José Jacinto Milanés is one of the most interesting poets in our lyrical history, not only for the uniqueness of the tones of his work within the romantic register, but also for his own life, especially the last years in which he completely loses his mind, the traces of the growing lack of lucidity are left in his works, although in the final stage he completely ceases his creative work and even his other tasks, in fact he becomes a useless being who wanders and rambles in his own universe, without any contact with reality.

Although his personal history has not been fully reconstructed, it is known that he came from a wealthy Matanzas family with a large number of children; however, their social status did not correspond to their actual financial resources, as these had diminished while they retained a false aura of wealth. The mental disorders and literary ramblings of the poet’s later years are sometimes attributed to contradictions arising from his position halfway between and at the center of the antagonisms of two opposing social classes.

The poet’s formation was directly mentored by Domingo del Monte, who exercised a kind of friendly patronage in the cultural sphere of Cuba at the time. It should be noted in passing that this personality, although possessing a notable intellect and vast culture, was limited by his class conditioning, as a member of the bourgeois elite and therefore a guardian of its interests. His influence on the poet perhaps tended to further sharpen the complexities of his personality and the difficult interaction with his environment, which is sometimes reflected in agonizing writing that breaks the most cherished canons of the author’s own aesthetic.

Along the aesthetic lines that are intelligible throughout his work, without taking into account the final phase from a literary point of view – it is true that psychologically it has an invaluable and as yet untapped value in approaching the poet’s personality – one can appreciate a romanticism indebted to Heredian poetics, but which follows a much sweeter and more intimate line, without the exaltation that runs through the verses of the aforementioned author.

The use of words that were then Cuban neologisms, sometimes bordering on the vulgar, is notable, perhaps in an attempt to rescue and shed light on the beauty of popular speech, which was largely ignored. Regarding this aspect, Luaces and Fornaris emphasized in Cuba Poética: “He was the first among us who wanted to initiate his own literature, and to this end, he painted the objects that surrounded him with vivid colors, daring to use provincial names and even expressions (Cubanisms) that our poets had previously avoided as an insult to tradition and a profanation of the classic Spanish poets.”

However, Cuban identity, in addition to being present in the words and the poetic discourse itself, followed from Heredia a path toward independence that would be unavoidable and at the same time exacerbated by the Romantic movement, which had one of its key anchors in Milanés. One of his most famous poems, “The Escape of the Turtledove,” is a clear allegory of the island’s need to free itself from the Spanish yoke. One possible reading also points to the end of slavery, suggested by the use of the word “cimarronzuela” to describe the fleeing turtledove, especially if one appeals to the author’s sensitivity to just causes. Another enigma this poem poses is that the lyrical subject conversing with the turtledove is female, although this may simply be due to a need for rhyme. The most significant stanza for understanding the author’s position on freedom is the following:

“But alas! Your escape already proves me right.”
How you long to be free, blessed passion
That although I cry for her, I approve of her-
Oh my turtledove, my little turtledove,
That he has gone to the mountain and there he stayed!

In addition to this, his work reveals a socialist undertone that his family was careful to conceal. It has even been speculated that his madness, attributed to a broken heart in love, was actually a kind of ruse to protect him from alleged Spanish persecution. His poem, entitled “A Thought,” explicitly referring to Cuba, contains the following stanza:

“But alas! Although it flatters
Your beauty so full,
In that candid breast
There is a horrible sore.
In vain, beautiful maiden,
You hide it, everyone sees it,
And everyone knows very well
That a sore on a beautiful
Her beauty undresses.
Poor Cuba, poor girl,
To whom the disgusting ringworm
He stole her Indian beauty!
What is the point of adorning yourself with flowers,
If in your guava fields
Lords and slaves wander,
“Oppressed and oppressors?”

The theme of Cuba was very recurrent in his poetry, and José Jacinto Milanés has gone down in history not only for capturing the independence sentiment that was taking hold in the collective consciousness of the time, but also for the uniqueness of his poetic voice, in which romanticism did not in any way constitute an imitation of European models, nor even of those that already formed part of the lyrical tradition on the island, but had been internalized and brought to light in a different and plural way.