Ramón Guirao

Cuban poet. He wrote Afro-Cuban poetry and was a founding member of the Society for Afro-Cuban Studies. His work includes notable titles such as Bongó, Poemas negros, and Órbita de la poesía afrocubana.

For many today Ramón Guirao is an unknown poet. A great silence, an unjust silence surrounds his name. As if it were not enough misfortune to have died so young, at forty-one years of age, on April 17, 1949.

Guirao was among the first authors to publish books about the black theme in poetry. His book Bongó, from 1934, alerts us to this detail. The critic and scholar Max Henríquez Ureña noted of it that it had "a poetic personality of positive original force. He was a child of his century. He followed the currents of most pronounced novelty, with eventual resonances of Rafael Alberti and Luis Cernuda."

The biography of the bard is not very extensive. He was born in Cabañas, Pinar del Río. His father and mother were Spanish, but the offspring turned out to be very Cuban.

He established a romance with letters from adolescence, making himself known in the supplement of Diario de La Marina, around 1928, with the Afro-Cuban poem "La bailadora de rumba."

He also cultivated journalism; his contributions can be traced in Revista de Avance, La Prensa, Orbe, Carteles, Social, Línea, Revista Bimestre Cubana, Bohemia, Espuela de Plata, Verbum, Orígenes, and other publications, including some magazines from Central and South America. He was not, as his total absence in literary accounts might lead us to believe today, an unknown author, nor ignored, nor devoid of vigor in the literary and poetic panorama of the 1930s and 1940s of the twentieth century, where transcendent voices abound.

In 1937 he won the national essay prize on Cuban themes from the Contest of the Department of Education, and at that time, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Grafos, a monthly publication of cultural topics that published works by important authors of the period.

He published only one other book: Presencia, but left unpublished the poetry collections Cuadrante and Seguro secreto, as well as a critical text on the enslaved poet Juan Francisco Manzano. He was among the founders of the Society for Afro-Cuban Studies and worked in the editorial offices of Avance and Alerta.

Of self-taught formation though a cultured individual, it is said that his life was somewhat bohemian and removed from comforts. He was passionate about black culture, its way of speaking and living. He even traveled to distant Nigeria in his eagerness to better know the Yoruba roots, something singular in a man of the first half of the twentieth century who, without money, worked to earn a living.

Cintio Vitier called Guirao the modest poet, testimony that he was a man for whom literary work, inquiry into African roots, and an existence consistent with his way of thinking, marked his path.

In 1937 he won the national essay prize on Cuban themes in the Contest of the Department of Education.