Saturday, Aug. 13, Fidel Castro, the great Cuban revolutionary and former president of the island nation, celebrated his 90th birthday. There are countless reasons to pause and pay tribute to this remarkable leader, particularly for his stalwart stance against U.S. imperialism and the assistance he provided for liberation movements around the globe.
As we embark on the momentous Harlem/Havana Music & Cultural Festival, set to begin this weekend, time should be set aside to honor “El Presidente” and salute his courageous struggle to empower people of the Third World and elsewhere.
To be sure, there has been a long, and oftentimes tortuous relation between Cuba and the U.S., but, thankfully, there are many bright spots, many occasions when the U.S., via its Black population, is working in concert with the brothers and sisters from Cuba. Most rewarding has been the shared music experience, and that reached its apex when Dizzy Gillespie invited percussionist Chano Pozo to join his orchestra.
That moment when they combined their musical genius in the late ’40s has been the wellspring of several styles of expression, none more popular than the connection between bebop and Latin American music.
Given the prominence of the musical merger, very little is said about the other ways in which Cuba and Black America came fruitfully together. When the intrepid and gifted Langston Hughes translated the works of poet Nicholas Guillen, that act sparked a vital literary exchange.
In the summer of 1944, after Hughes had translated the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain’s “Masters of the Dew,” he received a formal invitation from Guillen to translate some of his poetry. But the following year, Doubleday rejected both books, insisting there was little interest in the former, and as for the latter, they rarely ventured into poetry.
Four years later, the diligent Hughes found a publisher for “Cuba Libre,” as Guillen’s collection of translated poems was called. At last, after Hughes’ 18 years of musing over Guillen’s work, the book was ready for distribution. Hughes was aided in this mission by Ben Carruthers, an able scholar of Spanish at Howard University. The illustrations were supplied by Gar Gilbert.
Although only 500 copies were printed, it was “a labor of love” for Hughes, according to his biographer, Arnold Rampersad. “The 50 poems came from Guillen’s early books—‘Motivos de Son’ (1930) … which was largely inspired by Hughes’ visit to Cuba that year,” Rampersad wrote. Other poems were taken from Songoro Cosongo (1951) and Sones para turistas y cantos para soldados (1937).
From Guillen’s “Tu no sabe ingle,” which Hughes translated as “You don’t speak no English,” you get some flavor of the Cuban’s creole and Hughes’ African-American vernacular:
“Con tanto inglé que tú sabía,/(All dat English you used to know)/Bito Manue (Little Manuel)/con tanto inglé, no sabe ahora desí ye. (all dat English, now can’t even say: Yes.)/La mericana te buca, (‘Merican gal comes lookin’ fo’ you)/y tú le tiene que huí: (an’ you jes’ runs away)/tu inglé era de etrái guan, de etrái guan y guan tu tri. (Yo’ English is jes’ strike one! strike one and one-two-three)”
A few weeks later, after the book was published, Guillen visited New York, warmly praising Hughes for his “una edicion esplendida.” Guillen’s regard for the book was shared by practically everyone, except the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. It was deemed an inadequate translation, and there was a complaint about the meager number of copies.
By the 1960s, in the wake of the McCarthy period and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Hughes began to distance himself even further from politics. Even when his old friend Guillen asked him to speak out against the anti-Castro nostrums, he refused to respond. Much of his inaction came from a wrong conclusion that fellow writers associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, including LeRoi Jones, had lost their jobs.
Perhaps the last vestiges of his militancy vanished when he, along with other Black Americans, was applauded for resisting the blandishments of the Cubans.
It would take years before Hughes even mentioned Cuba in his poems, and that occurred in “Good Morning,” which had no attachment to communism or Stalingrad as in the past.
Hughes’ radicalism was in the rearview mirror, but that didn’t keep him from lending his resolve to the fight against Jim Crow and racial discrimination.