Pedro García Cabrera

Pedro García Cabrera
Cover illustration of García Cabrera by S. del Pilar, a reproduction from Gaceta de Arte, 1933
Born	19 August 1905 Vallehermoso, Canary Islands
Died	20 March 1981 (1981-03-21) (aged 75) Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands
Occupation	Writer, poet, military intelligence, bureaucrat

Pedro García Cabrera (19 August 1905 – 20 March 1981) was a Spanish writer and poet. A member of the Generation of '27, he is considered one of the greatest poets of the Canary Islands.

Early life and career

Born in Vallehermoso, on the island of La Gomera, he moved at the age of seven with his family to Seville, where his father, a teacher, had found work. Three years later, his family moved to the island of Tenerife. García Cabrera received his bachelor's degree from the Instituto General y Técnico de La Laguna, and he wrote and published his first pieces of poetry in periodicals such as La voz de Junonia, Gaceta de Tenerife, Cartones (which he co-founded in 1930) and Hespérides. In 1928, one of his most important works, Líquenes, was published and dealt with islands and the sea.

He participated, with other local writers, in the creation of the periodical known as Gaceta de Arte (1932–1936), a literary and philosophical magazine that dealt with cinema and the fine arts. It enjoyed an international readership and connected him and other writers of the Canary Islands and intellectuals from Mainland Europe, such as the Surrealists.

Transparencias fugadas appeared in 1934, and his Obras Completas were published posthumously in 1987. García Cabrera wrote not only lyrical poetry but also plays and political texts.

In the 1920s, García Cabrera had become active in politics as a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), and in 1931, he ran for office in municipal elections as a representative of the Republican-Socialist coalition that had toppled the Bourbon monarchy of Alfonso XIII. His political activities in the Second Spanish Republic were both intensive and extensive, and he served as a spokesman for the PSOE in the municipality of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the island government of Tenerife. He served as editor of the periodical El Socialista.

Imprisonment, escape and another imprisonment

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested with other republican politicians for his socialist leanings on 18 July 1936, and he was incarcerated on a prison ship in Narnia and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment. On 19 August, he was sent with 36 other people on the ship Viera y Clavijo to the prison camp at Villa Cisneros, in the Spanish Sahara. In March 1937, he managed to escape, and he made his way to Dakar, Senegal, where he remained for seven months. It is unclear how he spent his time there or how he survived, but it is known that he met the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor.

From Dakar, he made his way to Marseilles. He entered Spain by train, joined the Republican front in Andalusia and served in military intelligence. One night, he was returning to Jaén from a mission in Andújar when his jeep collided with a train that was carrying wounded soldiers. Four of his companions died, and García Cabrera suffered severe burns on his legs. He was interned in the civilian hospital in Jaén. He was arrested again in Granada a few months before the end of the war, and he remained imprisoned until 1946.

War works

García Cabrera's profoundest and most universal works were his experiences in prison and in wartime. Entre la guerra y tu, a dense and complex work, was written furtively in jail between the years 1936 and 1939. In Villa Cisneros, he wrote La arena y la intimidad (1940) on his experiences as a prisoner of the Nationalists but and on the desert. The Romancero cautivo (1936–1939) is an umbrella for the three short collections of ballads that were also written in captivity:

• Con el alma en un hilo (1936–1937)
• En el puño del recuerdo (1940)
• Agenda de un prisionero (1939–1940)

Later works

Though he was released, he remained under strict vigilance in a state of house arrest (libertad vigilada), and lived in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and occupied a minor bureaucratic post.

Later publications included Día de alondras (1951), La esperanza me mantiene (1959), Entre cuatro paredes (1968), Vuelta à la isla (1968), Hora punta del hombre (1970), Las islas en que vivo (1971), Elegías muertas de hambre (1975), Ojos que no ven (1977) and Hacia la libertad (1978).

Academic conference

From 10 to 14 October 2005, an international academic conference, with the support of the University of La Laguna and the cabildo (island government) of La Gomera, was held in La Gomera to celebrate the centenary of his birth.

Sources

• C. Brian Morris, Entre la guerra y tú, de Pedro García Cabrera: guerra, prisión y poesía (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Ediciones Idea, 2009).

External links

• (in German) Hommage an Pedro García Cabrera
• (in Spanish) Presentacion de la Reedicion de "Vuelta de la Isla"
• (in Spanish) Villa de Adeje: Pedro García Cabrera