From the series Georgina Herrera I

Regarding women's poetry in Cuba, Catherine Davies points out that until the triumph of the revolution there were no black women writers; which may be excessive, referring more to their visibility than to an undoubtedly improbable non-existence. In any case, the contrast is strong with respect to the sample of black writers, who cover the entire literary spectrum; curiously, with more resonance in conservative media —such as the Diario de la Marina—, becoming even a niche.

In any case, the difference refers to the political precariousness of black people, determining its priorities; more serious in the case of women, even without cases like that of Phillis Wheatley in United States, who had the patronage of her masters. In Cuba, on the other hand, social freedom did not make this type of patronage possible, which alleviated the harshness of the environment; which, though less rude, was still beyond the strength of individuals aspiring to such a specialty as that of poetry. With men it is different, because its projection —and connections— is always political, allowing for other developments; contrary to women, who must leap from the domestic, when this —and not poetry— was the priority, as a primary need.

However, history is not an immobile, universal and abstract phenomenon, to be looked at with absolute parameters; on the contrary, as a reality, it occurs in the concrete phenomena in which it is realized, punctual in its exceptionality. It was then a matter of time before some pioneer would put her pike of blackness in the Flanders of Cuban literature; a development traumatized by the triumph of the revolution, with what that meant institutionally and ontologically.

That is the strange circumstance of Georgina Herrera, who makes her literary debut with the new institutionality; curiously, on the losing (Ediciones el Puente) and not on the triumphant side, which persists in its racial elitism. In fact, her older age compared to her contemporaries exposes her as the pioneer who did not materialize; grouped in an extemporaneity that did not allow her to establish group but only her own references, in her sufficiency.

In another circumstance, Herrera would have renewed the national spectrum with her sentimental existentialism; in her actual circumstance, she was neutralized by her low political profile, persisting in that existentialism. Perhaps this made possible her special sensitivity to African openness, dubious outside of the country's political manipulations; and yet this allowed her to reconnect with a transcendence, in which identity transcends the problems of childhood.

Recognized in all its splendour, her poetry is nevertheless dragged down by the weight of mediocre criticism; that, resorting to the commonplace, still tries to put together a political discourse where there is only personality; It is also about overexploiting that other commonplace of motherhood, more complex and dramatic than idyllic in her. Herrera is, in any case, an enigmatic and complex figure in every sense, from thematic to strictly literary existentialism; because her poetry does not derive from the symbolism with which modernity culminated, in its critical rationalization of romanticism; but matures directly from this romanticism, probably thanks to her formation, unique and sufficient as her self-taught.

Georgina Herrera navigated the iron system with her apparent modesty, camouflaging her haughtiness in silence; which further guaranteed her existentialism, with her persistence in the low political profile, which preserved it. In the end, there is nothing more political than that scandalous silence of her, like the stamp of his African elegance; something that the country insists on disdaining, as if it were not the needle that gives consistency to world, only that she already was and will be.