Nicolás Guillén

"Some time in that period also I discovered the writing of Nicolás Guillén from Cuba and there was a permission to write the way my neighbors spoke."

"For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original."

"Nicolás Guillén brought an Afro-Cuban essence into poems that still enable us to hear the drumbeat of cultures unbroken by the Middle Passage. His poetry helped put the negrista movement on the map."

"That victory of 1959 produced a "before" and "after" unlike anything elsewhere or since. For Cuban poets born at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Nicolás Guillén and Dulce María Loynaz...it meant an entirely different life. Guillén welcomed and embraced it."