Nicolás Guillén

Cuban-born writer and poet

• Born: July 10, 1902
• Birthplace: Camagüey, Cuba
• Died: July 16, 1989
• Place of death: Havana, Cuba

Guillén is considered the pioneer of Afro-Cuban literature. His literary and journalistic work was associated with the Cuban Revolution from very early in his career. He advocated for a mestiza Latin American identity—an interethnic form of working-class solidarity.

Early Life

Nicolás Guillén (nihk-oh-LAHS je-YEHN) was born Cristobal Guillén y Batista in 1902, only four years after Spain handed Cuba over to the United States and the same year that the island became formally independent. However, the Platt Agreement granted the United States de facto control over Cuba. Guillén’s early life was marked by the political and economic instability created by these developments.

The modernization of the sugarcane industry and the massive infusion of American capital between 1890 and 1920 resulted in the displacement of black farmers. Although Guillén grew up in a mulatto, middle-class family, the political unrest that resulted from the reconfiguration of Cuba’s economy affected him all the same.

After its independence, Cuba underwent a series of revolts in which farmers struggled to gain recognition and rights in the new republic. In the revolt of 1917, Guillén’s father, a journalist and liberal senator, was assassinated by the repressive government of Cuban president Mario García Menocal with the aid of American troops. While the old Spanish colonial government had kept most blacks in slavery and forced servitude, the new Cuban republic continued to marginalize blacks and to favor the interests of the international sugarcane trade.

After the death of his father, Guillén worked as a typographer for the daily newspaper El nacional while publishing some of his early poems in local magazines. He began working as a journalist for the daily Las dos repúblicas at the age of eighteen. In 1937, Guillén, already a well-known journalist, joined the Cuban Communist Party.

Life’s Work

The publication of Guillén’s first poetry book Motivos de son (1930), in which he portrays Afro-Cuban culture, coincided with the consolidation of the negritude movement launched by Aimé Césaire, Léopld Senghor, and León-Gontran Damas. While Guillén was certainly influenced by the negritude movement, his exploration of the African contribution to Cuban culture must be understood in the wider context of the efforts of African, African American, and Latin American communities to reinterpret their histories and cultural legacies.

Besides the negritude movement, the end of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century were also marked by the development of an African American conscience as expressed in such movements as the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and indigenism in Haiti. In fact, Guillén’s work is deeply informed by the long Latin American intellectual tradition that explores mestizaje (the mixing of races), not just African heritage, as the source of cultural identity. Guillén’s did not seek to develop an alternative to Latin American tradition but wanted to expand this tradition to incorporate African heritage. As he explained, “We won’t have a well-developed Creole poetry if we forget the black” who provide “essential ingredients in our cocktail.”

Guillén’s poetry covered a wide range of topics and styles: European-based modernism, folklorist interest in Afro-Cubanism, overtly political poetry, and the more ironic critique of social issues that characterizes his later work. Some of his most celebrated poetry books are: Sóngoro Cosongo (1931), West Indies, Ltd. (1934), Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (1937), La paloma de vuelo popular: Elegías (1958), and El gran zoo (1967). Prosa de prisa (1962) and El diario que a diario (1972) contain a selection of his best journalistic prose. Guillén’s celebration of the Cuban revolution comes across as somewhat complacent, particularly in books like Tengo (1964), where he seems to argue that all revolutionary objectives have already been fulfilled.

It is important, however, to remember that Guillén’s notion of ethnic and national identity is inextricable from his commitment to class solidarity. Once he overcame his initial folklorist stage, Guillén understood negritude as a transnational, interethnic movement of working-class solidarity. While his commitment to the Cuban Revolution may seem to be uncritical of its shortcomings, Guillén’s revolutionary fervor must be understood in the larger context of transatlantic unity.

Significance

Nicolás Guillén’s place in the history of Latin American literature has always been and continues to be controversial. The notion of negritude has been harshly criticized for its essentialist representation of African, African American, and Latin American identity. Although Guillén’s mestizaje supposedly overcomes essentialist definitions of ethnic identity by celebrating the fusion of races and cultural traditions, his poetry has been criticized for reiterating a traditional patriarchal discourse. Guillén, however, continues to be acknowledged as one of the pioneers who raised awareness of the importance of African cultural traditions in Latin America and as a first-rate poet whose command of the Spanish language combined an excellent knowledge of Spanish literary traditions and Caribbean oral literature

Bibliography

Adotevi, Stanislas S. K. “Negritude Is Dead: The Burial.” New African Literature and the Arts 3 (1973): 89-104. One of the first critiques of the notion of negritude, Adotevi criticizes the essentialist representation of African identity.

Andrews, George R. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. A thorough analysis of the socioeconomic developments that shaped the experience of Afro-Hispanics during the last two centuries.

Guillén, Nicolás. The Daily Daily. Translated by Vera M. Kutzinski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Collection of journalistic essays and poems in which Guillén critiques prerevolutionary Cuban society.

Kutzinski, Vera M. Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. An in-depth study of Cuban nationalist discourse that pays special attention to issues of gender.