First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"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."
"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."
"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 GuillĂ©n and Dulce MarĂa Loynaz...it meant an entirely different life. GuillĂ©n welcomed and embraced it."
"Exile was where I was able to complete the amended or mutilated spaces that I was still missing to understand Cuba’s history. My novels, riddled with ghosts, journeys in time, mythological reinterpretations, are how I try to give a coherent image so as to reconstruct that incomplete reality which I was shown."
"It’s as if Ray Bradbury had married Michael Ende and occasionally flirted with Anais Nin.”"
"Man is a political animal in certain societies, but it is also an emotional and imaginative animal in any context. Its spirituality is a lot more powerful and omnipresent than politics. My characters might be influenced by political events, but politics isn’t what governs in their lives, but spirituality. A citizen in any Western country could describe themselves as a political animal”; but a druid priest, masai or pygmy in Africa, an indigenous person from the Caribbean in pre-historic times or even the Amazon today, doesn’t follow these parameters. According to these cultures, the spirit and emotions are a lot more important."
"I’m more worried about exploring new subjects and places that give me interesting information, than speculate about what other people can think or say about my work. Life is getting shorter and shorter and I want to make the most of mine."
"I would like my readers to levitate when they read the novel. I believe that there is too much violence and coarseness in the world, not just in books, but on television as well. People become degraded when they overuse these things. As I writer, I feel it is my challenge to come up with a phrase that can convey all the anguish a human being feels and to express it in a poetic way. Literature becomes simplistic when two out of every three words are vulgarisms. It requires no effort on the part of the creator or the reader."
"Cuba is a ghost that feeds my literature...The seedling of what I am today took root on that island. But, that Cuba no longer exists, except for in my memories and my generation’s collective imagination. This is why it is a mythical and real land at the same time, which continues to sustain my ideas and dreams."
"In life, reality and fantasy are blended, and I deliberately look for that connection in my work. It gives me pleasure to do so"
"The working class districts of Havana shaped my outlook"
"We also need to see black characters somewhere other than in films about slavery. We badly need something more contemporary and more pertinent."
"For my family it [the revolution] meant achieving a real, tangible position in the social and political life of Cuba, which Fidel’s bearded revolutionaries [los barbudos] made possible. Those transformations opened the doors of the university to me, something that would have been impossible, given the slender means of my parents."
"Perhaps Nancy Morejón’s most precious gift to both readers and listeners is her complex portrait of empowered black women."
"My country will remain there where it is, washed by the Gulf Stream, the Caribbean Sea and by that desire to exist and remain and last with its windows open to the purest elements in human civilization without renouncing social justice. I would earnestly hope that there is a greater understanding between our cultures, in favor of civilization, against war, against terrorism, against every regressive atavism. Art is the magic that will take us by the hand along the most beautiful of paths."
"The revolution opened doors for us and allowed an enormous social mobility. Many walls that blocked communication were demolished, and taboos were cast out."
"MorejĂłn has been recognized as one of the most celebrated and revered writers and intellectuals of the Cuban revolutionary period and one of the most important Caribbean women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...Her experiences and her fluency in the languages of the region have endowed her with a profound and rich voice that has helped shape our understanding of the Caribbean as a field of study."
"We Cuban artists have played a decisive role not only in the Cuban society of today but also in its greatest definition throughout our history. We Cuban artists have contributed to improving our values, to articulating our character, to stimulating the clearest cultural resistance, to understanding ourselves better, to creating a world where, as the poet José Martà demanded, the most important currency is the full dignity of man and woman. We have offered that contribution through our work and, in many cases, through our efforts to transform the country. Sometimes utopian, sometimes feasible, our art operates in the spirit of modernity, service and independence."
"My whole vision of the world, beyond the perspective of art, literature and specifically poetry, is affected by those three conditions, which cannot in any way be separated...I am not more of a black person than a woman; I am not more of a woman than a Cuban; I am not more of a black person than a Cuban. I am a brief combustion of those factors."
"In Cuba we must respect all those writers who have maintained their space and their dignity beyond the question of making a hit at book fairs or in the commercial world. I respect all of them even if all of them are not to my taste or don’t make me happy."
"For my generation and for the generations that came after, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara preside over an irreversible constellation of heroes and, for that reason, have become integrated into the most beautiful popular imagination on the planet."
"The purpose of any piece of writing is its existence before a reader’s eyes."
"In 1959, when the revolution triumphed, I was an adolescent. I had only lived 14 years in the other society. Today, with the passage of time, we see how different it was in 1959 to have the power of reasoning. I was a person whose sensibility, intelligence, and knowledge were in formation. Various members of my family-and I myself—were the objects of many racist demonstrations. In addition, I was a witness along with them to many others. Thus, the transformations that were starting to take place were obvious, unobjectionable. Notice that I use the word transformations but not changes. I do so because I think that when I’m speaking about transformations the reader must think of a process that moves forward in a progressive way; whereas if I speak about changes, one thinks of a magic leap toward some paradise. We have made extraordinary advances in this terrain. And yet it has been neither easy, nor by way of a magic wand. The social gains in this domain respond to a long-standing, well-defined awareness that supports the full dignity of all Cubans, whatever their class or ethnic origins or their sexual or religious preferences. Racial prejudices still exist, which these 40 years of efforts have not been able to eradicate completely. This is a reality. I can tell you that, in this sense, racial prejudice is defeated but not dead."
"Very often people abroad see us talking about our free education as some sort of empty political slogan but in fact it is a reality and a priority."
"one of its [society's] most sinister creatures: the practice of racial discrimination, a lever that always heightens racial prejudice. Both creatures make up racism."
"For me, writing a poem means enormous enjoyment that reaches its culmination when the poem appears in print."
"In exile one is nothing but a ghost ... I ceased to exist when I went into exile."
"I’ve always been very interested in the short story. Compared to the often exhausting world of the novel, the short story offers a quicker reward, and there’s something appealing about its greater spontaneity…"
"I never keep a fixed schedule. I like to write for a while, move around, read, drink something, come back. But when I’ve entered the world of the novel, that demands more concentration. It’s hard to even write a letter, because it means leaving that world. To put aside the typewriter and take out letter paper, or stop because you have to pay the phone bill, is terrible…"
"The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context…"
"Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements."
"To govern well, one must see things as they are."
"The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country."
"The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes."
"Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones. There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement."
"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."
"Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests."
"The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that he can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds."
"Cuba and Belgium are both countries of modest size, surrounded by large, powerful and often hostile powers."
"Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself."
"Day and night I always dream with open eyes."
"All is beautiful and unceasing, all is music and reason, and all, like diamond, is carbon first, then light."
"La patria es ara, no pedestal."
"Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas."
"Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him."
"My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water."
"My poems please the brave: My poems, short and sincere, Have the force of steel Which forges swords."
"Oh, what company good poets are!"