Jorge Guillermo (born August 1, 1946; Jorge Pérez y Guillermo) was the husband of Princess Christina of the Netherlands between 1975 and the couple's divorce in late 1996. He was accordingly brother-in-law to Queen Beatrix between 1980 and 1996. He is also a noted art collector. Since 1996, he has generally avoided gratuitous publicity.
Life
Family provenance and early years
Jorge Guillermo was born in Havana, Cuba where he attended school until 1960. Dr. Federico Gilberto Pérez y Castillo (1911–1967), his father, was a physician with connections to the political establishment. Prof. Edenia Mercedes Guillermo y Marrero (1925–2002), his mother, held a series of senior positions in education administration by 1960, combining her duties as director of education of the Province of Havana with a lectureship. Jorge Guillermo also had an older brother, named after their father, Gilberto Perez (1943–2015), who later became an American Professor of Film Studies. The decision that the family should leave the country was evidently taken, in the first instance, by Edenia Guillermo.
Political exile and further education
In 1960, following the Cuban Revolution, the Pérez y Guillermo family relocated from Cuba to the United States. Like thousands of other political refugees from Cuba, they settled in Miami, where Jorge Guillermo attended high school. Despite coming from a highly intellectualized family, there are indications that Jorge Guillermo did not share his elder brother's appetite for scholarship. He would nevertheless complete a course of university-level education. In 1963 he entered Cornell College in Iowa. His student visa expired after a year, but he and his brother were reclassified as refugees due to the political situation in Cuba. He then switched to Monmouth College in Illinois, graduating with an Art History degree in 1968. The transfer had been arranged by his mother, who worked at Monmouth College, between 1964 and 1975, as a professor of Spanish. Between 1965 and 1968, mother and son shared an apartment in the small town. Jorge Guillermo's father died in 1967.
New York
Circa 1973, Guillermo moved to New York City, where he became involved in the work of the charismatic poet-educator Frank "Ned" O'Gorman, a friend whom he had known since 1971. Since 1966, Gorman had been working to improve the "storefront school" a day-care and education center for the disadvantaged very young children of working mothers in the city's Harlem quarter. While O'Gorman ran the center, the focus of Guillermo's contribution was reported to be on fund raising. At one point, Guillermo and O'Gorman became surrogate parents for one of the children attending the center after his grandmother failed to retrieve the boy at the end of the day. It was not clear whether the two men were unable to trace the boy's parents, or the parents simply refused to take him back. Either way, young Ricky, two-and-a-half, moved in, becoming a member of the friends' bachelor household. There was no formal adoption, but Guillermo and O'Gorman shared parenting duties, which included toilet-training. Details of Ricky's condition never became clear: he was seriously ill. O'Gorman himself later recalled without elaboration that "it took him six years to die".