We know Alberto Mawad Santos for his contributions to the exact sciences, primarily as a physics professor and coach. But he prefers not to talk about that; “there are men who carry within themselves the dignity of many men,” said Martí. Today, we will talk about another facet, one that links him to José María Heredia, that great figure of our literature, whom we know so little about, "the first poet of America," as the Apostle called him.
More than a year ago, Mawad immersed himself in the work of the initiator of Romanticism in the Spanish language, and although he does not consider himself a historian nor does he seek titles for it, it is fascinating to hear him talk about the subject. In particular, he conducted a detailed study of the hypertextual relationship between Heredia's poem Oda and issues 1, 2, and 3 of El Habanero, written by Félix Varela y Morales.
Along these lines, this history lover from Las Tunas demonstrated that "El cantor del Niágara" (Niagara rhapsodist), through Oda, shows his acceptance of Varela's political ideas and, not only that, but expresses them in verse. He also asserts that it is the poetic work written by the author of Himno del desterrado that “shows the greatest political urgency among all his patriotic compositions.”
Dates, letters, phrases, poems, symbols, semiotics, lexicology... Mawad took all this and more into account to support his study. Among the concluding elements, he points out that “Ode is the first poetic work in Cuban literature in which the insular nature of Cuba and its geographical position appear as the basis for a political conviction of independence.” In addition, after a thorough review of the documentary bibliography, he established a probable date for the writing of the poem in question as March 4, 1825, which means that it has now reached its bicentennial.
“For more than 30 years, I have been looking for references to physics in socio-historical works, in essays and creations without fictional nuances, but I also began to look for them in Cuban poetry. Then, one fine day, I came across Heredia, in whose texts (also in prose) I found it...,” says the professor at the University of Las Tunas.
“As I delved deeper into his writings, I realized the hypertextual relationship with Varela's thinking and devoted myself to finding out how that symbiosis was established,” he adds. Thus, following in the footsteps of an Ode —which was not as widely disseminated as Niagara or the Hymn of the Exile— this professor has consulted dozens of books, articles, opinions of the Venezuelan humanist Andrés Bello, texts by German Hispanists, Martí, Manuel Sanguily, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, and others.
"The historian Emilio Roig, for example, describes how at the end of the 19th century, people did not remember the existence of the newspaper El Habanero. The Spanish government had persecuted it," are among the insights offered by the researcher, who, a few months ago, shared this knowledge at the Tunas headquarters of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation (FNG in Spanish). That meeting was peppered with quotes, comparisons, curiosities, and readings of fragments of unique texts such as letters from Heredia to his mother.
Mawad still feels “improvised” in the field of scientific research, but he does not stop. And for me, as a journalist, what captivates me is his concern for revering one of our illustrious writers, the one who, in addition to his lyrical works, left us essays, literary criticism, short stories, dramatic pieces, and a valuable collection of letters that we are unaware of. The one who is said to have already known how to read at the age of three and, at 17, wrote his first poem, En el teocalli de Cholula (In the Teocalli of Cholula). The one who, from exile, expressed an enormous longing for our land. It was not in vain that Martí said of him: “I come here as a desperate and loving son, to briefly remember, with no other notes than those dictated by glory, the life of the one who sang, with unknown majesty, to women, danger, and palm trees.”