CAMAGÜEY.- The initial verse, transformed into the headline of the commentary, intends to recognize the inner child of the journalist, the Camagüey’s writer of intense and novel literary work Nicolás Guillén Batista, who also dedicated children's texts, with the same fervor with which he expressed his political ideas, among them the socialists, not well appreciated by their contemporaries, especially because of the color of their mulatto skin.
Close to the commemoration of the 120th anniversary of the birth of the National Poet of Cuba (Camagüey, July 10, 1902) it is timely to highlight among the many stylistic innovations from the great classic among children's readings that is the collection of poems “Por el Mar de las Antillas anda un barco de papel” (1977), Poem with children, Sensemayá and his song to kill a snake, up to the audio of Lullaby to wake up a black boy (1988).
His journalistic work began when he was 22 years old, at the end of March 1924, when the management of the provincial newspaper El Camagüeyano, with a conservative tendency, apparently in a political maneuver summoned Guillén, with liberal ideas inherited from his father.
He accepts the proposal after his dismissal from the City Council for the crime of thinking with his head, he takes charge and transforms for good the contents of the commercial propaganda in the Pisto Manchego section.
Under the pseudonym of Interim, he wrote 421 costumbrist columns, with sharp and satirical chronicles, and some scholars of Guillen's work affirm that a third of the contents referred to local, national and international political issues, especially anti-imperialist ones.
The cause of the abandonment of this section, after about two years of journalistic work, was, among others, the disagreement with the director of the newspaper about a campaign in favor of child labor.
On a certain occasion, in a conversation with the journalist from Camagüey Eduardo Labrada Rodríguez, a long-standing professional in the provincial newspaper Adelante, pointed out that the director of El Camagüeyano advocated the idea that one way to help the poor is for children to work, for example in the sale of libel.
Those ideas could not fit in the mind of a Cuban who had cut his teeth in politics, not just liberal, but related to leftist tendencies.
When referring to the allegorical world of Guillén and the children, it is justified to quote the complete stanza of the verse:
Woe to whom separates children,
because he separates men!
The sun rises every day
is playing in every house,
hit him with his cane,
and burst out laughing...
Blood is an immense sea,
El son entero, 1947
Translated by Linet Acuñ Quilez