Gustavo E. Urrutia and the Not-So-Strange Case of Black Conservatism

Martín Morúa Delgado may be the most dramatic black personality in Cuba, with his importance and deepness; but this drama has a historical meaning, given by the political confrontation with the Independents of color. More interesting, although less striking, would be the case of Juan Gualberto Gómez, with his black associationism; also Gustavo E. Urrutia, with his distrustful conservatism and middle-class rationality, excelling in prosperity.

All of them —but especially Urrutia— have against them that conservatism, making them reprobate to the revolutionary spirit; it may be —but no one knows— because in its anthropological functionality it shows the political dysfunction of the other. In short, liberalism is paradoxically conservative, with its emphasis on the preservation of the status quo; which is society as the ultimate structure of the human, in a value of its own that superimposes it on culture. In contrast, black conservatism is functional in its anthropological rather than political nature; responding to its intrinsic precariousness in this sense, even if it converges with classical conservatism; which is political, because of its directly economic determination, and based on the structurality of the social.

That is paradoxical as a principle, but not in the reality in which it occurs, as an expression of the middle class; with the agglomeration of an aristocracy resentful of the absolutism of seventeenth-century Versailles, with so much time available. This, in the context of a new economy extending the feudal clientelism in modernity with a consumer culture; in which economic corporatism subverts and corrupts industrialism, as traditional aristocracy is replaced by the financial, in the securing of capital.

None of this has anything to do with black culture, which emerges in Cuba as one of service, subordinated to this decadence; but it does condition it in that first precariousness, in which the concrete person must ensure his subsistence. This would be the explanation of this conservatism, incomprehensible to revolutionary moral suprematism; widespread in the patronage of the poor classes in another form of determinism, also racial in that suprematism.

In short, liberalism understands its own determinations, but not those of the black race it says to sponsor; and which it reduces to poverty of caste, with that difficulty of idealism in understanding historical singularity. The problem with conservatism in general would be that it starts from a contradiction of liberalism as a premise; which is false, because both are expressions of the same economic structure, distorted by political pressures.

From there it becomes the moral reduction, which presupposes a political identity proper to Black people, as poor; which is offensive, based on its patronage by the liberal contradiction, no less supposed than its own liberalism. Thus, the conservative Black person is universally regarded as declassed, condemned to the fate of the proletariat; who —in that racism of progressiveness— may escalate or try to escalate to petty bourgeois, but at the cost of its legitimacy.

For this reason, the political merit of these Black people is delegitimized on principle, without recognizing any possibility of it; discarding even—as supposedly individualistic—the family and community effort that built them. Gustavo E. Urrutia was formed as intellectual and politician against this political rudeness, from his professional solidity; as a representative of an astonishing black, Cuban and prosperous middle class, against all ideological reductionism.

There is no more eye-catching illustration of this than the collaboration between Booker T. Washington and Juan Gualberto Gómez; exchanging efforts for the professional training of black Cubans, as the foundations of their middle class and bourgeoisie. From this alternative network, which was of cultural rather than political resources, arose the elitism of the Athens Society; and this elitism, as the crosshairs of black society, as long as they were not played the dirty joke of socialist patronage.