Baquianos Still Life. The "Espejo de Paciencia" and the Doramas's Forest

Abstract

The offering of tropical food and flowers by pagan deities, toward the end of the First Canto of Espejo de paciencia (1608), is undoubtedly the most talked episode of Silvestre de Balboa’s (1563-c.1647) epic poem. We assume the most recent reviews (Firbas, González Echevarría, Marrero-Fente), advocating an alternative to the idea of a Cuban primitive, dominant in the comments about this poem, since its discovery in 1836, and during most of the twentieth century (Pichardo, Vitier, Lezama). And we propose an analysis of the issue of indigenous nature from two dimensions: against the background of the interests of the colonial society on the one hand; and as a poetic system that has the marks of digression and periphera, on the other one. For the first dimension, we rely on the work of historian García del Pino; for the second, in the structure of the myth of Doramas Forest, of Cairasco (1538-1610), because of its relevance in literary and Balboa training for his native still life settings.