ABSTRACT
In the Spanish Caribbean, the first Dominican universities had been founded in San Domingo as early as 1528 and in Cuba in 1728. To Guillen, it was obvious that the essential culture of Cuba and the Caribbean was African-based, but it was there to be shared by all ethnic groups. Guillen, who later took a leading role in Castro's intellectual revolution, was elected Cuba's poet nacional in 1961, but he had been a pan-Caribbean force from the 1930s. In the 1960s, the political future of postcolonial Caribbean society was an issue hotly debated on the University of the West Indies campuses, which now included sites in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and Guyana. Glissant developed the concept of 'Antillante', a holistic experience which embraces the 'folk' experience together with all other elements of the Caribbean reality, held in a profoundly realised instant of the present.
