Nicohlas Guillen

Nicohlas Guillen was born in 1902. He was an Afro-Cuban poet, writer, journalist, and social activist.

Guillen’s father introduced him to Afro-Cuban music when he was very young. His father was a journalist.Guillen began writing about the social problems faced by blacks in the 1920, his first poems appeared in Camaguey Grafico in 1922.

In 1930, he created an international stir with the publication of Motivos de son, eight short poems inspired by the Son, a popular Afro-Cuban musical form, and the daily living conditions of Cuban blacks. Composed in Afro-Cuban vernacular, the collection separated itself from with Spanish literary cannon and established black culture as a legitimate focus of Cuban literature. It was as if Guillen had touched on something that the people of Cuba could recognize as having been on the tips of their tongues waiting for Guillen to articulate it.

In 1940, he ran for mayor of Camaguey and in 1948, Guillen was a senatorial candidate for the Cuban Communist Party; both campaigns were unsuccessful. He truly identified with the plight of blacks beyond his native Cuba, this is reflected in his Elegias (1958). Upon his return to Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro awarded him the task of designing a new cultural policy and setting up the Union of Writers and Artist of Cuba, of which Guillen became president in 1961. During the next two decades, he wrote and published a number of collections of poetry including Tengo (1964), El gran Zoo (1967), La rueda dentada, and El diario que a diario (1972), and Sol de Domingo (1982). Guillen died in Havana in 1987.