It was another moment of union between both peoples, pointed out Cuban ambassador in Uruguay, Zulan Popa, about the event sponsored by the embassy of the Caribbean nation together with local artists and from other latitudes.
The diplomat evoked José Martí, consul of Uruguay in New York, and the national poet of his homeland, Nicolás Guillén, who would celebrate his 121st birthday these days.
The Cuban writer Edel Morales defined Guillén’s “an artistic work of excellence”, accompanied by his social search and communist militancy, which he shared with other greats such as Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda.
Morales highlighted the imprint of the book Motivos del Son, which marks an aesthetic change in Cuban and continental poetics and places it at the forefront.
The Uruguayan group Afropoética remembered Guillén in his poems and by authors from here, such as poet Beatriz Santos, who this year was named an Illustrious Citizen by the Municipality of Montevideo.
Another Uruguayan, Horacio D’Angelo, read Mario Benedetti and his poem Habanera, full of mulatas and other Cuban evocations.
Several of the interpreters recalled Nicolás Guillén’s visit to Montevideo in 1947, where he was received by the writer, journalist and activist Virginia Brindis de Salas, the first black woman to be published in Uruguay.
Take off the blindfold, a shocking poem by Brindis de Sala, was sung by Patricia Robaina, who is investigating the work of her compatriot, now recognized after decades of oblivion.
Here the Cuban bard met the poet and essayist Roberto Ibáñez, who ultimately received the Casa de las Américas Award in 1962 with the work “Las Fronteras”, recalled his granddaughter in the Uruguayan’s writing dedicated to the Caribbean intellectual.
And at the end a drumbeat, candombe style, as Nicolás Guillén would have liked, the one from “La Muralla”, “In what a quiet way”, “I don’t know why you think” or “They kill me if I don’t work”, among others of his poems set to music throughout the world and reissued on a Saturday night in Montevideo.
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