Nicolás Guillén was born in Camagüey, Cuba. He studied law at the University of Havana, and worked as a typographer and journalist. He began publishing poetry in various magazines in the 1920s. His first collection of poetry, Motivos de son, was published in 1930. He wrote poems critical of the government and was arrested and jailed in 1936. In 1937 he travelled to Spain to attend a Congress of Writers and Artists and to report on the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, having returned to Cuba, he ran in local elections as a member of the Communist Party.