Nicolás Guillén : scrapbook [microform]

1931-38

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (1902–1989) was a Cuban poet, journalist, political activist, writer, and the national poet of Cuba. Born in Camagüey, Guillén studied law at the University of Havana, but abandoned a legal career and worked as both a typographer and journalist. His poetry was published in various magazines in the early 1920s; his first collection, Motivos de son (1930) was influenced by his meeting with the African American poet, Langston Hughes. West Indies, Ltd., published in 1934, was Guillén's first collection with political implications. Political repression persisted in Cuba even after the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado was overthrown in 1933. After being jailed in 1936, Guillén joined the Communist Party the next year, traveled to Spain for a Congress of Writers and Artists, and covered the Spanish Civil War as a magazine reporter. Identifying as a Communist denied him a visa to enter the United States the following year, but he traveled widely during the next decades in South America, China, and Europe. In 1953, after being in Chile, he was refused re-entry to Cuba and spent five years in exile. He returned after the successful Cuban revolution of 1959. Starting in 1961, he served more than 30 years as president of the Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba, the National Cuban Writers' Union. Among his awards were the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954, the 1976 International Botev Prize, and Cuba's National Prize for Literature in 1983. The Nicolás Guillén scrapbook contains poems by Guillén; criticisms of his poetry; typescript and manuscript letters from Nicolás Guillén to Arthur Schomburg; the pamphlet "La poesía cubana de Nicolás Guillén [por] Regino E. Boti"' and the musical composition "Negro bembonson, letra de N. Guillén, musica de Eliseo Grenet."