Mireya Castañeda

FOR his work, Nicolas Guillén (1902-1989) is considered Cuba’s National Poet. Something of our own, personal, recognizable as Cuban, vibrates in his poetic compositions.

He introduced African themes into the Spanish language and succeeded in fully interpreting the spirit of struggle within human beings and their hopes of attaining a better society.

He was a prolific and untiring journalist since the 1920’s; for example in the El Camagüeyano newspaper, where he was responsible for the "Pisto Manchego" (La Mancha Hotchpotch), in which he mixed current national or international issues with product advertisements, with supreme elegance. He never abandoned journalism.

As a youth he participated intensively in the cultural and political life of Cuba, which resulted in his exile on various occasions. Back in Havana he met intellectuals such as the Spaniard Federico García Lorca (invited by Fernando Ortiz to give a series of lectures), and the great African-American poet and novelist Langston Hughes, whose friendship and influence were highly important for Guillén.

In 1930, he wrote "Motivos de son" (Son Motifs) which, published in the Diario de la Marina, launched the new poet into a kind of controversial fame, but gave him a wide popular resonance and, the following year, Sóngoro cosongo; poemas mulatos, a book of greater artistic stature, with a far more perfect technique and a reflective look at Cuban culture, which includes "Los Motivos (Motifs). This, his real first book, is considered the one which opened the doors to his dedication.

Sóngoro cosongo… is preceded by an author’s prologue: "Finally, I will say that these are mixed-race verses. They perhaps share the same elements which enter into the ethnic composition of Cuba, where we are all a little loquat. Does that hurt? I don’t believe so. In any case, it’s important to say so before we forget it. The African injection in this land is so profound and so many capillary currents cross and interconnect in our well-watered hydography, that it would be the work of a miniaturist to unravel the hieroglyphic."

In 1934 he published a new volume of poetry, West Indies, Ltd, where an intellectual growth can be noted, moving toward positions even more critical of his country’s social and economic imbalance.

He traveled to Mexico on January 19, 1937, to take part in the Revolutionary Writers and Artists of Mexico Congress and there linked himself with artists such as Silvestre Revueltas, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Sequeiros and others. It was in this period that he published a book of poetry with a strong popular intonation, Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (Cantos for Soldiers and Sones for Tourists), with a prologue by Juan Marinello.

That same year he took part in the 2nd International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid, in the midst of the anti-fascist Civil War. There, Manuel Altolaguirre edited Guillén’s España. Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza (Spain. Poem in Four Anguishes and One Hope), and he was in contact with the most outstanding Spanish and international intellectuals: Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, Ilya Ehrenburg, Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, León Felipe, Juan Chabás, Octavio Paz, Tristán Tzara, Anna Seghers and Ernest Hemingway, whom he has met in Cuba.

Following the publication dates of his books of poetry one can appreciate this rapid evolution toward political and social concerns; for example, El son entero (1947) and La paloma de vuelo popular (1958), a commitment to Cuba and the Americas, or España. Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza itself, written under the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Federico García Lorca; or Elegía a Jesús Menéndez (1951), in honor of the Cuban workers’ leader, with whom he had maintained a friendship and collaboration.

At the triumph of the Revolution, Guillén was in Buenos Aires and immediately returned to Cuba. Two years later, at the 1st National Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists, he was elected president of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), a post he held until his death in 1985.

During those years he published Tengo (I Have, 1964) Poemas de amor (Love Poems, 1964), El gran zoo (The Big Zoo, 1967), Cuatro canciones para el Che (Four Songs for Che, 1969), La rueda dentada (The Cogwheel), Diario que a diario (Every Day Diary) in 1972, El corazón con que vivo (The Heart With Which I Live, 1975), Por el mar de las Antillas anda un barco de papel (Through the Caribbean Sea Sails a Paper Boat, 1978), and Elegías (Elegies, 1977).

On the 110th anniversary of his birth, the Nicolás Guillén Foundation organized a colloquium during which the always interesting aspects of his work were discussed and, for that reason, this publication had a brief dialogue in the UNEAC gardens, with Nicolás Hernández Guillén, president of the Foundation.

Maybe for a first reading, the love poems. Love is a sentiment which everybody feels at some moment and Nicolás Guillén’s poetry makes an impression, with many levels of reading, some of them very simple, which can move, impact on people’s feelings in a very direct way. In that sense, Guillén’s love poems could make attractive reading for youth and even more so, taking into account that for many years it was a little circulated or publicized area of his poetry.

But I think that at another moment there is a reading, with his Black poetry and I must confess that Guillén himself was not very happy to have poems in which he approaches issues related to the African presence in Cuba referred to as Black poetry. What he was seeking was a Cuban poetry. I think that Guillén’s reflections through poetry of what Cuba is have an exceptional importance and that, in a slower reading, I am sure that he would attract the attention of youth because of the astuteness, and profundity with which he captured the national essences of this country. I insist, it is not about Black poetry, Guillén was very well aware that language materializes thought; that in some way, the way in which you express yourself conditions the way you think, and in a reciprocal manner, the way in which you think conditions how you express yourself. Guillén thought that a purely Black or African poetry was not possible if expressed in the Spanish language, and this sole fact signifies the presence in his work of a heritage, of an influence, of a culture expressed in that language.

On the other hand, what he tried to highlight was the mixed nature, neither black nor white, of Cuban culture. One would have to say neither black, nor white, nor Chinese nor Indian, because many other components contributed to the formation of this nature. Guillén wanted these two currents to have the same stature and began to act at a time in which the current which comes from Africa was unknown, minimized, underestimated by the dominant culture, and he stuck his neck out in favor of what was just and necessary at that moment. He always thought of a Cuban poetry, which would express the essence of the nation.

We dedicated it to the 110th anniversary of his birth, we reflected on the inheritance of his Spanish grandfather. In April, we had an event principally dedicated to the legacy of his African grandfather, because this year coincided with two relevant events, the bicentenary of the Aponte Conspiracy and the centenary of the armed protest and massacre of the Independents of Color, and we used it to warn of the persistence of prejudices, discrimination and even racial violence, as is the case in the United States, where young Trevor Martin was killed a few months ago.

In the July encounter, we talked about his Spanish inheritance, starting with Guillén’s presence in Spain in 1937 as an event which he included among the five which most influenced his life: his presence in the Spanish Civil War. He joined the Communist Party there and then remained in Spain for a number of months and wrote some magnificent reports and accounts of the Spanish people’s struggle against fascism.

Scholars referred to his great poem to Spain, to the inheritance he received from the great Spanish poetry of the Golden Age, his relationship with Spanish intellectuals like Rafael Alberti, Lorca himself, Altoaguirre, Miguel Hernández. In one way or another, his relations with all of them marked him and they always accompanied him, in the case of those who lived a long life, as is the case of Rafael Alberti.

And we also talked about the presence in Cuba of a very large group of Spanish intellectuals who had to flee Spain as a result of the victory of fascism and arrived on the island, perhaps not so many as could have been desired, because they were good men of enormous talent. However, for example, one of the regulations of our University (of Havana) prevented the hiring of foreign professors and these men could not have had a livelihood which corresponded with their knowledge, their talents. They were lost to academia and went to live in Mexico or Argentina, or other places. In any event they left an imprint here, some of them in the publishing world, as is the case with Manuel Altoaguirre.

I think that they are, little by little. I believe that after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, and as a consequence of leanings of thought toward the right at the global level, Guillén was somewhat forgotten, not by us, of course. You know, the Foundation was constituted during the Special Period in 1901, and how could we have doubted the enormous importance and the enormous value of Guillén’s poetry for the Cuban nation, but I do believe that Cuban society reflected something of what was happening at the global level. We were convinced that it was a pendulum movement. During the Colloquium and Festival of Music and Poetry three years ago we organized one session in the University of Havana. Those present listened stupefied to a panel of four students in the fourth year, on Diario que a diario. They were brilliant, original. For that reason I think that studies on Guillén are guaranteed. Studies and appreciation of Nicolás Guillén in the Cuban nation are not going to be abandoned, I believe that in a certain way, that would be cultural suicide and I am convinced that this is not going to happen.