By Alexander Hall
The origins of the Afro-Cuban concept, according to bibliographer Tomás Fernández Robaina, were set by Fernando Ortiz Fernández in 1847. Based on data provided by González del Valle, he asserts that the aforementioned word was initially used by Antonio de Veitía. (1) However, there are no confirmatory elements that certify the social use of the term by these specialists in the 19th century. Ortiz himself used it in his pioneering period of publications to refer to the cultural practices of enslaved people from Africa.
At this stage, the Cuban scholar’s investigations were notoriously influenced by Italian criminological anthropology. This current considered blacks as inferior subjects, due to the size of their cranial circumference. (2) According to the precepts of Lombrosian positivism, the size of the skull determined the intellective capacity of the “races.”
In accordance with this, an arbitrary classification was established that resorted to racialization to certify the postulates of superiority of some human groups, under empirical discrimination instruments lacking scientific support. Such assumptions enjoyed popularity in circuits of the European intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century, despite being refuted since the 19th century by Haitian anthropologist Antenor Firmin. (3)
During that time, criminological anthropology served as an ideological tool for colonization practices. Their lacking objectivity reasonings were essentially motivated by reasons of cultural legitimacy and their methodologies were adopted by the German National Socialists during the 1920s and 1930s to support their theories of “racial superiority.”
La obra de Fernando Ortiz declarada Patrimonio Cultural de Cuba
According to the postulates of this current, the existence of black people reproduced “atavistic” practices that compelled them to commit criminal acts. Thus, a stereotyped relationship was established that defined a criminal bias in dark-skinned individuals, added to a narrative that understood Western Catholicism and European culture as “paradigms of civilization and good customs.”
Following such foundations, Afro-Cuban traditions were considered as acts of “sorcery,” “witchcraft” and “paganism,” by underestimating their importance as manifestations of spiritual and cultural resistance to the effects of European domination. These statements can be perceived in the texts of Fernando Ortiz between 1906-1939.
The ideas of the “third discoverer of Cuba” — as writer Juan Marinello described him — coincided with the precepts of a hegemonically white republican ideal, which in its design sought to condemn to ostracism the non-Western practices and traditions. This intention would also be mediated by the influence that by then marked the U.S. penetration of the island.
Afro-Cuban exponents during the 1920s
As of 1927, the section “Ideales de una Raza” began in the Diario de la Marina. It was promoted by journalist Gustavo E. Urrutia Quirós, who fostered with it one of the most commendable processes of socialization of Afro-Cuban culture of the period, with the participation of figures such as: Regino Boti, Lino D’ou, Ramón Vasconcelos, José Armando Plá, Juan Gualberto Gómez and Nicolás Guillén, whose confluence made it possible to approach social problems and relegated phenomena with respect to the marginalized sectors.
At this stage, the term “Afro-Cuban” is re-semantized, assumed as an expression of pride among blacks, whose intention was to remove the precept from the pejorative nuance with which it was conceived at the beginning of the century. From the section “Ideales de una Raza” the study of Afro-descendant practices was promoted, preventing them from being subsumed by the eugenic interests of the elites.
In this sense, the organ Estudios Afrocubanos (1937-1945), together with the magazines Bimestre Cubana, Adelante (1936-1940), and Archivos del Folklore Cubano (1924-1930), carried out an outstanding role in bringing together figures committed to the analysis of a historical-cultural legacy that had been outlawed by the canonical academy and political power.
As of the 1920s, many have opposed the use of the term “Afro-Cuban” in reference to skin color, under defensive arguments of “national unity.” This vision was advocated by leading exponents of black nationalism such as: Juan Gualberto Gómez, Martin Morúa Delgado and Sixto Gastón Agüero, who affirmed that racial identity should not be superimposed on patriotic sentiment.
This generated a rejection of the term at a social level. The trap of this budget consisted, and still lies, in the omission of the factors that define inequalities by skin color, which causes some to enjoy privileges and economic superiority, while the precarious strata, among which there is an overrepresentation of black people, suffer the organic consequences of social oblivion.
The descendants of Africans suffered the effects of segregation during the so-called “first republic.” When they decided to break the excluding reins of the liberal model, they were brutally massacred in 1912 by their former comrades in the fight against Spanish colonialism. This fact refutes the political tactic of subordinating the libertarian cause to a common purpose since behind this strategy there persist reproducing devices of oppressive patterns in social sectors.
Anti-racist activist and former president of the Federation of Black Societies Juan René Betancourt had no qualms about opposing that forced vision of nationality that sought integration without addressing the systemic variables that mark inequalities and structural disadvantages. For this reason, he was a critic of the integrationist theories wielded from positions of privilege, entirely functional to the exclusive bourgeois order of the subalterns.
In his postulates, it is possible to perceive a radical criticism against the approaches of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), which subordinated its analyses to the designs of the international communist movement and in accordance with the Marxist precepts of the time, which understood the racial question as subordinate to the “class struggle.” This tradition of thought during the 20th century made it impossible for the communist parties to gain more popular roots and caused well-known figures of that political militancy to decide to advocate Pan-Africanism in the face of the misunderstandings of the world anti-capitalist camp.
“Afro-Cuban” concept after the revolutionary triumph
With the revolutionary triumph of 1959, the discursive rhetoric of the leadership expressed its commitment to combat the multiple expressions of racism that took place in the country. This was declared by Fidel Castro in several speeches until the Second Declaration of Havana in 1961, this being the symbolic moment that marked the beginning of a long period of silence on the subject in its public treatment.
Since it came to power, the political leadership implemented a set of measures that prohibited segregation, while promoting the access of the popular layers to goods, services and rights previously reserved for the white and wealthy population. In the same way, a massive participation of the humble strata in socioeconomic tasks was evidenced, and, consequently, an improvement in their social indicators of life.
This will was also manifested in the circulation of militant publications full of triumphalist subjectivisms, such as the analyses of José Felipe Carneado and Pedro Serviat in their respective works La discriminación a Cuba no volverá jamás (1961), and El problema negro en Cuba y su solución definitiva (1986), which took for granted the overcoming of the scourge. In them, the approach to the phenomenon can be appreciated as a matter of the past, fueled by the official imaginary that considered it eradicated from the island.
Similarly, the Sovietization of the Cuban geopolitical space led to the problem being underestimated, understanding it as a “vestige inherited from the old capitalist-neocolonial regime,” which would disappear with the established “socialist” model, whose leadership ensured the establishment of a transit period towards the abolition of social classes in Cuba.
The predominance of an essentialist/colonial Marxism, which considered Afro-Cuban manifestations as folkloric expressions destined to disappear with the “improvement of the intellectual level of Cubans,” relegated the understanding of such practices and their importance for the people. This worsened the strategy of silence on the subject to avoid its treatment, with the instrumental purpose of sustaining “national unity” (now homogeneity) in the face of the U.S. political-cultural threat.
The above reasons caused the subject to be banned in scientific-social spaces. While the structural problems, given the socioeconomic differences by skin color within Cuban society, were subsumed by the egalitarian policies of the government, whose institutional/state-centric treatment reproduced the tactics of internal colonialism. As a result, any autonomous attempt at self-organization to claim the emancipatory demands of said social group was co-opted and subordinated to a centralizing, top-down, and authoritarian government praxis.
The period between 1961-1989 can be described as a setback in terms of Afro-Cuban studies, due to the State policy that shelved the subject, the religious censorship that prevented the entry of practitioners of beliefs of African origin to the ranks of the Communist Party of Cuba and the predominance of an academic bibliography that, under the foundations of Marxism-Leninism, condemned such expressions for being removed from “scientific atheism.”
The exacerbation of inequities during the Special Period produced an emergency of racism, catalyzed by the establishment of neo-capitalist social relations of production, which caused the impoverishment of the black population, which came to occupy the worst remuneration spaces in the working market. This reality, added to a crisis of paradigms, encouraged researchers, intellectuals and academicians to delve into these studies.
This scenario has favored the emergence of authors who defend the Afro-Cuban concept, among whose exponents stand out Alberto Abreu Arcia, Roberto Zurbano Torres, (4) Maikel Pons Giralt, Alejandro Leonardo Fernández Calderón, and Zuleica Margarita Romay Guerra, among others, who have reflected on its use as a communicative tool to vindicate the ancestral traditions that find their roots in the so-called “black continent,” while boosting pride and racial identity in said community. However, its use has found detractors in the field of racial studies such as Esteban Morales Domínguez, (5) Rodolfo Rensoli Medina, Ana Cairo Ballester, (6) and Gisela Arandia Covarrubias, who argue an uncritical importation from the United States, as well as the existence of a single ethnos in the Cuban nation-state.
Such positions, while pointing out the natural social and cultural differences between both nations, in addition to ignoring the historical treatment granted by various exponents of national culture such as Rómulo Lachatañeré, Fernando Ortiz or Lydia Cabrera, ignore the struggles of Afro-descendants and their demands in the Abya Yala collectives, self-identified as Afro-Ecuadorians, Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Brazilians, etc., whose legacy and historical disputes have been mapped by sociologist Agustín Laó-Montes from a novel decolonial approach, enriched by the counter-hegemonic visions of committed voices with the justice of the “peoples without history” in that broad spectrum recognized as Afro-America.
Likewise, it is essential to highlight the effort that black women have made to vindicate the concept of Afro-Cuban. From activism and feminist thought, multiple resistance strategies dating back to colonial times have been highlighted, through the visibility of actions against racism in the journalistic pages, autonomous organizations or the political field itself, whose trajectory is marked in turn by a strong tradition of struggle against the challenges of patriarchal domination, strengthened with an anti-discriminatory position in the face of a society that understood whiteness as a reference of universal representation.
The efforts of black women such as Daysi Rubiera Castillo, Inés María Martiatu, Gloria García Rodríguez, Georgina Herrera Cárdenas, Rosa Campoalegre Septien, Oilda Hevia Lanier, Alina Herrera Fuentes, Sandra Álvarez Ramírez, among others, have been fundamental. From various fields of knowledge they have contributed to breaking the supremacy enjoyed by men in the narratives established by historical genealogies. In this sense, the contributions of academicians such as María del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, Mayra Espina Prieto, Miriam Herrera Jerez and Lázara Menéndez Vázquez are also commendable.
All the aforementioned efforts have served to articulate new anti-racist organizations, movements and alliances that have managed to give new meanings to the concept of Afro-Cuban/Afro-Cubanness and boost the emergence of projects whose actions are fundamentally focused on making the racial phenomenon visible under new precepts of social assimilation. Now, set aside from political and academic conservatism, while enriching the sociocultural panorama of the island around the subject, with its numerous specialized contributions through its approach in various spheres.
The rebirth of independent associativism makes it easier to confront the multiple manifestations of racism in the public and sociodigital space. It also allows work around mutual aid networks, the configuration of intellectual alternatives that enhance the role of Afro-Cubans and the projection of new proposals for racial reparation, until their desires for equity and social justice materialize to consolidate the integrity of the nation.
Let’s continue the effort so that color is no more than an epidermal mark between affective ties of solidarity brotherhood. We must promote the configuration of an economic order based on cooperative social relations, to the point that it renders any discriminatory idea or project meaningless, that alludes to skin pigmentation as a distinguishing feature among human relationships.
Notes
(1) Tomás Fernández Robaina: El término ‘afrocubano’: una contribución olvidada de Fernando Ortiz, pp. 73-102, in Identidad afrocubana, cultura y nacionalidad. Oriente Publishers, Santiago de Cuba, 2019.
(2) Cesare Lombroso: L`Uomo biano e l´uomo di colore, letture sull´origine e la variete delle raza umane, Padova, Tip. Editrice F. Sacchetto, 1871.
(3) Antenor Firmin: Igualdad de las razas humanas: antropología positiva, Ciencias Sociales Publishers, Havana, 2013.
(4) Personal interview with Roberto Zurbano Torres on March 17, 2019.
(5) Personal interview with Esteban Morales Domínguez on November 12, 2019.
(6) Ana Cairo: El tema negro en la literatura cubana en los años 90, pp.46-78, in Denia García Ronda: Presencia negra en la cultura cubana, Sensemayá Publishers, Havana, 2015.
Author
OnCuba Staff
