Since the fifteenth century, in variants such as the royal couplet and later the spinel, the décima has captivated not a few creators with that magic that is a "pure air prison". Vicente Gómez Martínez Espinel, with his musical virtues, established the structure that would mark the rhymes: "abbaaccddc". And from then on, he flew the "peninsular traveler" until she got native in Cuba. Not for nothing Mirta Aguirre said: "…because she was born first/and our people later."
Las Tunas, Cuba.- In Las Tunas it is often said half-jokingly, half seriously, that you lift a stone and a poet emerges. An octosyllabic tradition and several names that resound like bells, even beyond our borders, reaffirm that exaggeration has a lot of truth.
We are no longer in times in which a woman, like the Havana marquise Beatriz Jústiz de Santa Ana, complains before a Spanish monarch with a long spread in décimas for the poor work of the colonial troops in defending the city. But we are in times of empowerment, gender perspective, and different views of our environment. For this reason, the inspirations of the word echo these and other realities.
In the land where a bard, just over 30 years old, became the most important figure in the matter of that verse in Cuba, the poetesses also honor him on his 194th birthday with various creations. An example of this was the Women's Recital of Décima that in the context of the Cucalambeana Fiesta reached the Las Tunas venue of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation, to make poetry a delight for the participants in the Supreme Festival of the Cuban Peasantry.
Under the leadership of Odalys Leyva and María Sao, writers such as Marina Lourdes Jacobo, Yuslenis Molina, Maritza Batista, Lucy Maestre, Nuria Bárbara Fernández, Ana Pérez, and others, raised their lyrical voices in the “Cherry Tree Courtyard.”
The prominent intellectual Carlos Tamayo presented a Solo Poetry, with the work of authors who are members of the Provincial Committee of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), a foldout illustrated with works by Gitzy López and verses as beautiful as those of Maritza Batista when says: "... of children, their innocence/ when they offer you their arm/ or they give you a deck/ of stars, algae and fish./ Someone will count the months/ if you ask them for a hug.”
Repentistas like Orismay Hernández, Héctor Pélaez, Juan Carlos García Guridi, and Guillermo Castillo (son), with the accompaniment of strings from Camagüey, dedicated décimas to the women and honored the peasant tradition that summons them here. Not in vain, Castillo expressed at the end of a composition: "The Cucalambeana stanza has a woman's name."
