PEDRO BETHENCOURT PADILLA
Born in Agulo in 1894, from his teenage years his cultural concerns turned to poetry, as did his brother Joseph. In 1905, he moved to Santa Cruz de Tenerife where he studied first at the Professional School of Commerce and then at the secondary school of La Laguna (university city), where he met other young people among whom we can highlight Pedro Pinto de la Rosa or José Aguiar. It is in the university city that his poetic work began to be recognized, being awarded in contests and artistic-literary fiestas.
Pedro Bethencourt proposed his own philosophical avant-garde with Pedro Pinto de la Rosa: Yuvism. He traveled to Madrid to study medicine and for many years combined his studies and poetry.
In 1920 he presented at the Athenaeum of Madrid his first book entitled Salterio, where he aroused the interest of the specialized critic. This book of poems was made with the collaboration of José Aguiar, painter with family roots in Agulo.
In 1934 he published in Madrid another book, perhaps his best known work: Vida Plena.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Pedro Bethencourt returned to Cuba, an island on which he had previously resided, now settling in Havana, where he married and established his family.
The poet Agulense is, in short, a poet of the landscape, of personal introspection, of the sea and the island. In his poetic reflections he delves into intimism, but he also reflects on everything concerning the Sea in its social involvement: emigration-exile, fishermen, isolation, horizons to be discovered. A certain Masonic aesthetic is evident in his work in a dual way: on the one hand because of his philanthropic attitudes towards Humanity, as champion against social injustice, in clear opposition to the landowners prevailing in his contemporary Gomera; on the other hand, and at the same time, his poetry acquires theosophically solutions, largely present in some branches of Canarian Freemasonry of the twentieth century.
