Among the many virtues of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén (Camagüey, 1902–Havana, 1989), is not only the formal excellence that has made his verses classics of 20th century Spanish language literature, but also the revealing variety of themes he addresses, the majority related to some figure, anecdote, or event in Cuban national history. Acclaimed since the appearance of "Motivos de son" in the "Ideales de una Raza" section of the Diario de la Marina, April 20, 1930, Guillén's poems became famous early on, along with the poet's growing intellectual prestige.
Summer, the only season the poet recognized as legitimate on the island, was a central theme of his poems and journalistic prose. He had a certain devotion to summer, to the sun, as friends from his childhood in Camagüey have commented.
I always recall his lines from 1934, "The sun makes everything here smaller / from the brain to roses (West Indies, Ltd., 1934). Or the famous joke he told a French reporter, during his exile in Paris. In Spanish, one word is used for both season and station: estación. So, when he was asked how many "estaciones" there were in Cuba, Nicolás answered: summer and the train station.
As the reader surely noted, the month of July has a special place in the biography of the poet who wrote "El son entero" (1947). His physical and spiritual being came into the world in the beautiful city he called "a town of pastors and hats," today Camagüey. He was born there July 10, 1902, and died on the 16th, of July as well, but in Havana, in 1989.
His life had a perceptible splendor, in both his verse and prose, and in the taking of any action in the service of a better world, supporting the most noble causes, from his passion for the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the premonitory and tragic energy of the Centenary Generation led by a young lawyer, whose personality caught his attention in exile, during the summer of 1953.
The death of his father was an emotional catastrophe and was transformed to epic and lyrical substance through one of his most ethically important books "Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas" (1937), written perhaps as a foreboding preamble to the values in dispute during the Spanish Civil War.
Federico García Lorca, also killed by soldiers in the Civil War, would take on one of Guillén’s masterpieces “Angustia cuarta,” praised by so many readers and critics, among them Argentine Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, who considered the heroic tone characteristic of the poet. In the final song of this poem elements appear that will become part of another great work in El son entero, ten years later. Let us recall:
(A song) He left Sunday, at night / He left Sunday, and is not coming back / he held a lily in his hand / and fever in his eyes; / the lily turned to blood, / the blood turned to death. (Angustia cuarta)
Nicolás Guillén, the prince of language, always encourages with these verses: I was going down a road, / when I can across Death. / Friend! Death shouted / but I did not answer…
One July 16, in 1989, 30 years ago now, he left on that long journey along the road he had envisioned since 1845, when Death offered him dear friendship with a shout. Although acclaimed for his novel use of son in formal and popular poetry in our language, Guillén was, paradoxically, a heroic poet, with death showing its face in the most representative moments of his work. For Nicolás Guillén, the work of creating poetry was as essential living act. His verse, clear and simple, just a José Martí sought, served to resist the master’s grip – slave trader or global investor – to awaken consciousness among the humble; to resolutely denounce the most subtle, masked expressions of racial prejudice; to be the voice of the most genuine aspirations of Cubans – which are those not only of Cuba, but all the Antilles and the Caribbean, as well as the rest of Latin America. Along with these accomplishments, Guillén was able to establish an image of the nation’s soul, by creating poetics that are legitimate pillars of Antillian green and blue, the guitar, the palm, the precious woods of the bush, the lizard, the rosebush, and the paper bird.
