Nicolás Guillén

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (10 July 1902 – 16 July 1989) was a Cuban poet, journalist and political activist. He is best remembered as the national poet of Cuba.Associated Press, "Nicolas Guillen, 87, National Poet of Cuba"
''The New York Times'', 18 July 1990: A19.

Born in Camagüey, Cuba, he studied law at the University of Havana, but abandoned a legal career and worked as both a typographer and journalist. His poetry was published in various magazines from the early 1920s; his first collection, ''Motivos de son'' (1930) was strongly influenced by his meeting that year with the African-American poet, Langston Hughes. He drew from '' son'' music in his poetry. ''West Indies, Ltd.'', published in 1934, was Guillén's first collection with political implications."Nicolás Guillén 1902–1989"
''Enotes.com''. ''Poetry Criticism''. Retrieved 9 March 2009. Cuba's dictatorial Gerardo Machado regime was overthrown in 1933, but political repression intensified. After being jailed in 1936, Guillén joined the Communist Party the next year, traveling to Spain for a Congress of Writers and Artists, and covering the Spanish Civil War as a magazine reporter.

After returning to Cuba, he stood as a Communist in the local elections of 1940. This caused him to be refused a visa to enter the United States the following year, but he traveled widely during the next decades in South America, China and Europe. In 1953, after being in Chile, he was refused re-entry to Cuba and spent five years in exile. He returned after the successful Cuban revolution of 1959. From 1961, he served more than 30 years as president of the ''Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba,'' the National Cuban Writers' Union. His awards included the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954, the 1976 International Botev Prize, and in 1983 he was the inaugural winner of Cuba's National Prize for Literature. His great grandson Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas who protested the Cuban regime during the 11th of July protests was murdered in police custody during his 6 year sentence at 29 years old.

Early life

Nicolás Guillén Batista was born July 10, 1902, in Camagüey, Cuba, the eldest of six children (three boys and three girls) of Argelia Batista y Arrieta and Nicolás Guillén y Urra, both of whom were of mixed-race, African-European descent. His father had fought for independence as a lieutenant. When his first son Nicolás was born, the father worked as a journalist for one of the new local papers. He introduced his son to Afro-Cuban music when he was very young. Guillén y Urra belonged to the ''Partido Libertad'' and founded the daily newspaper, ''La Libertad,'' to express its views. Government forces assassinated Guillén's father for protesting against electoral fraud and destroyed his printing press, where Nicolás and a brother were already working. Argelia and her children struggled financially. Nicolás and his siblings encountered discriminatory racism in Cuba similar to that suffered by African Americans in the United States.

Literary works

Guillén drew from his mixed African and Spanish ancestry and education to combine his knowledge of traditional literary form with firsthand experience of the speech, legends, songs, and songs of Afro-Cubans in his first volume of poetry, ''Motivos de son.'' It was soon acclaimed as a masterpiece and widely imitated. In the 1920s, when Afro-Cuban sounds and instruments were changing the world of Cuban music, Afro-Cuban culture began to be expressed in art and literature as well. Initially, Afro-Cuban poetry, or "''negrista" ''poetry, was mainly published by European Cubans such as Emilio Ballagas, Alejo Carpentier, and José Tallet. It was not until the 1930s that Guillén would appeal in literary terms by expressing a personal account of the struggles, dreams, and mannerisms of Afro-Cubans.Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. "The role of music in the emergence of Afro-Cuban culture," ''Research in African Literatures'' 29. (1998) : 1.179–189

Guillén became outspoken politically, and dissatisfied with picturesque portrayal of the daily life of the poor. He began to decry their oppression in his poetry volumes ''Sóngoro cosongo'' and ''West Indies Ltd.'' Guillen also wrote ''Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas,'' which reflected his growing political commitment. Guillén is probably the best-known representative of the "'' poesía negra''" (" black poetry"), which 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 that composer's best-known work, followed by José Limantour's suite from his film score for '' La noche de los mayas''.

Guillén later became acknowledged by many critics as the most influential of those Latin American poets who dealt with African themes and re-created African song and dance rhythms in literary form. Guillen made an international mark with the publication of ''Motivos de son'' (1930). The work was inspired by the living conditions of Afro-Cubans and the popular ''son'' music. The work consists of eight short poems using the everyday language of the Afro Cubans. The collection stood out in the literary world because it emphasized and established the importance of Afro-Cuban culture as a valid genre in Cuban literature.

In ''Man-Making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén'', Angel Aguier, in reference to ''Motivos de son,'' wrote that

"the 'son,' a passionate dance born of the Negro-white encounter under Caribbean skies in which the words and music of the people culminate in song, is the basic substance of the elemental poetry which Guillen intuitively felt as the expression of the Cuban spirit.... He specifically chose the son as the mixed artistic creation of the two races that make up the Cuban population; for the son, in form and content, runs the full gamut of every aspect of our national character."

This quote establishes how the ''son'', such a profound musical genre of that time, initiated the fusion of black and white Cuban culture. Guillén's incorporation of the genre into his writings, symbolized and created a pathway for the same cultural fusion in Cuban literature.

Guillén's unique approach of using the ''son'' in his poetry is expressed in his book ''Sóngoro consongo'' (1931). In this work, he included poems that depicted the lives of Cubans and emphasized the importance of Afro-Cuban culture in Cuban history. ''Sóngoro consongo'' captures the essence of the Afro-Cuban culture and ways that the people deal with their personal situations.

Guillén's poem, "Motivos de son", from ''Sóngoro consongo'', is a fusion of West African and Hispanic literary styles, contributing to his unique literary vision.

"La canción del bongó", like many poems in ''Sóngoro consongo'', incorporates the rhythmic sounds of son. The poem has a rhythm that uses the marking of stressed and unstressed syllables in strong and weak beats, rather than simply the number of syllables. Dellita L. Martin says that "La canción del bongó" stands out as a poem because "it is the only one to indicate Guillén's painfully increasing awareness of racial conflicts in Cuba".

Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén

In 1930, José Antonio Fernández de Castro, publisher of the Havana

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