death_date death_place birth_place subject imagesize birth_date genre image article_title name
16 july 1989 havana camagüey black poetry -lrb- poesía negra -rrb- 150px 10 july 1901 poetry nicolásguillén-1942 . jpg nicolás guillén
 nicolás guillén
nicolás guillén

nicolás cristóbal guillén batista -lrb- 10 july 1902 -- 16 july 1989 -rrb- was a cuban poet , journalist , political activist , and writer .
he is best remembered as the national poet of cuba .
born in camagüey , he studied law at the university of havana , but abandoned a legal career and worked as a typographer and journalist .
his poetry was published in various magazines from the early 1920s ; his first collection , `` motivos de son '' -lrb- 1930 -rrb- was strongly influenced by his meeting that year with the african-american poet , langston hughes .
he drew from `` son '' music in his poetry .
`` west indies , ltd. '' , published in 1934 , was guillén 's first collection with political implications .
cuba 's dictatorial gerardo machado regime was overthrown in 1933 , but political repression intensified .
after being jailed in 1936 , guillén joined the communist party the next year , traveling to spain for a congress of writers and artists , and covering the spanish civil war as a magazine reporter .
after returning to cuba , he stood as a communist in the local elections of 1940 .
this caused him to be refused 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 .
from 1961 he served more than 25 years as president of the `` unión nacional de escritores de cuba , '' the national cuban writers ' union .
his awards included the stalin peace prize in 1954 , the 1976 international botev prize , and in 1983 he was the inaugural winner of cuba 's national prize for literature .
