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ences. The eight poems in the volume imitated the rhythms of
son
while focusing on themes related to the island’s poor black,
or Afro-Cuban, people. The poems also employed speech pat-
terns from that group.
Cuba’s blacks were only two generations removed from the
experience of slavery, which after more than three and a half
centuries had finally been abolished on the island in 1886.
Afro-Cubans and their culture were still widely looked down
on, however. While Guillén was angered by the racism he saw
and experienced, he wasn’t bitter. If
Afrocubanismo
for him
involved honoring and elevating the black Cuban experience, it
didn’t mean condemning Cuba’s whites. On the contrary,
Guillén celebrated the interconnectedness of all his country’s
people, whether they descended from African groups such as
Arts and Literature of Cuba
14
This Cuban stamp
features a portrait of
Nicolás Guillén.
“Tengo lo que tenia
que tener” is the last
line of one of his best-
known poems,
“Tengo.” In English,
this is translated as,
“I have what I had to
have.”