Libidinal politics are not central to the huge critical enterprise that continues to be spawned by the writing of Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989). Race, Black aesthetics, nationalism, and anti-imperialism have been the mainstay of Guillén criticism. The emphasis on race and anti-imperialism is hardly surprising since Guillén's is, perhaps, the most influential voice of an African-centred consciousness to have emerged in Cuban writing since the end of the colonial period. The major studies on Nicolás Guillén published over the last three decades testify to the applicability of his poetry to a wide range of themes within global blackness. Accordingly, his poetry has been brought into productive conversation variously with African American creative discourse (Kutzinski 1987), negritude aesthetics (Kubayanda 1990) and the contestatory cultural traditions of the wider Caribbean (Smart 1990). These studies served to build on the ground laid by critical texts of the early 1980s, such as Lorna V. Williams's Self and Society in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén (1982) and Keith Ellis's Cuba's Nicolás Guillén: Poetry and Ideology (1983), which had already firmly established the poet's socio-historic significance.

Early work by (particularly) North America-based scholars of Afro-Hispanism tended to examine the poetry of Guillén against the tradition of ‘negrista’ poetry in order to establish its continuity with or divergence from the main tenets of this movement. The negrismo movement of the 1920s and 1930s manifested the discourse of mestizaje as the definitive representation of national cultures in the Hispanic Caribbean. Setting out to evoke their own sense of an essence of blackness (if not to represent actual Black subjects), negrista poets were, in the main, White men of letters. A politics of authenticity, based to a large extent on the way race works in the United States, informed much late twentieth-century Afro-Hispanist critical work on this movement. Early Afro-Hispanism also did the indispensible job of uncovering and celebrating Black writers from Latin America which, for many, included Guillén. Guillén's poetry thus became seen as a bona fide representation of Black Cuban life which served as an urgent and necessary corrective to the reductive, false and often abusive portrayals which were seen as characteristic of the poetry of White writers such as the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos (1898–1959) or Cubans such as José Zacarís Tallet (1893–1989) and Emilio Ballagas (1908–1954).