Silvestre de Balboa

Very few data are known about him, among which you can count the baptismal certificate containing his date of birth and the name of his parents: Rodrigo de Balboa and Úrsula de Troya. Hidalgo of the small nobility, he arrived in Cuba, still single, between 1593 and 1603. He married Catalina de la Coba, a native of the town of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, the current city of Camagüey. In 1604 he was in the city of Bayamo, although already in 1608 he was a neighbor of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe where he was confirmed as a notary of the council in July 1624. His work Mirror of Patience remained hidden and survived the fire that ravaged the town in 1616. It was found in 1836 by José Antonio Echeverría, who discovered the manuscripts in terrible condition in the archives of the Patriotic Society of Havana, interspersed with other documents. The poem was published without any change in its original version although only in fragments two years after its discovery in 1838, in the newspaper El Plante and soon after it was published entirely for the first time in the second edition of the Cuban Bibliography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He died in 1644