“Habana del centro” is a collection of poems published by Fina García Marruz in 1997, still awaiting critical acclaim. It consists of a section of the same name and nine others entitled “Of the Humble and the Heroes,” “Old Melodies,” “Charlot’s Credits,” “Elementary Notions and Some Elegies,” “Elementary Physics,” “Second Parts,” “Ode to Anacreon and Other Poems,” “The Rembrandts of the Hermitage,” and “Friendly Verse.”

Some of the pieces in the collection date from the Republican era and are not arranged chronologically, perhaps because they constitute timeless brushstrokes with which Fina had painted her inner city. However, some poems, such as “La puesta,” draw us into a world of lyrical reminiscences of childhood, the miracle of the sunset from a Havana rooftop.

In this collection of poems, she also pays tribute to key poets of our tradition, including Eliseo Diego, José Lezama Lima, Octavio Smith, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Samuel Feijóo, among others. In some ways, these poetics also converge in Fina’s work, although her creative uniqueness integrated and transcended countless national and foreign influences.

In “Foggy Crystals,” she captures many family memories in soaring poetic prose. These pieces have a tone of transcendent intimacy, as if the poet has spent the entire period of solitude, evoking and then poetically expressing her discovery in memory, moving on to a new state of communion with her circumstances and readers. But beyond these poems, in “Old Friendships,” she expresses the essence of poetry:

“Poetry, I open my hand. You are generous today (…) I know the solitary place where you dwell and where you whisper all the things we have forgotten. I have not always been faithful to you, but my insides know only of the imposing force with which your waters once filled the humid caverns of my deserted rock.”

The collection includes a lengthy text dedicated to Rita Montaner, whom he proposes including not among the voices but among the “Cuban laughter,” as a reflection of her joy in life, along with others dedicated to Bola de Nieve and Miguel Cuní, Virgilio, and others. The lyrical materials he sculpts in the text are certainly diverse, and some pieces stand out above others in terms of aesthetic resonance; however, they converge in a dialogue with memory that reaches notable heights, culminating in a lyrical career of universal reach.