Added to your basket:
13 Bandas y 48 estrellas. Poema del Mar Caribe.

Checkout now

First edition of these thirteen poems by the Spanish Marxist poet Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), one for each stripe on the American flag, condemning a nation that ‘once was the symbol of democracy and which has gradually become the symbol of imperialism’ (p. 35, trans.).

Alberti, a friend of Hemingway and a member of the Generación del 27, travelled to North America, Central America, and the Caribbean, with his wife, the writer, activist, and secretary of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture María Teresa León, to raise awareness of the brutal repression of miners in the Asturian Revolution of 1934 on behalf of the Communist International and to seek aid for the affected workers and their families. 13 bandas y 48 estrellas (13 Stripes and 48 Stars), dedicated to the Cuban politician Juan Marinello and to ‘all the anti-imperialist writers of America’ (trans.), is directly inspired by his experience of American capitalism and imperialism, from his arrival in New York (where he recited some of his poems at Columbia) to Florida, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela, amongst others.

‘The thirteen poems collected in 13 bandas y 48 estrellas, first published in 1936 and later recollected in part 3 of De un momento a otro, are songs of protest against, and critical evaluations of, the role of “el imperialismo yanki”, “la diplomacia del horror”, and “la intervención armada” in the Americas, their effects on the people, and the limitations they place on freedom…’ (Nantell, p. 80). The first poem in the collection, ‘New-York’, ends with Alberti’s particularly damning first impression of the United States: ‘Still more across America burns the pulse | of nations in their agony shouting to me | in my own language through the fog, | plotting your fatal shakeup. | Thus one day your thirteen horizontals | and your forty-eight white stars | will see themselves vanish in a righteous and liberating flame – of oil’ (Noyes, in The Americanization of Europe (2006), p. 310, trans.).

The printer, Manuel Altolaguirre, would move to Cuba three years after the publication of the present work; he remained there until 1943, where he would publish works both by Spanish exiles and the Cuban literary milieu. Alberti was forced into exile after the Spanish Civil War, living largely in Argentina and returning to Spain only after Franco’s death.

We find two copies in the UK (Exeter, Sheffield).

See Nantell, Rafael Alberti’s Poetry of the Thirties (1986); Pulido Mendoza, ‘La recepción de la huelga de Asturias en la prensa de izquierdas de Nueva York: nuevos datos sobre María Teresa León y Rafael Alberti en 1935’, in Revista de Literatura LXXII:143 (2010), pp. 187–226.