The dove of intellectual flight

Lydia Cabrera ethnologist prided herself on the fact that black Cubans were different, citing testimonies from them; it called nobody’s attention that she was white, and therefore these testimonies could respond to her interests. This is due to the fraud of Cuban miscegenation, preceding the revolution in Cuban culture, as its dove of intellectual flight; and that explains that ethnographic fatality of our anthropology, in which blacks are only a passive object of curiosity.

This type of misunderstanding could be due to the historical solitude of black Cubans, which is truly political; which them tends to protest, without however doing anything to effectively change that circumstance. It is not that the ideological trap is not true, but also that this disagreement needs two parties in collaboration; because just one is not enough, and the one making the move should be the one that needs it most.

Of course, for that we would have to develop that identity awareness, from which to make ourselves heard; recognizing ourselves in them and them in us, for the common problems and not for those of others, which divide us. That would mean, however, that we do not see ourselves as different from them, and that is something quite different; because the truth is that we black Cubans like this difference, which lies in not believing ourselves to be as black as they are.

That is why the distancing is as logical as it is mutual, based on the fact that we do not recognize ourselves as black; but that we only react as non-white, in a negative definition, as the inconsistency that makes us untrustworthy. We have always prided ourselves on that distinction, even if under the table so as not to be rude; in another example of the same duplicity, which thus makes us doubly suspicious and again untrustworthy.

Even our anthropology is actually ethnology, with the black person as the passive object of that culture; to which he brings the same clichés for which he protests, reduced to music, dance and poetry. In times of superficiality, no one delves into the semiological depths of that contribution, which transcend form. We prefer to justify —hiding the resentment— the vulgarity to which we are reduced, as a false popular simplicity; playing into the hands of the ethnologist who tells us that we are different, more intelligent, refined and tamed.

The blackness is still there, however, beyond the white babalaos and the light mestizos owning the botanics; and in that blackness, the mother of the world keeps her arms open, waiting for our existential catharsis.  That catharsis would fulfill the terror of the Delmontinos, throwing us into the center of the Haitian enlightenment, for example; but harmonizing the entire country in a real miscegenation, and not the intellectual fiction that now constrains it.

Cuba is as white as it is black, but also the other way around, not in one direction of that fallacy of miscegenation; in which, as in Nicolás Guillén's dove of intellectual flight, being black only means not being white. It is an old syndrome, the so-called Bovarism, from Jules Gaultier to Arnold van Gennep and Jean Prince-Mars; so it is also time to overcome it, with a maturity that is not only intellectual —that is the trap— but above all existential. Black people are black, even if we are Western, with that wonderful and non-schizoid duality described by Du Bois; and those of us from Cuba have the wonderful power to arrive fresh and last to the dance, marking the rhythm by which the world dances.