About the issue of Afro-Hispanic review dedicated to Georgina Herrera

Almost four years after her death, The Afro-Hispanic Review dedicates a thematic issue to Georgina Herrera; and the delay may — but is not known — due to the tense negotiation over its questionable legitimacy. The number was planned at the very moment of his death, and I was invited to participate by Juana María Cordones, who was a guest editor; but which I conditioned on the exclusion of Roberto Zurbano —for reasons that everyone should know—, to which she refused.

Neither the reluctance of the invitation nor the refusal are important, because they are banal and subjective; but the appearance of this number points to an appeasement, even more offensive than the original offense. I did not condition my participation on Zurbano's exclusion out of arrogance, but because of his disrespect and opportunism; and the fact that they excluded him without renewing my invitation, speaks of that arrogance and opportunism on themselves, and of cowardice and weakness.

It is not a struggle between two mediocrities, but about Georgina Herrera's ascendance in her motherhood; usurped —or pretended— by Zurbano in his manipulations, on the negrerismo of the North American universities. Put like this, they could even made him the guest editor, since the offense is even greater, if Herrera's son is excluded; it does not matter the reason, beyond the irresponsible hypocrisy with which her motherhood is spoken of and praised.

Right here Zurbano is mentioned, as the origin of the outrage to Georgina Herrera, so it is clear that it is about dignity; something that has been unknown to that magazine, with that arrogance of French aristocrats at the end of the eighteenth century. That explains the naturalness, with which they spend public money on patting each other, while they continue to exploit blacks; ignoring in this also the dignity of those who do not need them, because they do not live on another people's money.

They had alternatives for this number, which at least would have saved their face, in a situation that deserved care; even if they had had to take the fief from the white master, and there is no black person —from Vanderbilt to Puerto Rico— who dares to do so much. That, even more than the personal, is what hurts about this slamming door, as a weakness of a race incapable of dignifying itself; in proof that nothing has changed, but only that they have increased the payroll of foremen and butlers.

In fact, and as is typical of racial behavior, this number does not even do justice to Georgina Herrera; because it ignores its importance, more axial than anecdotal, in the determination of the black cosmos in Cuba. That, which occurs in the intense power of her poetry, is mostly manipulated as a poetics of resistance; that hides in it the existential scope, with which it reorganizes the Cuban ethos, in its true dimension.

Too many important people have collaborated in that number, and no one knows the conditions or why they did it; the good will of some is enough not to go around offending them all, in what would be an act of unforgivable vanity. However, to those who do know that they acted with duplicity and cowardice, it only remains to lament the poverty and pettiness; if they are so transcendentalists, they should know that this is what will remain of them, the arrogance and ignorance they exhibit.

Nor should nobody exhaust the limits of love, no matter how immense, because it always dries up in the inconsistency; and that would be irreparable, after having grown only from faith and the memory of a distant past. It is not strange that this is done by Cuban cultural institutionalism, to which this thoughtless arrogance is natural; but it is sad that American universities —which use public money— accompanied them like this, into the abyss of that vulgarity.