The Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute received this Tuesday a passport canceled by the Government of Fulgencio Batista as part of the in memoriam legacy dedicated to Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), recognized as the National Poet of Cuba.
The event was attended by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Monteroand Nicolás Hernández Guillén, president of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation and grandson of the writer, referred to the relevant Spanish institution.
García Montero highlighted that Guillén was a poet who “brought Spanish cultural tradition into dialogue with Cuban identity and represented the Cuban color space or blackness.”
Likewise, the Spanish poet stressed that Guillén’s political commitment “was strengthened” after Batista’s coup d’état.
“He was a musical poet and his verses were sung in our squares, encouraging us to tear down all the walls,” said García Montero.
Legacy of Nicolás Guillén in Madrid
For his part, Hernández Guillén explained that The passport, now deposited in box number 1146 of the Cervantes, was used by his grandfather in 1953 to travel to Chile to a Latin American Congress of Writers, but that trip “turned into exile due to the impossibility of returning.”
The document retains a stamp with the word “unused”, testimony to the moment when the Batista regime annulled its validity.
This forced the poet to remain in France until, thanks to the mediation of Rafael Alberti and the support of the then Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, he was able to move to Argentina.
The legacy is completed with a dedicated copy of the prince of Sóngoro Cosongo (1931), one of his fundamental works, and a drawing by Guillén himself entitled Salina con hombre.
According to his grandson, the author financed the collection of poems with money from a lottery prize, and the dedication of copy number 2 reads: “For Rosa, with the great affection that her sóngoro cosongo has for her.”
Guillén, pioneer of black poetry in the Spanish language and communist militantdeveloped a work marked by social justice and mestizo identity.
Among his most notable titles are Reasons for are (1930), West Indies, Ltd. (1934) and Spain. Poem in four anguish and one hope (1937).
Exiled during the Batista dictatorship, he was founder and president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) until his death in 1989.
His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and It continues to be a symbol of cultural integration between Spain and Latin America.
