LITERATURE: Veteran Cuban Poet Takes Top Prize

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Dec 2 1997 (IPS) - Carilda Oliver Labra, the 73-year-old poet who proclaims at the top of her voice to have been “messed up” by love, has become the second woman to win Cuba’s National Literature Prize.

“I’m becoming a mess, love; I’m becoming a mess,” is without a doubt Oliver Labra’s best-known written phrase in Cuba, and one that identifies her as the poet of love,.

“Are you still messed up by love?” is the obligatory phrase of every reporter who is granted an interview with Oliver Labra, a retired divorce lawyer who scandalised the prudes of her time with her lack of inhibition and open war against all prejudice.

“If they love me for the erotic presence in part of my work, I don’t mind. It comforts me to know that at least they love me for something,” said Oliver Labra shortly after receiving Cuba’s highest literature accolade last week.

Awarded for the first time in 1983, other winners have included: Dulce Maria Loynaz, Eliseo Diego, Nicolas Guillen, Cintio Vitier, Felix Pita Rodriguez, Francisco de Ora, Miguel Barnet and Pablo Armando Fernandez.

This year’s contenders for top honours included the poets Nancy Morejon and Rafaela Chacon Nardi and writers Ambrosio Fornet, Anton Arrufat and Salvador Bueno.

Oliver Labra, however, won hands down and, as one critic wrote “it was not a gesture of chivalry by the jury. It was simple justice.”

Oliver Labra had produced a serious body of work and excellent poetry, and deserved the prize, critic Ventura de Jesus wrote in the daily ‘Granma’, the official publication of the ruling Communist Party.

“It’s about time,” said another critic, Arsenio Cicero Sancristobal, who said he was grateful for the opportunity to offer prizes to challenge oblivion and “return to the good things of the past.”

“Carilda is like a rare bird of Cuban poetry. Her home, 31 Terry Street, is a myth of Cuban culture like she herself, always surrounded by graffiti and young men who follow her through the streets,” Cicero told IPS.

Although much less known outside of Cuba than Loynaz, Oliver Labra is considered one of Latin America’s leading poets. She was admired by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and by U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway. Another great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral wrote of her: “Beautiful girl, deep as the metals, hard as the altiplano, her poetry, if disseminated with justice, will soon exercise a blazing teaching in the Americas.”

Born in 1924 in the city of Matanzas, 100 kms from Havana, she says she has never felt the temptation to live outside of her hometown, and that cities like New York and Madrid are “boring.” Matanzas, known as “the city of bridges” and the “Athens of Cuba”, was once not only one of its most beautiful cities, but also one of its leading cultural centres.

Oliver Labra has published some 10 books of poetry, including “South of My Throat”, which caused a scandal with its daring title and content, “The Dust Disappears” and “A Night to Be Left in a Will”.

“All my poems are real. They are impressions, memories, sorrows. The most distressing feelings are those which give poets the greatest pleasure. Poetry is a genre of sensitivity and experiences,” the poet told the official Cuban press agency Prensa Latina.

Oliver Labra, who won the National Poetry Prize at the age of 26, has written more than 1,000 poems, generally intimate, full of nostalgia and melancholy. According to her, around 30 of them deal with love.

Forty years ago, whe wrote a poem titled “Song to Fidel”, and this year was visited by President Fidel Castro. Her biography is about to be published, and an international colloquium focused on her body of work has been organised by her hometown.

Asked if she has ever thought about going into exile, she responded with a verse: “When my grandmother came she brought a bit of Spanish soil/ when my mother left she took a bit of Cuban soil/. I will not keep a bit of my fatherland,/ I want it all over my tomb.”

“I don’t understand what it is with me,” she complained. “At times, rather than reading my books, people seek me out to see what they can find of the myth, of the exaggerations told about me.”

But the association is inevitable. “She is a woman who has spent her life challenging prejudices, living without thinking of the criticism, challenging norms,” commented Cicero.

She herself admits it: “Perhaps everything started in 1950 when an enamoured Uruguayan climbed the Aconcagua to shout out my name…this poet’s thing. Later they even blamed me for two suicides committed for love, but they were really due to other reasons.”

As a lawyer she specialised in divorce, perhaps because she believes that “fidelity is a virtue, but also a vocation.”

“Love is sacred. I was married three times and have always been faithful. He who isn’t loyal doesn’t know how to love,” she said. “They criticised me harshly because I married a very young man. I fell in love with his temperament, not his youth…I marry a young man even though I can’t get up the next day,” she says with a smile.

Oliver Labra continues writing poems on love, she does not want to accept her aging, and says that she would gladly adopt “all the crazy fashions of today.” She feels that she still has many desires to be satisfied, and lives “the fiction of believing herself a poet.”