This poem from the collection Sóngoro consongo (1931) is an outstanding example of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry, reflecting both his Afrocentrism and his nationalist response to U.S. imperialism.

The poem was inspired by and written for featherweight champion Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo. Fighting under the name Kid Chocolate, Sardiñas Montalvo became a favorite at New York’s Madison Square Garden in the late 1920s and something of a Cuban national hero. In Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano, Guillén transforms the boxer into an archetypical Afro-Hispanic hero.

The diminutive boxer with his “cuerpo de ardilla” (squirrel’s body) and confident “punch de tu sonrisa” (punch of your smile) is pitted against the monstrous “Norte… fiero y rudo” (hard and cruel North). The short meter and free-verse composition with its rapid sequence of boxing images captures the essence of the sport while alluding to the impending battle between tiny Cuba and the beastlike Broadway, a metonym for the United States, “que estira su hocico… / para lamer glotonamente / toda la sangre de nuestro cañaveral” (that stretches out its snout to lick gluttonously all the blood of our canefields).

The repeated interjection of boxing-world Anglicisms (“ring,” “clinch,” “training,” “jab,” “punching bag,” “shadow boxing,” “black jack”) literally exemplifies Anglo-Saxon hegemony in Latin America. Although the protagonist, like his homeland, may seem at a disadvantage, he will ultimately rise to the challenge—“pulido, fino, fuerte” (polished, fine, strong).

The poem’s final stanza foretells the victory of both the hero and his people. Just as “Europa se desnuda para tostar su carne” (Europe strips itself to brown its skin) to the music of “jazz” and “son,” so the poet exhorts his countryman, “frente a la envidia de los blancos” (before the envy of the whites), “to shine as a black man while the boulevards applaud” (lucirse negro mientras aplaude el bulevar), and to speak as a true black man (hablar en negro de verdad).

Bibliography
Guillén, Nicolás. Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano. In Obra poética, 1922–1958. Havana, Cuba: Letras Cubanas, 1985.