Under the title “Island and Other Poems,” the bard and literary researcher Juan Nicolás Padrón released a selection of poems by the late Rolando Escardó, many of which had already been included in previous anthologies, as is the case of the poem from which the title is taken and which is representative of Escardó’s entire poetics, even more of the nationalist sentiment purified with the revolutionary impetus, to whose sound of change he was incorporated body and soul into his poetry.

The poem has been included in numerous anthologies of Cuban poetry, and literary critics generally agree that it reflects the way in which the collective experience of the Revolution was expressed in Cuban poetry in the early years after the Revolution came to power. This generation of the 1950s, to which Escardó belonged, is even associated with the centenary generation, as they fulfilled an aesthetic purpose concomitant with the process of political transformations undertaken in 1953.

The poem “Island” in a certain way updates to a transformed present the also mythical poem “The Island in Weight” by Virgilio Piñera, from this hidden link of meaning one can follow part of the process of formation of the most lucid face of nationality, passing through the Origenist inquiries and the discoveries that the revolutionary process itself entailed, to which Escardó also dedicates himself from the verse:

“This island is a mountain on which I live,
The solemn mother
He pushed these rocks into the seas.
In the unknown time that is not named
in the limit that is not written
landslides occurring
the deep cracks
-throats to the white fires-:
The time of my birth on this island arrives
-planet burning in the sky-:
the time of my birth arrives
and also that of my deaths
For I have come to the world so that I may settle.
(…)
But what matters to me is the Revolution
the rest are words
from the background
of this poem that I give to the world
the rest are my arguments.
Don’t believe my words
I am one of many crazy people who talk
and you will not understand me
don’t believe my words
This island is a mountain
on which I live…

In these verses the author allows himself to be carried away by a poetics of social beat that had nothing of compliment or formalism, but rather expresses an authentic vibration and the flowering of a poetic expression already in the colloquial, where he has not however renounced the torment of his innermost being as a creator but tries to erect himself on the primordial emotions, the dictates of the unconscious and even a certain intellectual vein to transmit the effervescence of events that he considered more important than poetry itself, until then worthy of his greatest offering.

Escardó’s poems contained in this book have been considered the most important in terms of the artistic sensibility that prevailed in the first revolutionary decade, however they manifest a poetics that is undoubtedly unique in its appropriation of diverse lyrical flows, in addition to the aforementioned colloquialism, a certain influence of César Vallejo can be seen as an outstanding note, an anguish that is expressed in a sometimes esoteric symbolism and even some critics have noticed how his other vocation, speleology, filters into his poetic work.

Rolando Escardó is one of those promising young writers whose death cut short his most fruitful years. However, he undoubtedly left an indelible mark on the history of poetic creation in the islands, and his work sparks growing interest among scholars and readers, who rediscover him with each new edition.