Nicolás Guillén

Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989), Cuban poet and journalist, the chief exponent of Cuba’s negrismo movement, which glorified Afro-Cuban culture and identity. He became known as Cuba’s national poet for his commitment to social justice.

Nicolás Guillén Batista was born in Camagüey of mixed African and European ancestry. He abandoned law studies at the University of Havana in 1921 to concentrate on his poetry. He edited newspapers and literary journals before publishing his first collections, Motivos de son (Sound Themes, 1930) and Sóngoro cosongo (1931). The poetry in these volumes incorporates song, myth, legend, and colloquial speech to express the experience of blacks in Cuba. Although poetry using black themes was already popular there, Guillén’s was the first to portray Afro-Cuban culture as more than an exotic presence.

With West Indies, Ltd. (1934), a sharp condemnation of colonialism, Guillén began expressing his political views. In 1937 he joined the Communist Party, and his subsequent poetry demonstrated his commitment to Cuba’s black population and to political and social reform in Cuba. That same year he traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The volume España (Spain, 1937) reflects on the impact of the war, both on Spain and on Guillén, and on the assassination of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca during the war.

Through much of the 1940s and 1950s Guillén continued to criticize the government in his poetry and in essays published in political periodicals; this led to his exile in 1953. The volume La paloma de vuelo popular (The Dove of Popular Flight, 1958) describes the period of his exile, during which he lived in several different Latin American and European countries. In 1959, after Communist leader Fidel Castro came to power, Guillén returned to his country and was soon hailed as a national hero for his longstanding support for revolution in Cuba. Guillén later served in a number of diplomatic posts and continued to write and publish poetry. In Tengo (1964; translated 1974) he celebrated revolutionary Cuba. Later volumes include El gran zoo (1967; translated as The Great Zoo, 1972), an imaginative look at human nature, and El diario que a diario (1972; The Daily Daily, 1989), a collection of poems and articles that show the breadth of his political vision.