Nicolás Guillén

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (10 July 1902 – 16 July 1989) was a poet, journalist, political activist, and writer who lived in Cuba.

Quotes about

 * Some time in that period also I discovered the writing of Nicolás Guillén from Cuba and there was a permission to write the way my neighbors spoke.
 * Aurora Levins Morales Oral History Interview (2005)


 * For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original.
 * Nancy Morejón Interview (2002) translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss.


 * On 20 April 1930, Nicolás Guillén’s famous Motivos de son, which would stand as the most brilliant banner of negrismo, appeared in the Diario de la Marina, in Havana. Guillén, many decades later, published an article in the Madrid newspaper ABC titled “Negrismo y negritud.”
 * Nancy Morejón Interview


 * Nicolás Guillén brought an Afro-Cuban essence into poems that still enable us to hear the drumbeat of cultures unbroken by the Middle Passage. His poetry helped put the negrista movement on the map.
 * Margaret Randall Introduction in Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (2016)


 * That victory of 1959 produced a "before" and "after" unlike anything elsewhere or since. For Cuban poets born at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Nicolás Guillén and Dulce María Loynaz...it meant an entirely different life. Guillén welcomed and embraced it.
 * Margaret Randall Introduction in Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (2016)