Gullah Geechee in Cuba, the common vessels of New Africa

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No matter the irregularity of its origins, blackness converges and is refounded in the Americas as New Africa; and the meanders of that blood reunites in a single flow, which acquires oceanic overtones. An example of this is the incredible life of the black Francisco Meneses, captain of the Spanish army; whose singular destiny would take him to Cuba, as an unlikely outpost of the Gullah Geechee culture.

Its importance is then symbolic, although in a historical sense, as part of the founding myth of negritude;  which integrates the Cuban in the  universality of the New Africa, for this ascendant of Captain Meneses. Of course, this ascendant would have diluted his genetic factuality in the creoleness of the  new environment; nevertheless that would be enough, establishing that  link that recognizes blacks throughout the Americas as neo-Africans; cutting with trauma the umbilical cord, so that it grows to a striving adolescence, and from there to the sufficiency of maturity.

The myth covers Captain Meneses with a dubious role, but recognizes the importance of the link; and  that is enough, because it explains the thousand nooks and crannies that culture crosses on the shoulders of the race, to settle its power. The myth says that Captain Meneses fled slavery in the colony of Carolina, taking refuge in the Spanish policy against England; that is why he would have founded Fort Mose, where he would gain the rank of captain and even be rescued by the crown, before landing in Cuba with the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

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There —of course— begin the shadows of all myth, for that Spanish program was not universal on its own; and many fugitive  slaves —like Captain Meneses himself— were resold, to compensate their original owners.  Meneses would not be baptized of his own volition, but as a product of this resale of his to a  Spanish landowner; and he would end up fleeing to the Bahamas, acting as a pirate against English merchants, until he was captured by them.

Between its folds,  the myth then  hides the tragedy of the Spanish betrayal, compensating the English;  in fact, even the Indians themselves were not friendly to the blacks on principle, since their conflict was internal, not with the English. The Indian conflict was caused by the distortion of the slave market, which affected the power relations between them;  but for many of these, the Spanish were also settlers, affecting their relations of interest with their original tribes.

The important thing is that Meneses arrived in Cuba, and  —protagonist or not— participated in the founding of Ceiba Mocha; then in Cuba —specifically in Matanzas— somehow is flowing the Gullah Geechee blood of the United States. This is  more than symbolic, because that region is already the black belt that pressures ethnos and anthropologically the Cuban creoleness; and it is important, because the African ancestry is above all moral and symbolic, but not politically effective; while this mythology directs —in that singular symbolism  of the historical— the course of genetics, as a communicating vessel of black reality.