The Poets (and more)

It’s important to recognize that the Figueredo family has produced some remarkable members of the literary world.  Perucho Figueredo and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, themselves, were recognized as musicians and poets many years before they became famous as martyrs to the cause of Cuban freedom.

German Arciniegas Angueyra wrote more than 60 books and is described as “one of the continent’s most important writers”. Such works as Caribbean, Sea of the New World, in 1946, and Latin America: A Cultural History, in 1966, introduced an international audience to Arciniegas' panoramic view of his continent.

Ursula de Céspedes y Orellano was a poet whose first book of  poetry, Ecos de las Selvas [Echos of the Forest] was published in Bayamo in 1860, and contained a foreword by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

Jose Jacinto Milanes y Fuentes was "one of the most distinguished Cuban poets of the nineteenth century" despite ''vague rumors that surround a gifted writer's strange life".

Silvestre de Balboa Troya is described as the author of the first major literary work in seventeenth century Cuba, a poem entitled El espejo de paciencia.

Alba de Céspedes y Bertini wrote more than ten novels and two collections of poems and was one of the pioneering figures in the feminist movement of pre-war Italy.