Nicolás Guillén is part of the atmosphere and the subsoil of the nation. He is the life and work, the current legacy and the future projection. One hundred and twenty years after his birth on July 10, 1902, in Camagüey, the poet who gave voice to those who did not have one, who vindicated the blacks and mulattos who were outcasts and marginalized in the neo-colony, who proclaimed deep-rooted anti-imperialist convictions, who defended the Spanish Republic against the onslaught of fascism, who joined the ranks of the Communist Party, who exalted the memory of Jesus Menendez, who appropriated and transcended the son, who greeted the advent of the Revolution, who welcomed Fidel at the top of the Turquino, who worked from the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC in Spanish) for the unity of the intellectual and artistic movement in favor of the revolutionary transformation of society, who sang of love and hope, who still inspires and accompanies to this day.
For him, according to Nancy Morejon, one of his keenest scholars, "the exercise of poetry was an essentially vital act (...) with which he knew how to found the image of the national soul creating a poetics of which are legitimate pillars the Antillean green and blue, the guitar, the palm, the precious woods of the mountain, the lizard, the rose bush, the paper bow tie".
All Cuba celebrates and sings him, especially his homeland, to which he returns this weekend with the celebration of the 23rd Colloquium and Festival that bears his name. The Nicolás Guillén Foundation, together with the Ministry of Culture, the UNEAC, political authorities and cultural institutions of the city, are carrying out an intense commemorative program of remarkable social irradiation. The verses of his Camagüey Elegy are tattooed in the memory there, even though the city is no longer a "region of shepherds and hats" but the poet's words still resound when he said: "I come from walking and here I stay with my people."
From the beginning of the colloquium, the emphasis is placed on the Antillean, decolonizing, dimension of the poet, examined by Doctor of Science Margarita Mateo in the lecture La isla cercana y desconocida: Haití en las crónicas de Nicolás Guillén (the near and unknown island: Haiti in the chronicles of Nicolás Guillén), a topic that would be later revisited from another approach by researcher Emilio Jorge Rodríguez.
The Santa Cecilia Convention Center host presentations and debates on topics ranging from Guillen's anti-racist thinking to the validity of his permanent poetic renovation, such as the one he recorded half a century ago with the publication of La rueda dentada (the cogwheel) and El diario que a diario (the daily diary).
Other artistic expressions have also come to celebrate the poet: the Camagüey Ballet and the Camagüey Folkloric Ballet with special performances, plastic arts exhibitions and popular music concerts, such as the one troubadour Tony Ávila performed at the fairgrounds on Saturday July 16.
The colloquium also remembered the imprint of the recently deceased José Luis Cortés, who historically promoted the colloquium and festival. Other events held at the colloquium include the presentation of a recording work containing authors and performers of Camagüey. The headquarters of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation were duly reinstalled in the poet’s birthplace on Hermanos Agüero Street, and a sculpture of the poet, created by artist Marta Jiménez, was placed in the Plaza de la Merced on Sunday.
Shortly before the start of the celebration day, Nicolás Hernández Guillén, president of the Foundation, called attention to the extraordinary lucidity and absolute validity of the verses that give title to the poem La rueda dentada: "When we read no cogwheel can go without teeth / nor the wheel can go with a failing tooth; / for if it starts a turn it stops soon / either because the tooth fails, or because it is broken; we cannot help but think of it as a suggestive metaphor around the concerted and coherent unity to move forward. And also we make the claim of the poem at the end of the poem ours: always much more / never too little."
