CESARINA BENTO
Canarian romantic literature did not give particularly significant names, let alone in the smaller islands. The case of the poet of Agulo Cesarina Bento is therefore a certainly paradigmatic case.
Born in Agulo in 1844, at the age of ten she moved with her family to Cuba, where she lived her adolescence. Her father, José Ramón Bento Peraza de Ayala, a gomero landowner, had decided to settle in Cuba by investing his fortune in farms and land with stables, specifically in San Andrés.
The academic training of this period is received at the El Salvador school, one of the most prominent of the Cuban bourgeoisie due to the guidelines of the pedagogue José de la Luz Caballero, father of Latin American secularism.
The poet returned in 1863 to Agulo. When she was 26 years old, she married her cousin Fernando Bento, 19 years old, in a logical operation of the island bourgeoisie for accumulating property and maintaining the family lineage. Since Cesarina settled in La Gomera, her production continued to combine it with the tasks of a bourgeois lady.
Although she died in 1910, leaving a huge production, and to some extent unknown, it was not until the poet and historian Sebastián Padrón Acosta claimed her figure in 1940, when her name began to be known among the Canary cultural spheres. Among her interesting compositions can be highlighted El asesino condenado a muerte, although it is perhaps her most important work an intimate book entitled Libro de Cesarina Bento y Montesinos.
Her style, typical of the Victorian era in the Canary Islands, is similar to that of other island poets such as Victorina Bridoux. Cesarina’s poetry is resounding, marked by sincerity evoke diverse landscapes and realities. Her years lived in Cuba, where she frequented Havana society, her talks and modernity, are present in the works of Cesarina, who claims happiness for La Gomera, happiness she longed to seek, being in contact with those illustrious travelers who around the island come, like the case of R. Verneau, serving as notable hosts in his residence.
