SOURCE: "The Poetry," in Cuba's Nicolás Guillén: Poetry and Ideology, University of Toronto Press, 1983, pp. 147-61.

In the following excerpt, Ellis examines poems in Tengo, Guillén's first book after the Cuban Revolution.

La paloma de vuelo popular was published on 28 December 1958. The flight of [Cuban President Zaldivar Y] Batista from Cuba in the early hours of 1 January 1959 marked the triumph of Fidel Castro's rebel army. Guillén returned to Cuba on 23 January 1959 and was given a welcome the size and warmth of which suggested that he was popularly regarded as one of the heroes of the revolutionary struggle. He immediately undertook a variety of new tasks on behalf of the revolution. The popular poetry readings he had given in the late thirties and forties during the course of usually unsuccessful political campaigns were repeated now as events of acknowledged national importance. At the same time...