July always brings the everlasting memory of the Camagüeyan poet Nicolás Guillén, whose birth and death dates both took place during the seventh month of the year, with a difference of 6 days. His physical disappearance hurts, as it also causes pain not to have among us the National Poet of Cuba, whose name spread early beyond the Caribbean and the American continent, by sinking with his work the roots in the deepest of the national being.
Thirty-five years after his last farewell, Cuba meets again with Nicolás Guillén to pay homage to the man of immaculate merits, the soldier of ranks for present and future battles. The enjoyment of his poems as everyday water is the living essence of the written language and the oral tradition with its indescribable beauty.
His verse, clear and simple, served to whip the claw of the master, to awaken the conscience of the humble, to make the voice of the purest aspirations of Cubans. Guillén knew how to found the image of the national soul, creating an authentic poetics, identitarian of our Cuban identity, which reached an early celebrity accompanied by an ascending intellectual prestige.
An invariable July 16, 1989, 35 years ago today, when death offered him, through a shout, its deep friendship, because the mulatto from Camagüey, prince of the language, is an indelible substantive of time. Even though he has never left, the National Poet is closer to us than usual, because the outstanding intellectual, founder of Uneac and its president until the end of his days, is the soul of the sense of duty, ethics and commitment.
