Apotheosis of Fernando Ortiz and the alternative of Lachatañeré

Rómulo Lachatañeré's critique of Fernando Ortiz is usually understood as an adaptation of the latter's excesses; marking his progression, from legal positivism to a better understanding of Cuban culture. The rectification of his initial judgment on Santeria, and the adequacy of his criticisms on criminality, would confirm this; at least in a historically significant sequence, still insufficient to exhaust the scope of Lachatañeré.

In fact, and for whatever reason, this adaptation would have hidden the momentum of Cuban anthropology; settling it in Ortiz's positive conventionalism, even if due to an inability to do anything else and not ill will. The issue here is not the change of perspective imposed on Ortiz by the other, but what his own work establishes; with a first compilation on Afro-Cuban mythology, whose importance exceeds Ortiz's excess and arrogance.

In fact, the other apotheosis of Lachatañeré would not lie in postulating the religious maturity of the cult of Ocha or Santeria; accessing cultural determinations, which do not depend on their political, juridical or racial treatment. In this difference there is an anthropological tension, which rectification —even if authentic— does not manage to resolve; displacing the problem, from Ortiz's evolution to the very possibilities opened by Lachatañeré.

It is therefore not a question of a judgment on the black population, but of the emergence of a cultural configuration; capable of recognizing and elaborating itself from its own determinations, not in the conventionalism of national politics. There is a ontology extracted from this mythical tradition, which proposes black culture as an alternative, in its sufficiency; which in fact determines the Cuban culture in its popular base, with the progressive blackening of society.

Lachatañeré would not expressly formulate that ontology extracted from his compilations, but rather allows it; being in this that it is unnoticed by the special interests of that conventionalism, which are political. His work on folklore would then be a realism avant la lettre, in the adequacy of Feuerbach's negativism; and as part of the neo-African emergence in which the West is disorganized, which is critical and early.

Ortiz's apotheosis in his conventionalism does nothing but exacerbate the country's problems, which are cultural; posing them as political in their determinism, and therefore as an ideological solution rather than an existential one. Lachatañeré's alternative pointed to the ontological function of culture, from this religious maturity; which is nevertheless pushed to the margins, feeding the dialectical loop of modern historical confrontation.

Curiously, Lachatañeré would participate more radically than Ortiz in this historical confrontation, in his communism; but unlike Ortiz, he is black —of Haitian descent as well— and settled in the other capitality of the East. His case then, like that of Du Bois in the United States, Fanon in the Caribbean and Senghor in Africa, is one of contradiction; but as a triangular tension, which pushes the potential emergence of the neo-African, in its evolution.

In Ortiz's apotheosis, Cuban racism becomes surreptitious and even spoils the blackening of its popular culture; everything was agreed upon in a convention of miscegenation, which nevertheless prevents the effective integration of the black. The latter is subtle and profound, since the black is exhibited in Cuba as an integral part of its folkloric expression; but denaturalized in the ontological function of that culture, by the determinism of the political expression in which it is realized.

This becomes critical, given the insufficiency of any other alternative, because of its intellectual but not existential excellence; such as the ontology of Lezama Lima —in its functional realism—, which still does not understand and incorporate the black. This is especially relevant, precisely because of the excellence of Lezama's realism, in the limitations of its Catholicism; only understandable in the practicality in which culture exceeds its intellectualization, because of functionalism.