Nicolás Guillén

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista, born on 10 July 1902 in Camagüey, Cuba, and dying on 16 July 1989, is known as Cuba’s national poet. He also worked as a journalist and political activist. After studying law at the University of Havana, he left that path to become a typographer and journalist. His first poetry collection, *Motivos de son* (1930), came after he met African-American poet Langston Hughes that same year, and it was heavily shaped by son music. By 1934, his collection *West Indies, Ltd.* marked his first politically charged work. Following the 1933 overthrow of dictator Gerardo Machado, repression grew; Guillén was jailed in 1936 and joined the Communist Party in 1937. That year, he traveled to Spain for a writers’ and artists’ congress and reported on the Spanish Civil War for a magazine. Back in Cuba, he ran as a Communist in the 1940 local elections, which led to a U.S. visa denial in 1941. Over the next decades, he journeyed through South America, China, and Europe. In 1953, after a stay in Chile, he was barred from re-entering Cuba and spent five years in exile. The 1959 Cuban revolution allowed his return. From 1961, he led the Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba for more than 30 years. His honors include the 1954 Stalin Peace Prize, the 1976 International Botev Prize, and the inaugural National Prize for Literature in 1983. His great-grandson Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas, who protested the regime during the July 2021 protests, was murdered in police custody in 2024 at age 29 while serving a six-year sentence.

Guillén was the eldest of six children born to Argelia Batista y Arrieta and Nicolás Guillén y Urra, both of mixed African-European heritage. His father, a former lieutenant in the independence struggle, worked as a journalist and introduced young Nicolás to Afro-Cuban music. Guillén y Urra belonged to the Partido Libertad and founded the newspaper *La Libertad*. Government forces killed him for protesting electoral fraud and destroyed his printing press, where Nicolás and a brother already worked. The family struggled financially, and Guillén faced racism similar to that experienced by African Americans in the United States.

His first poetry volume, *Motivos de son*, blended traditional literary form with the speech, legends, and songs of Afro-Cubans, drawing on his mixed ancestry and education. It was quickly hailed as a masterpiece and widely copied. In the 1920s, Afro-Cuban sounds and instruments transformed Cuban music, and Afro-Cuban culture began appearing in art and literature. Early “negrista” poetry came from European Cubans like Emilio Ballagas, Alejo Carpentier, and José Tallet. Only in the 1930s did Guillén offer a personal account of Afro-Cuban struggles, dreams, and mannerisms. He grew politically outspoken, moving beyond picturesque portrayals of poverty to denounce oppression in *Sóngoro cosongo* and *West Indies Ltd.*, as well as in *Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas*. Guillén is the best-known figure of “poesía negra,” which aimed to fuse black and white cultural elements into a “poetic mestizaje.” His poems often use onomatopoeic words like “Sóngoro Cosongo” and “Mayombe-bombe” to mimic drum sounds or son rhythms. Silvestre Revueltas based his symphonic piece *Sensemayá* on Guillén’s poem of the same name, making it his most famous work; José Limantour’s suite from his film score for *La noche de los mayas* followed. Many critics later considered Guillén the most influential Latin American poet dealing with African themes and recreating African song and dance rhythms in literary form. *Motivos de son* made an international impact, inspired by Afro-Cuban living conditions and son music. Its eight short poems used everyday Afro-Cuban language, standing out for establishing Afro-Cuban culture as a valid literary genre. In *Man-Making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén*, Angel Aguier wrote that the son—a dance born from the black-white encounter in the Caribbean, where people’s words and music become song—is the core of the elemental poetry Guillén felt expressed the Cuban spirit. He chose the son as a mixed artistic creation of Cuba’s two races, since it encompasses every aspect of the national character. This shows how the son, a profound musical genre, initiated a fusion of black and white Cuban culture, and Guillén’s use of it symbolized and opened a path for that same fusion in Cuban literature.