Mercedes Cuesta Dublin, University of Oriente

The search for identity that characterizes today’s global reality finds controversial nuances in Latin American and Caribbean countries. All these territories share, alongside a common past marked by discovery, conquest, and colonization, the burden of slavery: a phenomenon as old as humanity itself, which darkened their skin through the Atlantic triangular trade Europe-Africa-America.

In the American colonies, the ruling elites resorted to various strategies and explanations to justify their apparent superiority and the subjugation of the enslaved population, African at first, and later their descendants. In the specific case of Cuba, whites born on the island tried to monopolize the status of creoles, seen as a social, economic, and political category. Those who had also been born in the country but were of African origin were distinguished by being called Afro-descendants: a racial identity that the dominant class frequently used to refer to black creoles with the aim of accentuating the hierarchical differences between them and the descendants of Spaniards within colonial Cuban society. A social demonym, in the words of Zuleica Romay, to perpetuate a status of inferiority. Identifying someone as “Afro” served to highlight certain distinctive practices of the savage and barbaric appearance attributed to Africans and their descendants, all members of an inferior class plagued by marginality and criminal behavior, as well as lust, sexual corruption, prostitution, vagrancy, idleness, witchcraft, ñañiguismo among other expressions of their cosmogonies and belief systems distorted by the Eurocentric hegemonic culture. Thus, Afro-Cuban represented a bad life. For this reason, black people themselves opposed its use at different moments in history. Afro also acts as a semantic reiteration to emphasize the folkloric character of some traditional practices marked by exoticism.

The term, now widely used in academic, spiritual and artistic spaces and by social activism movements, was part of Cuban intellectual discourse from the beginning of the twentieth century and even before. Under the influence of the scientific racism of the time, Fernando Ortiz referred in his early works to primitive and marginalized practices of witchcraft and to the apparently innate criminal aspects of the Afro-Cuban personality inThe Black Sorcerers and the Afro-Cuban Underworldrespectively. Years later, he returned to this word but with a less prejudiced sense, calling attention to the values of African-origin culture, its importance in history and in the formation of some of Cuba’s characteristics as a nation. Gustavo Urrutia in hisRadio Talkspointed out the need for Afro-Cubans to know “the religious, moral and artistic values of their black grandparents” so that they would no longer be ashamed or coerced with “supposed inheritances of inferiority.” Up to this point we see the use of both terms: Afro-descendant or Afro-Cuban by a republican and progressive intellectuality eager to recognize the rightful value of the black branch of our nationality. Emphasizing the Afro as a way to highlight the relevance of that racial heritage in the constitution of Cuba as a nation. The international discourse on racism and racial discrimination adopted Afro-descendant after the III World Conference against Racism in Durban, 2001 to recognize the descendants of Africans brought to the Americas during the colonial era.

In our country Afro-Cuban(a) is the category of identification with African cultures; activists inside and outside Cuba also mostly use it from a vision distorted in itself, because, as Eduardo Torres Cuevas said, “appealing to origins can be a denial of who we are today,”^[1]these Afro-descendant activism movements^[2]in their eagerness to combat all kinds of discrimination prioritize ethnic origin over national origin, assuming a word used to ratify our condition as “part of that otherness constructed intentionally and treacherously by the effective tools of power.”^[3]

Considering the cultural practices that connect us with the African as Afro-Cuban raises questions and not a few disagreements when analyzing their relevance to the particular conditions of the formation of Cuban nationality. In contrast to a history of uprooting that continues to dominate among peoples descended from slaves who still consider themselves the African diaspora in the Americas.

In the formation of the Cuban ethno-nation the African component, together with the Hispanic, acts as a determining element. Also to be considered is the role of the wars against Spanish colonialism as a catalyst in the construction of national identity. Without overlooking manifestations of racism and their influence on the success of the independence struggle, the fight for a free Cuba acted as a factor of psychological integration on the battlefield where blacks and whites shed their blood for a common cause, advancing in recognition and military rank regardless of the color of their skin.

It is worth noting that cultural preservation encountered many obstacles with the involuntary transfer of Africans to the so-called New World. First, individuals originating from the black continent had to learn about and adapt to the new natural, social and cultural environment. Adaptation that involved phonetic changes to their original languages, forced coexistence with their enemies because upon arrival in colonial territory, ipso facto Africans became part of a socio-racially homogeneous group by the will of their masters who did not take into account the diversity of tribes, subtribes and clans of more than 46 denominations[4]from geographic, ethnic and cultural origins often in conflict; the assimilation and learning of another language and thereafter being governed by moral, religious and legal frameworks totally alien to their tribal organization systems. Over time, descendants born on Cuban soil replaced the imported blacks until their total disappearance. African heritage survived thanks to oral tradition, forced to mix with native cultural forms or others brought by the colonizers. Outside their natural setting, the practice of rites such as Santería may have retained the most deeply rooted original features but could not continue using the same herbs as in Africa or they were combined with elements of the imposed culture; the overcrowded living conditions and the labor regime led to variations in the liturgical conception of many constitutive procedures of the magical-religious systems that had their germinal elements in Africa but were forced to be reformulated in the new context. Likewise, the complex syncretism of orishas with Catholic saints and virgins produced a pantheon enriched by the fusion, interpenetration and assimilation of cultural elements from two different traditions; the Hispanic and the African resulting in a new and singular expression, though indebted to both: but already with a unique, Cuban identity.

Currently there is a repositioning of the racial issue in Cuban academic debate; the Afro-Cuban that accompanied the rhythm of Afro-Cuban music, the cadence of Afro-Cuban dances, the taste of Afro-Cuban cuisine lost the prefix “Afro” by virtue of the blood and sweat offered by the descendants of Africans in the wars of independence, against the imperatives of the republic to gain their status as citizens, to “stop being an extension of a bygone ethno to authenticate themselves as Cubans and black Cubans”[5].

[1] Astrid Barnet: “I have the dream and the hope that very soon we will have in Cuba a new, strong and critical thought.” Interview with Eduardo Torres Cuevas. La jiribilla. Year X, January 7–13, 2012

[2] Examples in this case include the blogs Negra cubana tenía que ser and Afroféminas

[3] Zuleica Romay Guerra: Conference From Afro-Cubans to Black Cubans. Africanness and skin color in the Cuban social imaginary. March 18, 2018

[4] According to studies conducted later by Fernando Ortiz and Rómulo Lachatañeré, this approximate figure at times referred to ethnic groups that were not even the same. Zoe Cremé Ramos: Research on the provenance of slaves in the jurisdiction of Cuba between 1792–1838

[5] Zuleica Romay Guerra: idem