This Sunday, March 20, it has been 41 years since the death of Pedro García Cabrera, a poet with surrealist roots who elaborated an introspection on the insularity and commitment of art. On Calle Santiago Cuadrado 7 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife lived the poet from Vallehermoso who was heavily involved in the civil war. A socialist by conviction, he underwent arrests and torture and then an adventurous flight from the Sahara to Senegal and then to Marseille, to return to the Peninsula and fight with the republican army, arrested and tortured, as a result of which he could no longer have children. In Andalusia, the nurse Matilde Torres, who will be his companion for life, takes care of his wounds. Returning to the island, he found work in the Refinery services, until his death. Many times I visited him at his home, wrote interviews and enjoyed his humble teaching. I had a relationship with his niece Ana García, originally from Córdoba, a very beautiful girl who had been Queen of the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. We were barely twenty years old, love if it is brief and intense is immortal.
The value of Pedro García Cabrera in Canarian letters is remarkable, he was a shock with great influence. From his belonging to Gaceta de Arte to his poetry that affects the anxiety of the times in which he lived. Pedro’s friendship with people of his generation was very close: María Rosa Alonso, Eduardo Westerdahl, Domingo Pérez Minik, figures within that republican and innovative thought that was castrated by the military uprising. The group had a wide projection, and in it we find figures far to the left but also others of a different temperament: Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo, Benito Pérez Armas, Luis Rodríguez Figueroa, José Arozena, Agustín Espinosa, Domingo López Torres. Several of them lost their lives after the military coup.
Pedro is the poet of the sea, a metaphysical and suffering sea, existential and captive. Arrested on July 18, 1936, he was sent to La Isleta and later deported to Villa Cisneros. He stars in a spectacular escape on the ship Viera y Clavijo, with which he arrives in Dakar, from there to Marseille and Andalusia, to be a protagonist on the Republican war front. His book La Esperanza Me Sustains records the transition from avant-garde lyricism to social realism, as Pérez Minik pointed out at the time. The title is extracted by García Cabrera from a popular couplet that he had heard, as a child, many times, in La Gomera and was kept in his memory. Domingo Pérez has said that this copla summarizes “the entire geographic and metaphysical condition of the insular man.”
Hope keeps me is an outstanding book in post-war Spanish poetry and praised by Vicente Aleixandre. It contains a prologue by Pérez Minik and illustrations by Westerdahl, links with the tradition of surrealism in the construction of images and the use of free verse and represents the transition from avant-garde lyricism to social realism, representing the combination between the feeling of solidarity and humanist roots. , on the one hand, and the vision of the insular landscape, on the other.
The title is extracted from a popular couplet that he had heard in his native house: I went to the sea for oranges, / something that the sea does not have; / I put my hand in the water: / hope keeps me going. It is a popular Asturian song although it could also be Andalusian, and is heard in Chile, Argentina, Peru or Mexico. In the European versions the center is in the sea as a metaphor for love and uncertainty.
His work registers the painful weight of the war but also a glimmer of hope in a better future for humanity. One day there will be an island / other than muzzled silence.
