A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, also known as the Warthog, takes off after refueling in the sky. Photo: AFP
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on April 9, 2026.
Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul condensed the illusion of neutrality into four verses: So that I may write poetry that is not political, / I must listen to the birds. / And to listen to the birds, / the warplanes must be silent. Where the sky is occupied by war, there is no place outside of politics.
This holds true for Palestine, but also for any people who have learned to live with the threat as part of their everyday landscape. Cuba, which has not been under the constant roar of bombings, understands other forms of sustained siege that also invade daily life. War takes the form of pressure and encirclement, of organized hostility and the feeling that daily life unfolds under a permanent shadow. On the island, as in the Gaza Strip, writing is never an innocent act.
The writer Alejo Carpentier, who was also an extraordinary musicologist, asserted that the history of Cuba was traced in its political songs. After 1959, an essential part of that tradition was also inscribed in its poetry. He recognized that, in societies subjected to great tensions, the poem is perhaps the most lucid form of consciousness.
In Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban national poet, that consciousness enters with popular rhythm, with street music, with the pulse of a country that does not separate song from struggle. In Son del bloqueo, the aggression is named without digressions: Kennedy with his blockade / Wants to close off the sea to us / Quenedí, quenedá, / To shave the bearded ones, / To enslave us again. / Kennedy, Kennedy, how brutal Uncle Sam is! / Kennedy. / Not a step back, comrades, / Friends, not a step back. Guillén transforms the situation into poetic form and demonstrates that defense can also be sung without losing intensity or beauty.
Ángel Augier, with a more classical style, expresses the same will to assert himself when he denounces the empire that seeks to “steal the air Cuba breathes.” Luis Suardíaz shifts the focus to the ethics of those who take on responsibility in difficult times. And Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Wichy, offers one of the most direct phrases in that tradition: “There is no neutral ground on earth.” In societies marked by danger, even silence has consequences.
For Miguel Barnet, the response takes on a communal tone. In *Patria*, the defense of the country is a living, material, and loving force, rooted in ordinary people: And I know that by my side, in the villages, far away, in the countryside / there is a force like the wind / that is ready to defend life.
Roberto Fernández Retamar, in They Asked Him About the Persians, speaks of “the profound decision to always remain on this land where we were born: / Or to tell with our own mouths, many years from now, how the fragile man who defeated the lion and the serpent, and built cities and songs, was also able to defeat the forces of greedy and clumsy creatures, / Or so that others may tell, upon our bones turned to foundation, how those ancestors who loved laughter and dance, made good on their words and preserved with their chests the flower of life.”
Cuban song, too, has known how to recount such experiences. The poet Silvio Rodríguez did so with singular intensity when he wrote, “We remain, those who can smile / in the midst of death, in full light.” Under pressure, even under threat, life does not entirely renounce its right to beauty. Cintio Vitier expressed it another way, speaking of how difficult it is to build a Parliament in a trench.
There is a common thread between Makhoul and these Cuban poets. The poetry of threatened peoples names, from different perspectives, a humanity that protects itself from cruelty, resists oblivion, and understands that the fundamental question is what kind of world we would have to build so that it would no longer be essential for poetry to bear the surname of politics.
As long as there are peoples forced to look at the sky in fear, as long as the noise of bombs and missiles continues to drown out the song of birds, poetry will have to remember, denounce, accompany, and defend. Rather than asking poets not to engage in politics, we should demand something else—something far more urgent and far more just. That the warplanes fall silent, once and for all.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English