The legendary Camagüey remembers today the birth of one of its great sons: that mulatto with a deep voice, turned into a National Poet, Nicolás Guillén.
Among the ancient streets of the city, tinajones and churches shakes the poetry book “Motivos del son”, whose verses opened a new stage in the island’s poetry, where the black appears portrayed with their customs and peculiar vocabulary.
Nicolás Guillén is one of those poets who dazzled the intellectual world, when writing with evident mastery that ajiaco of transculturation of our cubanía; when proving that the spirit of Cuba is mestizo.
The unforgettable Guillen
The San Juan de Dios Square in his native Camagüey still revives Guillén’s reunions with his friends of the time, still keeps the conversations of the first youth that nobody ever forgets, and waits for the return of the poet who went to Havana leaving the city of his love.
The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, UNEAC, evokes until eternity its founding father; the Central Committee of the Communist Party feels the loss of the faithful and dutiful militant, while the National Assembly of People’s Power longs for the seat of the committed deputy.
Guillen is cubanía in the crossbreeding; he is the one distinguished with the José Martí Order and the National Literature Award; he is the poet of love and death, of nostalgia and humor, of flora, fauna and anguish.
Guillén is the face of the Revolution that his Cuba saw the birth of on July 10, 1902, is the deserved praise that makes him shine 121 years after his birth in his Camagüey of cobblestone and narrow streets, is light that is reborn every day so that today we could have a wide radiance, of ray, star and flower.
