C U L T U R E

Havana. July 19, 2004

BY MIREYA CASTAÑEDA -Granma International staff writer-

THE convening of this year’s International Nicolás Guillén Colloquium and Festival of Music and Poetry was a truly great event. The Foundation that bears the name of the famous Cuban bard wanted to commemorate specific anniversaries that are too important to ignore. For this reason, it united names and events that are inseparable on any occasion: Heredia, Carpentier and Neruda, the Haitian Revolution and Juan Gualberto Gómez.

Realistically speaking, this unique theme - poetry and liberty - has always been accompanied by music since the event itself began. It should be stated that the poetry of Nicolás Guillén is one of the most musical, that is to say written in staves and stanzas, and the musicality of his poems is just one of their marvelous characteristics.

Nicolás Hernández Guillén, president of the Foundation, appreciates that these international events “have not been characterized by a spectacular gathering of foreign participants, but we always have at least four or five eminent individuals who have intellectual authority in their own countries; for example Professor Keith Ellis, of Jamaican origin and resident in Canada, and Marina Catzaras from Greece. I’m very satisfied with the turnout, and above all with the participation of Cuban scholars and intellectuals.”

“Epitome of the “Our America” Consecration. Guillén, Carpentier, and Neruda: Seizing the Infallible Word from the Shadows is the title of the detailed paper presented by Catzaras.

My interest in the Spanish Caribbean began early and I was fortunate that my student days at the Sorbonne in Paris coincided with the time when Alejo Carpentier was Cuba’s cultural attaché in Paris. I was studying El Siglo de las luces (Death in a Cathedral). For me, it was not just an honor but an exceptional moment meeting Carpentier and having the possibility to ask him about his work. But in some way, my inexplicable attachment to the Caribbean goes beyond that. Perhaps also having had the privilege at that time to be able to meet Guillén and Neruda as well; I was a member of that privileged generation when those great, unforgettable characters still gave lectures. I say with pride that I am a true Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist in Greece. In Athens, I direct the Al Andar Institute (named after the verse by Antonio Machado), a center dedicated to the culture and language of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

Well, it focused on the centenaries of Neruda and Carpentier, and the bicentenaries of Heredia and the Haitian Revolution. For me, this congress is so immense that I didn’t want to present specific issues that have already been analyzed, but to express my solidarity with this vision, by taking Haiti as a nucleus in the reality of today, of a people who have been totally forgotten and abandoned, and the idea that perhaps poets may be the only saviors of that terrible reality, along with other necessities of course; but where is the poetry to once again make a call to the forgotten people throughout the world.

Simply speaking, it’s the profound American identity in each one of them. I don’t mean Heredia, but Carpentier, Neruda and Guillén (two years older) are an obvious Pan-American trilogy, they have points in common.

Of course, but El Reino de este Mundo (The King of This World) seems to be a fundamental work for me because it is the start of a new take on historical consciousness, profoundly Caribbean and naturally a point of departure from magical realism.

I remember the omnipotence of the man who used to get up to speak with a map of Latin America behind him and he told me that although America appeared to be homogenous it was not, and for that reason all my life I have worked on the heterogeneity of that Latin America and the Caribbean.

Neruda is a great Latin American and universal figure who shares a close link with Guillén despite the dispute and the distance that was undoubtedly produced between the two at the end of their lives, something that involved many different factors, some beyond the two men themselves. Pablo is a character who has an important role together with Alberti during Nicolas Guillén’s time in Spain. It was a time that changed the lives of all those that took part in that intellectuals’ congress aimed at defending culture. They would never again be the people that they were beforehand and that’s true of Guillén, Pablo and Alberti, three of the most eminent voices of Latin American poetry, exponents of the vanguard and of social commitment. To commemorate Pablo is also to commemorate Guillén, what they experienced, believed and dreamed.

When Guillén came to live in Havana at the end of 1926, he met up with Lieutenant Colonel Lino Dou from the Mambí Army, who was a member of a small group of mixed-race intellectuals and a great friend of Juan Gualberto. Lino got to know Guillén in this circle. At that time Guillén was writing a series of articles on racism in Cuba and his understanding of Cuban culture, for example in El camino de Harlem, or in his interview with Rosendo Ruiz on son. Guillén was expressing an understanding of culture and the racial problem that I’m convinced was indebted to this relation with Juan Gualberto, one of the great figures of the defense of independence and sovereignty in the face of the Platt amendment, and who also made a decisive contribution in terms of black-white coexistence. In the United States, they never understood what we were talking about because they had another vision; the vision of a country where there had never been integration; here yes, they had stood firm together in the war, there were black generals, and the first act by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was to emancipate the slaves. In the United States, 200 years passed before there was the slightest mention of equality between blacks and whites. Juan Gualberto saw the opportunity and need to create a black-white nation, because Cuba had no chance of moving on without that fusion, without that integration of blacks and whites. When Guillén speaks of Cuban color in his prologue to Songoro cosongo, he is continuing Juan Gualberto’s line of thought, in his articles he said that some day we would stop talking about color.

It’s true that what we are commemorating is diverse, it’s a lot, but it’s all connected to Guillén, and has given us the opportunity to create a collection of reflections over particular aspects that continue to have great validity for the Cuban nation and its culture.

The contributions of his poetry and prose maintain their validity. I’d like to refer to two of them. Guillén was a poet who was very well known for his social commitment, at times too well known, and this has perhaps pushed other areas of his poetry into the background. His commitment served to express the essential problems and aspirations of the dispossessed at every possible opportunity. Guillén always supported the most just causes at any given opportunity, for example against racism in the United States and, of course, social inequality in Cuba. His anti-imperialist poetry is one of the high points of Cuban and Hispano-American literature, dating back to West Indies Ltd. Guillén is a true anti-imperialist. Everything he alerts us to in his work is absolutely valid, and goes beyond that. After that, the problem of race, in which we have experienced great advances since the triumph of the Revolution but which still remains an unresolved problem, and Guillén’s point of view is still totally valid. When he speaks of Cuban color, what we have to do is search from inside the spirit out towards the skin. Color comes to us from there and this is the greatest truth about us being Cuban, and we must keep working for that to be understood and accepted as a conviction for everyone, that our color is that of our spirit, not of our skin.

Besides that, Guillén is the author of several of the most beautiful love poems ever written in the Spanish language, an area of his work of which little is known, but which continue to preserve his complete topicality. I believe that this poetry will continue to enchant people for generations to come.