Between poetry and anecdotes passed the tribute that was paid last Thursday at the Los Pinos Cultural Complex to Jesús Orta Ruiz (1922-2005), better known as The Nabori Indian, one of the figures of Cuban poetics of the 20th century.
Characterized by its intimate and festive atmosphere, the act was part of the celebrations that have taken place this year in Cuba and Mexico for the centenary of who is considered the great innovator of the tenth spinel.
It was a session of almost two hours in which the island poets Fidel Orta Pérez, Waldo Leyva and Margarita Sánchez evoked the life and work of that author from Havana, in addition to reading aloud some of his poems and the honoree.
According to Leyva, The Nabori Indian He is “one of the most beloved poets” by the people of that Caribbean nation and the rest of Latin America.
He mentioned that at the last International Book Fair in Havana there was no shortage of days when there were at least two or three activities to honor him, to which he added that in Mexico another tribute was paid to him in Veracruz.
On August 13 there will be a dialogue about his life and work and a meeting of improvisers at the National Museum of Popular Cultures (Hidalgo 39, Coyoacán Center), starting at 3:00 p.m.
“The Indian was, as a poet and a human being, inexhaustible. He was blessed by nature. First, he was beautiful; second, a relentless social fighter; he sang like nobody else; the tenths of it renewed the entire tenth tradition of Ibero-America; he was a cultured poet; he wrote possibly some of the best poetry of the 20th century. He had everything,” he claimed.
As the son of the honoree and also as a poet, Fidel Orta Pérez recited from memory and read several of the poems of The Nabori Indian corresponding to various periods of his life.
Between one poem and another, the also narrator and screenwriter recalled passages and anecdotes from the life of his father, whom he defined as a polyphonic poet with many emotional and creative edges.
“Critics have him as the great innovator of the tenth spinel; In the Spanish language he is well known in this sense, but others consider him to be the innovator or rescuer of the sonnet as a stanza form; others of political poetry. He was extraordinarily linked to the Cuban political process from before the triumph of the revolution and until his death in 2005. ”
He was “a man with a very intense life in which everything started from emotion. He had a great virtue, analyzing his poetry: that in him the theme did not look for emotion, but this was the one that looked for the theme. He got excited and then he sang, he wrote. That is why there is so much emotion in his poetry, even in politics”.
He assured that although as a son he was very insistent with him to write his memoirs, after he became blind –“one of his great human dramas”–, he never agreed to do so.
“When he went to Panama, Omar Torrijos received him and spoke with him; The same thing happened with Salvador Allende in 1972, in Chile, and he never told what happened in those meetings, nor the ones he had with Fidel (Castro), the Che (Guevara), Nicolás Guillén and other great Cuban poets”, he pointed out.
“He said that these were circumstantial situations, that the most important thing in his life was in his poems; that whoever wanted to get closer to him, to know him from the inside, his secret, his mystery, should approach his poetry, where he would find everything.”