In the summer of 1890, the Cuban patriot José Martí vacationed in Twilight Park, a residential enclave in Haines Falls, where he was inspired to write Versos sencillos, his last and most influential poetry collection.
Twilight Park is a private summer colony located in the hamlet of Haines Falls, in Greene County, New York. It was founded in 1888 by Charles Wingate, a New Yorker who envisioned a community of professionally eclectic, if like-minded, city-dwellers seeking summer respite from urban life. Wingate purchased 160 acres in a scenic mountaintop area at the head of Kaaterskill Clove. The privileged location afforded breathtaking views of the deep gorge, close proximity to stunning waterfalls like Kaaterskill Falls, and easy access to hiking trails. During the late 1880s and ’90s, some 75 summer cottages were built, typically in a Craftsman or Adirondack style with roofed, open porches that allowed residents to enjoy the marvelous views and a relaxed indoor–outdoor lifestyle. Over the years, Twilight Park acquired more than 500 additional acres, yet the number of cottages only grew to 91, all of which retain their historic architectural details. The community, designated in 2017 a national historic district, continues to reflect Wingate’s founding ethos: “To cultivate good fellowship and enjoy rational recreation.”
The Cuban national hero José Martí (1853–1895) visited Twilight Park while convalescing in the Catskills in August 1890. It was during this trip he would draft his last and arguably most important poetry collection, Versos sencillos [“Simple Verses”]. Martí was exhausted after a restless decade in exile in New York City, where he had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, launched a newspaper and children’s magazine, published several books, and authored syndicated journalism disseminated across the hemisphere. He was also physically depleted from his participation in the contentious Washington Pan-American Congress of 1889–90. Suffering from fatigue, chronic aches, and pulmonary difficulties caused by sarcoidosis, Martí sought, on doctor’s orders, rest, relaxation, and the lauded fresh-air “cure” in the Catskills region.
Martí’s time in Twilight Park and its environs proved reinvigorating. His glowing impressions of his visit are documented in an 1890 crónica published in the Argentine newspaper La Nación. Twilight Park, he wrote: “es un sueño de hermoso, con su pórtico de ramas de abedul, sobre la boca de las cataratas mismas; su rebaño de casas rojas, agrupadas, aquí y allá, alrededor de la casa del club, sus sendas de piedra natural, que culebrean por la ladera, sobre arroyos y céspedes, de una casa a otra.” Martí was particularly taken with Twilight Park’s distinctive blend of natural beauty and human fellowship. As he put it, “Familia de casas parece el parque, que es todo de amigos, donde las visitas entran y salen a gozar en libertad de la hermosura del parque.” Martí describes the residential resort’s development and the myriad wholesome activities offered, from drawing, painting, hiking, picnicking, mule riding, gardening and botany excursions to napping in the great outdoors. He concludes the crónica with a cheerful scene of a rainy-day luncheon at the clubhouse. The assorted diners include parents and their sprightly children, doting grandparents, a general, a doctor, a consul, a minister, a pipe-smoking artist, and even an amusing dandy. The group eats, trades stories, debates and laughs, filling Martí with a sense of bright possibilities. As he puts it expressly in the crónica’s last line: “Y cuando acaba la risueña comida, sobre las barandas rústicas brilla, limpio, el sol.”
In his private notebooks and published writings, Martí’s writings shine with his sunny admiration for Twilight Park and the Catskills region. In his journal, for example, he records how the area’s verdant landscape enlivened his spirit compared to the grimness of the city: “En la ciudad cuando cierro los ojos, todo lo veo negro. Y aquí cuando cierro los ojos. Lo veo todo verde.” He jotted down colorful descriptions of the mountains amidst a downpour and recorded his amusement playing games with other Twilight Park guests. Perhaps most vividly, in his 1890 crónica for La Nación, Martí describes the Catskills region as “una gloria, bien se vaya adonde el bullicio, allá en los hoteles que dan, colosales balcones, sobre el valle del Hudson, bien busque casa juiciosa el veraneador en los pueblos amenos de las cuchillas, o en los caseríos que blanquean la floresta tupida de las cañadas.”
Martí’s restorative trip to the Catskills was not only for health and pleasure; it also had political ramifications. Twilight Park was an offshoot of the Manhattan social club for intellectuals known as the Twilight Club, of which Martí himself later became a member. During Martí’s time, Twilight Club members met for bimonthly formal dinners in which the pressing political issues of the day were debated in an open forum. The club boasted an impressive membership with mostly liberal and progressive leanings who exerted considerable influence in society. Writers like Walt Whitman, Charles Edwin Markham and Mark Twain, as well as the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, were all said to belong to the club, along with distinguished journalists, professors, artists, engineers, economists, doctors, and lawyers. Most of the early cottages in Twilight Park were owned by members of the Manhattan social club. Martí’s 1890 summer visit to Twilight Park thus allowed him to cultivate relations with some of New York’s influential elites.
As the Cuban critic Rodolfo Sarracino has shown, Martí used these connections to advance the cause of Cuban independence. In October 1890, after his return from the Catskills, Martí was invited by Wingate himself to address the Twilight Club in New York City. According to press reports, Martí began his speech by conveying his splendid impressions of his stay in Twilight Park, before proceeding to decry US interventionism in Latin America. His speech was received with a standing ovation, and two months later, in December, Martí became an official member of the club. It was, as scholar Enrique López Mesa put it, “la única asociación netamente norteamericana a la cual Martí perteneció.”
In April 1896, just months after Martí’s death, the Twilight Club issued an public statement of solidarity with Cuba’s right to sovereignty, reprinted in the New York Cuban newspaper Martí had founded, Patria, which read: “El Twilight Club declara terminantemente que siente profunda simpatía por el heroico pueblo de Cuba que pelea por su libertad e independencia y pide al presidente Cleveland que lo reconozco como beligerante.” Martí’s efforts to draw attention to the Cuban cause among Twilight Club’s influential members, efforts which were galvanized by his time in Twilight Park, had yielded fruits.
Versos Sencillos
While producing personal and political connections, the most important legacy of Martí’s visit to Twilight Park is literary in nature. Amid the Catskills’s rugged backdrop, Martí was inspired to write poetry again. As he put it: “Me echó el médico al monte: corrían arroyos, y se cerraban las nubes: escribí versos” [“The doctor sent me off to the woods/mountains/hills; streams flowed and clouds gathered; I wrote poems.”] What emerged was Versos sencillos, a deeply autobiographical expression of personal and political longings with universal resonances that cemented his reputation as one of the great writers of the Americas.
The poems of Versos sencillos bear the mark of the Catskill mountains in which they were composed. They attest to the poet’s profound rediscovery of the natural world. As Martí affirms from the outset, in the collection’s very first poem: “En el monte, monte soy” [“In the mountains, I am/become a mountain”]. This opening poem also establishes the collection’s signature poetic stance, attuned to nature and distant from the bustle and din of city life: “Yo sé bien que cuando el mundo / Cede, lívido, al descanso, / Sobre el silencio profundo, / Murmura el arroyo manso” [“I know that when the world / Surrenders, pallid, to repose, / The murmur of a tranquil stream / Through the deep silence flows”]. Entranced by the gentle sounds of the stream, the poet is able to leave behind, in nature, forms of pomp and intellectual pretense that he now finds tiresome: “Callo, y entiendo, y me quito / La pompa del rimador: / Cuelgo de un árbol marchito / Mi muceta de doctor” [“I fall silent, and understand, / and drop my rhymester’s show: / Upon a barren tree I hang / my fine scholar’s robes.”]. In place of these high-literary garments, a seemingly spontaneous, “simple” voice emerges, one whose lyrical vigor and organic harmony are stressed by the poems’ octosyllabic lines and rhyming quatrains.
Throughout Versos sencillos, the poet reaffirms his predilection for natural beauty over the past glories of human civilization:
Yo sé de Egipto y Nigricia,
Y de Persia y Xenophonte;
Y prefiero la caricia
Del aire fresco del monte.
Yo sé de las historias viejas
Del hombre y de sus rencillas;
Y prefiero las abejas
Volando en las campanillas.
[I know of Egypt and Niger,
Of Persia and Xenophon, no less,
But more than these I prefer
The fresh mountain air’s caress.
I know the ancient histories
Of man and his struggles for power,
But I prefer the buzzing bees
That hover round the bellflower.]
The poet rejects the artifice and ostentation of human intrigues and hotel-life in favor of the unpretentious buzz of his natural surroundings: “Odio la máscara y vicio / Del corredor de mi hotel: / Me vuelvo al manso bullicio / De mi monte de laurel” [“I hate the masks and vices / of the hallways of my hotel; I turn to the gentle noises / of my woods of laurel.”]. In this wooded mountainscape, he is clear and at ease: “Prefiero estar en la sierra” [“I’m happier in the mountains”].
Nature is thus a restorative space in which the poet of Versos sencillos finds anew his voice and self after political struggles waged below in committee meetings, gatherings, and the columns of newspapers. Indeed, the mountains are described as a space of soulful reflection, a veritable temple with the trees serving as pillars: “¡En mi templo, en la montaña, / El álamo es el pilar!” [“In my temple, in the mountains, the poplar is pillar!”]. This process of identification and self-examination elicited by the highland setting is further cemented when the poems themselves become the mountain from which they arise: “Mi verso es un monte […] / Mi verso es de un verde claro” [“My poem/verse is a mountain … / My poem/verse is light green”]. In the mountainous greenery, the poet rediscovers a spirited voice that matches the vibrant natural world around him. Bellflowers, jasmine, lilies, ferns, mosses, lakes, brooks, butterflies, bees, birds, birch and cottonwood trees all make an appearance in Versos sencillos, imbuing these poems with the rich imagery, hues, noises, and scents of the flora and fauna of the tree-topped Catskills, a stark contrast to the stone-gray, dreary world of political infighting and calculation that the poet has temporarily left behind.
Versos sencillos was published, in 1891, by Louis Weiss & Co. of New York. It would become Martí’s best-known and most acclaimed poetry collection. It has been hailed by critics as a “poetic testament” (Fina García Marruz), “the most daring of his collections and the one that contains his best mature poetry” (Roberto González Echevarría), “the most refined of Martí’s art [and] the culmination of his thought” (Caridad Atencio), and a “dazzling [...] symphony as perfectly modulated as the life it represents” (Manuel Tellechea). It was the last book that Martí would publish during his lifetime. Four years later, he would be killed by Spanish troops on a Cuban battlefield, fighting for his homeland’s independence.
Martí’s poetically melodious connection to the Catskills had a notable posthumous episode. The lyrics of “Guantanamera,” one of the best-known Cuban popular songs of all time, are based on selections from Martí’s Versos sencillos. In the U.S., “Guantanamera” was popularized by legendary folk musician Pete Seeger, who recorded an English-language version in the 1960s. Seeger, a New Yorker with deep ties to the Catskills region and its legendary folk scene, first heard “Guantanamera” in the Catskills. As Seeger recalls in an interview, “I was singing for the children at a summer camp up in the Catskill Mountains, and when I finished singing, the children said, ‘Oh, we have a song to teach you.’ And I was—you know, I said, ‘Can you send it to me?’ ‘No!’ They sat me down. They brought out this very shy young man. He was a Cuban who was studying music in the Manhattan music school.” The rest is music history.
This is one of the many sonorous echoes of the Cuban poet in the Catskills. The region that inspired Martí’s late and most unrestrained lyrical voice thus also laid the ground for Seeger’s countercultural rendition. Later on, Seeger would encourage audiences to sing the original, Spanish language version of the song “to hasten the day” that “the U.S.A. . . .is some sort of bilingual country.” Yet, as Martí’s time in the Catskills reminds us, the U.S. has in fact always been a bilingual, even a multilingual, country. ¡Qué viva Cuba libre! ¡Qué vivan las montañas de Catskill!
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