Nicolás Guillén

July 10, 1902 — July 16, 1989

Nicolás Guillén with Fidel Castro

Nicolás Guillén was born in Camagüey on July 10, 1902, less than two months after the Cuban flag was finally flying over Havana. Guillén was an avid reader during his youth and worked as a typesetter to support his mother and five siblings when his father, a journalist and liberal senator, was assassinated by government forces in 1917.

A life-long revolutionary activist, he was jailed in 1936 for publishing material deemed “subversive,” and released a year later. Exiled in 1957 by the Batista dictatorship, he lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, until 1959. He returned to Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution, and in 1961 he was officially proclaimed “Cuba’s Poeta Nacional” and appointed to the National Cuban Writer’s Union where he was subsequently elected president, serving for more than 25 years.

During his life he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954 and the Cuban Order of José Martí by Fidel Castro in 1981. In 1983, he was the inaugural honoree of Cuba’s National Prize for Literature.

Toward the end of his life, Guillén was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Guillén died at age 87 on July 16, 1989.

Poems

Guillén’s first poems, discussing social problems he witnessed in his community, were published in the Camaguey Gráfico when the author was still in high school. Planning to become a journalist and politician like his father, Guillén enrolled in the University of Havana in 1921 with plans to study law. He left school after one year to begin working on his career as a poet and essayist.

Motivos de son (1930), Guillén’s first published collection of poetry, was a revolutionary realistic account of Black life in Havana’s slums. “The collection’s socially complex and critically compassionate monologues brought unwonted, strikingly new dimensions to the shades of exoticism more typical of the negrista movement then coming into vogue,” wrote Roberto Márquez in the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. His next collections, Sónogro cosongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1934), and Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (1937) reflect his growing commitment to his politics. His other major collections include El son entero (1947), his several Elegías (1948-58), and La Paloma de vuelo popular (1958), which decry racial oppression and colonial practices.

A bilingual edition of his poems, Man-making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén, was published in 1975; another bilingual edition, Nueva poesia de amor: En algun sitio de la primavera or New Love Poetry: In Springtime was posthumously published in 1994.

An authoritative academic work on Nicolás Guillén is titled Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén: Poetry and Ideology by Keith Ellis, renowned scholar, translator and critic of Latin American literature. Ellis is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature at the University of Toronto.