The directory «Plots»

Guillén Nicolás
(1902—1989)

Nicolás Guillén was an Afro-Cuban poet. Guillén was born in Camagüey, Cuba. He studied law at the University of Havana, but he soon abandoned a legal career and worked as a typographer and journalist.

His poetry was published in various magazines from the early 1920s and his first collection, Motivos de son, appeared in 1930. The Machado regime was overthrown in 1933, but political repression intensified. In 1936, with other editors of Mediodía, Guillén was arrested on trumped-up charges, and spent some time in jail. The following year he joined the Communist Party and made his first trip abroad, to attend a Congress of Writers and Artists in Spain; also traveled in Spain and reported on the Civil War.

Guillén returned to Cuba - via Guadeloupe - and in 1940 stood as a Communist candidate in local elections. The following year he was refused a visa to enter the United States, but he travelled widely over the next twenty years - in South America, China and Europe. He was prevented by the Batista government from entering Cuba in 1953, but he was welcomed back by Fidel Castro after the revolution and appointed president of the Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba, the National Cuban Writers' Union. He also wrote some evocative and poignant poetry highlighting social conditions, such as "Problemas de Subdesarrollo" and "Dos Niños".

Guillén is probably the best-known representative of the "poesía negra" ("black poetry") that tried to create a synthesis between black and white cultural elements, a "poetic mestizaje". Characteristic for his poems is the use of onomatopoetic words ("Sóngoro Cosongo", "Mayombe-bombe") that try to imitate the sound of drums or the rhythm of the son. Silvestre Revueltas's symphonic composition Sensemayá was based on Guillén's poem of the same name, and became the composer's best known work. Nicolás Guillén died in 1989 at age 87 and was buried in the Colon Cemetery, Havana.

Cuba, 2002, Nicolas Guillen