Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana were undoubtedly the most prominent voices of Cuban female poetry during this period. Perhaps due to her long stay abroad and the inevitable distancing from her roots, or perhaps due to her energetic attitude, which echoed rebellious sentiments in many of her pieces, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda did not establish herself as a literary model on the island. Luisa Pérez de Zambrana did have some followers, and in this sense, her own aesthetic influenced the development of poetry by other women of her time.

Reminiscences of her style are somehow present in Úrsula Céspedes de Escanaverino (1831–1874), Adelaida de Mármol (1838–1857), and her own sister, Julia Pérez Montes de Oca. Less prominent poets also wrote during this period, but they contributed in some way to giving a face to women’s poetry. It is worth mentioning Brígida Agüero, Merced Valdés Mendoza, Luisa Molina, and Belén Cepero.

Úrsula Céspedes de Escanaverino founded a school for girls in Bayamo and published poems in various newspapers, such as “Semanario Cubano,” “El Redactor de Santiago de Cuba,” “La Regeneración,” “La Antorcha,” “La Alborada,” and others in different regions of the country. Her verses reflect an emotional interpretation of nature, and some reach elegiac tones similar to those of Luisa Pérez. However, she also cultivated a criollismo (a style not devoid of humor). Her vision of women was perhaps fresher and less tied to “what should be” than Luisa’s, although she did not reach the latter’s lyrical heights. The following stanzas from her poem, “El amor de la serrana” (The Love of the Serrana), are illustrative:

“At the highest peak
What’s in the Sierra Maestra
There is my hut, and it shows
That in it I lack nothing.
Here the brook jumps
From rock to rock to the valley
And through one street and another
Of orange and lemon trees,
They are lighting hearts
Serranas with a graceful waist.
(…)
He told me when I saw him
That I was heaven to him
And my hair was black
Like the neck of the totí.
That wasn’t around here
Another beautiful mountain girl,
And he added: From tomorrow
If you pity my sorrows
My hives will be yours
And you will be my sovereign.
(…)
And while I night and day
I cry in torrents here,
Very bad for me
They say in the mountains.
Well, just by seeing the falsehood
How bad my face shows,
With a clumsy and sinister tongue
They say I’m the mountain woman
More fickle and flighty
What is in the Sierra Maestra?

Adelaida de Mármol actually died very young and did not have enough time to cultivate her poetic gift; however, the few surviving works of hers possess a naive and peaceful tone in their descriptions of natural features and a spontaneous religiosity that in some ways recall the poetry of Luisa Pérez, to whom she dedicated a sonnet entitled “Al conocer a Luisa” (On Meeting Luisa), when she met the poet in Santiago de Cuba. She apparently published a collection of poems, entitled “Ecos de mi arp” (Echoes of My Harp), which has not been found to date, and other excerpts that were published in Havana magazines.

The most important figure of those mentioned in this section is Luisa Pérez de Zambrana’s own sister, Julia Pérez Montes de Oca, whose religious devotion stands out, evident in the poem “A Dios”, as well as her empathy with nature and the small creatures that live in it, as can be seen in her poems “A un colibrí” and “Al Campo”, from which the last stanza is reproduced:

“Who of inspiration felt the flattery
That I would not find sweet recreation in you?
What pain or desire
Your floating groves do not temper,
In whose high branches forgotten
The nightingale lover cries? Who could
Contemplate its beauty,
That in sublime sadness
The chest did not feel alienated,
And what sensitive heart does not love it?
From your rustic temples
The magical rumor that rises?

José Lezama Lima preferred among her poems the one titled “The Afternoon”, and expressed about its author: “Julia Pérez has a special significance within Romanticism, where the traditional concern of pursuing the best of a tradition, which does not die out because its roots are deep underground, is not very frequent” and he also said: “It is surprising that given the life that Julia Pérez had to lead, one of sadness and withdrawal, a life of intense frustration, she had a taste for reading classics, verses composed with meticulous care and maintaining an exquisite balance between feeling and form. Both Luisa and Julia are painful poets, but Luisa mourns what she acquired and lost, Julia, on the contrary, mourns what could never be hers, what a deceptive brush with her had with her, an impossible love with one of the poets of the time, everything that left a scar on her life from which she could never recover.”