“The Island in Weight” presents a perhaps dissolving vision of Cubanness, truly departing from Origenist inquiries but nonetheless marked by notable aesthetic values. Gastón Baquero and other members of his class did not share the work’s background, labeling it as distorting the reality of the national being, “a falsified testimony of the Island.”

The collection of poems begins with the following verses, in which one can already appreciate, to a certain extent, the subversion of traditional canons in the assessment of island circumstances, a weariness of life that is contradictorily a breath that runs through and gives life to its pages, where its authenticity as a creator resides, to a certain extent:

“The damned circumstance of water everywhere
forces me to sit at the coffee table.
If I didn’t think that water surrounds me like a cancer
I could have slept soundly”

One might think this is a biased perspective; however, it stems from the poet’s intention to expose the other side of a reality, of a country he considers too young. A veiled and sometimes more overt reminiscence of eroticism is rooted in the racial mixture he somehow defends, with his allusions to ñáñigos, Chinos, among others; but above all, the subversion of social and religious codes:

“…Can these people still be saved from heaven,
for to the beat of the hymns the maidens skillfully wave
the phalluses of men.
The impetuous wave invades the vast hall of genuflections.
No one thinks of imploring, of giving thanks, of being grateful,
in testifying,
holiness deflates like a laugh.
Let the chaotic symbols of love be the first objects that
feel,
Fortunately, we are unaware of voluptuousness and caresses
French,
We do not know the perfect enjoyer and the octopus woman,
we do not know the strategic mirrors,
We do not know how to carry syphilis with the calm elegance of a
swan,
We are unaware that very soon we will be practicing these mortals
“elegances.”

In another of the stanzas he refers with an explicit superficial meaning, deliberate as part of his approach to the insular, to elements of Cuban reality: downpour, sugar, sugarcane field, tobacco, highlighting in a certain way the meaninglessness of the words as an attempt to capture the irreducible nature of the national in a definition or mere enumeration of elements.

The poem culminates with the verses transcribed below, in which, above the elements indicated, it appeals to or proposes in a certain way an interweaving, the term of people, as a telluric brotherhood:

“A town descends resolutely into enormous fertilizer posts,
feeling the water surrounding him from all sides,
lower, lower, and the sea stinging at their backs;
A people stays with their beast at the time of departure,
howling in the sea, devouring fruits, sacrificing animals,
always lower, until knowing the weight of his island;
the weight of an island in the love of a people.”

Beyond the dissolution or collapse of the island in a metaphorical sense, the poet places it in a stage of emerging identity, perhaps as an intuition of the weight of republican subjugation to the United States, which constituted a heavy burden on existential plenitude.