he lacks the necessary money for the ticket. Without revealing his purpose, he asks here and there, cables powerful friends who can send it to him from abroad. He regains his élan and shines on him. The ship would leave at two on the afternoon of November 8, 1910, and until one o'clock Darío remained in the editorial office of the magazine El Fígaro awaiting the cable remittances that arrived in abundance and he was able to collect in full. He collects a handsome sum of money, because only Fontoura Xavier, the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, gives him 500 dollars —with regret that he cannot be more extensive in the gift.

Ignorant of the poet's departure, abandoned to his fate and penniless, the painter Ramos Martínez remained in Havana. Rubén Darío was selfish like children, comments Osvaldo Bazil: "he was a complete child when he faced life."