From the Gustavo E. Urrutia’s series

It cannot be stressed enough the difference between the intellectuality of Morúa Delgado and the political acuity of Urrutia; they only share the pragmatism, which in one is probabilistic and in the other is socially projected, more tactical than strategic. Between them, they illustrate the diapason of black intelligence in Cuba, with all its conservative nuance; which the relative liberalism of exceptions such as Juan Gualberto Gómez barely manage to tinge, pointing out its functionalism.

The difference is not only strange but also functional, which is what makes them both important in this illustration; one with the organization of a cosmology in the dramatic value of the real, whose anthropology emerges in their literature; the other in the understanding of that cosmology, and implementing it meticulously, in the brief piece of journalism. That is why Urrutia can never dare —nor does he care— in a project like Morúa's Political Essay[1]; but he can push that vision, as the other cannot do in his literary excellence, speaking to the common man.

Urrutia's other value is the illustration of Cuban conservatism, in its political advance with the triumph of Batista; that cannot obey just to a folkloric frivolity or a mere immorality, which is what it is reduced to ideologically. Any understanding of Batista is determined by his violence, as if the revolutionary one were not just as vicious; as if violence were not the characteristic of Cuban political culture, from its very genesis in the voluntarism of the Creole landowners of the independence.

This persistence should draw attention to its nature, at least in the case of black Cubans; who since Morúa presided over the Senate, only with Batista —and never again— did they achieve any political preeminence. Batista means something that is more serious than the supposed fickleness of a people that no one bothers to understand; and that secret would be in this sarcastic shadow, which follows him like a sixty-four[2] that the country recurrently encounters.

Urrutia makes it clear that Cuban racism, distinct from its racial prejudice[3], is a mimicry of that of the American; which is why it is typical of a high bourgeoisie with aristocratic pretensions, distancing itself from all petty bourgeois and proletarian ties[4]. That is important, because it is this false bourgeoisie that rejects Batista as well as Cubans in general in politics; and in this game of dichotomies, the Cuban is that sarcasm that persistently crosses it, eventually with its own violence.

This is important, because it diverts to Cuba the possibility of development that is impossible in the United States; since humanity cannot be concretized in this violence of subjugation, if it depends on the will to relate ones to others. That what means Batista's strength, understandable in the incredibly liberal reasoning of Urrutia's conservatism; and it is the kind of subtlety that, in its extreme tactical practicality, escapes the great cosmologies such as that of Morúa and his literature.

There is a detail in the joy with which Urrutia refers to Nicolás Guillén, no matter the obvious ideological divergence; and that recalls the subreptitious persistence with which Guillén maintains the memoirs of Lino Dou and Morúa in the revolutionary Cuba. It is an identity that, not being political, is not racial either —in that same ideological sense— but existential; even if this existentiality comes —as pragmatism— from his experience, in the political precariousness of his race. It is the same silent effort —perhaps unconscious— with which Fernández Robaina collects them all and puts them in order; it doesn't matter if he does it underhandedly, in that context of the Aponte Society in Cuba, which others take advantage of to ripe the new slave market of American Universities.

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[1] tags. It refers to the Political Essay or Cuba and Racial Integration.

[2] . 64, Grand Dead (ancestor) in Cuban Charade.

[3] . Racism and racial prejudice would be distinct categories, one referring to the organization of society as a principle, and the other to a cultural atavism with concrete practices; In this case, Cuban racial prejudice would be subordinated in principle to the integrationism of Iberian culture, while its racism would be subordinated to the mimicry of the Cuban high bourgeoisie of North American segregationism.

[4] . The excessive stratification of modern rationalism tends to identify the bourgeoisie as a single class, unaware of its own formation; with the upper bourgeoisie generated from the financial specialization of a part of it, which allows it to replace the traditional aristocracy, with the transformation of capital, from military to financial.// Cf: Onthe Reactionary Character of Every Revolution