This April 19, 1914, marks 110 years since the birth of Ángel Gaztelu Gorriti, a significant poet of the Orígenes Group. Despite being born in Puente la Reina, Navarra, Spain, Gaztelu embraced his Cuban identity deeply, as highlighted by Teresa Fernández Soneira in “La Voz Católica.” “Cubanía is felt or not felt,” Gaztelu affirmed, “and I know that I feel it deeply.”
At the age of 17, Gaztelu arrived in Havana, and after completing his high school education, he enrolled in the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio in Havana, where he was ordained a priest in 1938. He immediately began teaching Latin and Spanish grammar at the seminary, a place where he confessed he would have liked to stay, as he enjoyed teaching and being close to the library.
He was appointed parish priest of the Church of San Nicolás de Bari. From that moment, Gaztelu stood out for his efforts to restore religious buildings and artistically decorate them. This was evident when he was appointed parish priest of Caimito del Guayabal. The church there had been destroyed during the last war for our independence, and Gaztelu took on the task of rebuilding it.
In 1941, he was assigned to the parish of Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Bauta, which he also reconstructed. In this work, he demonstrated his artistic sensitivity by seeking the collaboration of artist friends for the decoration of the church. These artists donated valuable paintings, stained glass windows, sculptures, and murals, the latter painted by René Portocarrero and Mariano Rodríguez.
Through his brother Salvador, Gaztelu met José Lezama Lima when they were both very young, and that relationship would definitively mark Gaztelu’s life because Lezama introduced the priest to the Orígenes Group, one of the most significant events in the history of our literature. There he would meet Fina García Marrúz, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Gastón Baquero, Amelia Peláez, René Portocarrero, and other valuable artists and writers with whom he would maintain a deep friendship. According to Cintio Vitier, Father Gaztelu became a fundamental part of the Orígenes Group, as he made the Church of Bauta available to its members, who held their banquets and gatherings there.
It was in that church where Eliseo Diego married Bella García Marrúz, and it was also where Eliseo first presented his poem “Primer discurso,” from his famous poetry collection “En la calzada de Jesús del Monte.”
Being associated with this group allowed Father Gaztelu to make friends with many of the most valuable visual artists of that time, who gave him some of their works as gifts, allowing him to form a significant collection of Cuban art, now under the protection of the Catholic Church.
A Work Between Silence and Humility
The case of Father Ángel Gaztelu reminds me of the poet Roberto Friol, as both were notable cultivators of poetry, a creation they embraced with remarkable humility.
With the help of José Lezama Lima, Gaztelu published his book “Poemas” in 1940. In 1955, he published “Gradual de Laudes,” considered his most important poetic work, and in 1994, he published his book “Poemario.”
In 1997, the government of Navarra included him in its Literary Collection by publishing his book “Gradual de Laudes,” with a prologue by Gastón Baquero, who stated: “Gradual de Laudes is one of the jewels of that brief and intense treasure that Orígenes added to Cuban poetry (…) The novelty and distinctiveness of that voice harmonized deeply with the novelty and distinctiveness of the poetry of that group. That is to say, among the originists, Ángel Gaztelu was, by right, one of the best tones in the great total melody.”
Regarding Gaztelu’s poetry, Cintio Vitier affirmed that it “captures Cuban identity both internally and as landscape (…) which never constitutes an obsession or an object of search but as a loyal instrument, in a humbly maintained place, of clear glory and voluptuous chant.”
Juan Ramón Jiménez even selected eleven of his poems for his anthology “La poesía cubana en 1936.”
In the article “Ángel Gaztelu, sworn secular of Havana,” written by Roberto Méndez, the critic expresses that it is in the “Poemas sacros,” written in free verse, where the poet reaches his best gifts.
“So the soul grieves looking at the stars and the sea, entrusts its voices, its voices that in the rumor of a dove learn the foam of the name. The name in which everything is reborn and lives eternally flowery and young. In this night, I have found a new joy again of unspeakable calm. Facing the serene sea, one feels God, who forgives us and loves.”
Vitier stated that the poem “Oración y meditación de la noche” constitutes the first Cuban expression of “an absolute religious poem, without pretense or literature.” Despite the excess and inaccuracy of the quote, Roberto Méndez affirms in the aforementioned article the following: “Gaztelu has achieved not only a poem of unsuspected height within the reduced corpus of his work, but this vigorously renews the language of religious poetry in Cuba as the second half of the 20th century begins, stripping it of its worst rhetorical burdens and placing it at a very high level in the Hispanic world, close to the best texts that by those years produce a Luis Rosales or a José María Valverde.”
In the quoted poem, the poet bares himself before God, not only because he understands and has perfectly assimilated his smallness and vulnerability, but also because he places all his trust in Him, claiming eternity, ultimately, a divine gift. But that claim is not made for himself as a poet, but simply as a man who, from his humility, lived through a vigorous cultural era and also left his mark on it.
“And my name, Lord, write it with the fire of your blood, of your indelible blood, richer than silver and gold, in the book of Life. That’s all I want to ask of you, Love, tonight in the peace of your stars.”
Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces