On May 7, 1839, José María Heredia died in Mexico City. He was 36 years old when he died; However, he left behind a poetic and journalistic work that was one of the most representative of Latin American literature of the first half of the 19th century, whose influence would be present in other creators of the stature of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Plácido, José Jacinto Milanés and José Martí . Without overlooking his status as founder of magazines and newspapers.
For the Mexican writer María del Carmen Ruíz Castañeda: “His neoclassical culture, together with his knowledge of new authors, made him an ideal guide in the stage of disorientation that Mexico went through during the first years of its independent life.”
Considered by José Martí as “the first poet of America”, José María Heredia y Heredia is also our first national poet. Furthermore, he was the first of our illustrious political exiles to spend most of his short life distant from his two main loves: family and Cuba.
The country and freedom were the first and greatest foundations of his poetry with patriotic content. “The Star of Cuba”, conceived in complete secrecy in the city of Matanzas, in October 1823, is the first openly pro-independence poem in the history of Cuban literature. In the same Heredia assumes the star as the symbol called to guide Cubans along the difficult path of national independence, even though it was the “Bolivarian sun” that identified the aborted independence conspiracy in which he became involved (Soles y Rayos de Bolívar), being forced to flee disguised as a sailor through the port of Matanzas bound for the United States of America.
Heredia is also among the first of his time to sing with true poetic height about nature and the ancestral cultures of our continent. His ode “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1820), conceived at the age of seventeen, begins the transition from neoclassical to romanticism in Spanish-language literature.
Meanwhile, his ode “Niagara” (1824), which inspired him the majestic landscape of the famous falls, was included by the most important literary critic of Spain, Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, among the hundred best lyrical poems in the Spanish language. all the times.
In the ode “Niagara”, Heredia assumed the royal palm as an identifying symbol of the nature of Cuba, a condition until then granted to the pineapple fruit by the first Cuban baroque and neoclassical poets who preceded him.
It is not surprising, then, that his former friend in independence struggles, the artist and poet from Matanzas Miguel Teurbe Tolón, endorsed this condition decades later, by representing a royal palm in his design of the national coat of arms.
Heredia arrived in Mexico for the second time in the summer of 1825, following an invitation from its first president, Guadalupe Victoria, based on the literary merits garnered by the young Cuban lawyer, as well as his identification with the cause of American independence.
On the sea journey from New York to Puerto Alvarado, in Veracruz, the schooner in which Heredia is traveling, when crossing the Strait of Florida, is forced to divert its course due to a storm that abounds in this latitude. during these months of the year, and approaches the northern coast of western Cuba.
Such a maneuver, imposed by the hand of nature, allows our poet to see a height very endearing to him, the so-called Pan de Matanzas. Between excited and nostalgic, he then conceived “The Hymn of the Exiled,” which would become a true anthem of the Cuban independentists during the three wars they fought for national independence in the last century.
José María Heredia died in complete poverty, in an interior room at 15 Hospicio Street, in Mexico City. His remains were deposited in the pantheon of the Sanctuary of Mary Most Holy of the Angels. The press did not echo the poet’s death. However, the day after the funeral, the Government Diarywhere Heredia had assumed the literary section until a week before, published the call to fill the vacancy left by him.
In 1844, when his widow Jacoba Yáñez traveled to Cuba, where she arrived to die, the poet’s remains were transferred to the Santa Paula cemetery. With the closure of this necropolis three years later, his remains went to the Tepellac cemetery, where their location was lost as they were buried in a common grave.
Such events seem to replicate in immortality the odyssey of his childhood and eventful public life; but, there is nothing to regret. After all, the remains of America’s first poet rest on Mexican soil, that is, in Our America.
The influence of his poetry, particularly patriotic poetry, in addition to his work as a journalist, professor, historian, literary critic and playwright, contributed to reviving the independence ideal in new generations of Cubans; the same one that almost two decades after his death, became a war cry in Yara, on October 10, 1868. What other better national poet for the new homeland that was being born?
We Cubans, perhaps, today more than ever, need to return to him, reflect on his life and historical time, which is none other than the origins of a nation that continues to become… And, above all, return to his poetry and journalism. For those who awakened in Martí and so many other patriots and illustrious Cubans “the inextinguishable passion for freedom,” returning to him and giving him his rightful place in our history and literature will be the best way to honor him and honor us.
Taken from La Jiribilla
