This May 7, nostalgia runs through the streets of his native Santiago and his Cuba, remembering the loss of one of the icons of Spanish-American literature. At only 36 years old, the first poet of America, our first national poet, said goodbye.
José María Heredia was also the first of our illustrious political exiles to spend most of his short life, distant from his two main loves: family and Cuba.
Homeland and freedom were the initial foundations of his patriotic poetry. “The Star of Cuba”, the first openly pro-independence poem, constitutes an enduring symbol in the firmament, whose star in the letters of his verses was the image to lead Cubans along the difficult path of national independence.
Heredia is also among the first of his time to sing with marked poetic height to nature and the ancestral cultures of our continent. The heroic temper of his soul gave constant elevation to his poetry.
The first romantic of America sang with unknown majesty to women, danger and palm trees, always looking for the grandiose and the eternal, nostalgia and the memory of Cuba.
He was the bard from Santiago, according to José Martí, the son of Cuba, from whose lips came out some of the most beautiful accents ever modulated by the voice of man, the one who died young, outside the homeland he wanted to redeem, from the pain of searching in vain in the world for love and virtue.
His pen, expression of beautiful and defiant verse, endures grand and eminent without fear in time and the defects that his time put on him. “The hymn of the exiled”, turned into a true hymn of the Cuban independence fighters during the three wars fought for the emancipation, transcends to eternity.
After three days of delirium and agony, the first great civil poet of Cuba and the great romantic of America died in misery and oblivion in Mexico, extinguishing his figure as a symbol of his homeland.
To say of Martí: José María Heredia, was already, of himself, prepared to die, because when the greatness cannot be used in the offices of charity and creation that nourish it, it devours the one who possesses it.
