Ontological Pragmatism of African Origin, from the Epilogue to MogiNganga

The parallelism of the Greek and African cosmogonies is curious, although by confluence rather than direct influence; like in the rivalry of Olokun and Obatalá for control of the world in Ifé, as in Poseidon and Athena for Athens. In the Greek case, Athena defeats Poseidon by proving her usefulness, granting the people the power of judgment; in the Yoruba case, the judgment is of the divinities themselves in their sufficiency, and Obatalá wins it for his intelligence, not his usefulness. The Yemallá of popular tradition —collected by Rómulo Lachatañeré— synthesizes this conflict as existential; like the original Yembó, a sterile farmer woman, who receives fertility as she adopts Shangó, son of Obatala[1].

In this sense, the historical figure of Shango is that of the unpopular tyrant, condemned to suicide for his excesses; which he must undertake by the hand of his wife —with her as nature—, given its own scope as a political expression. This would not be a symbol of moral value —as from historical transcendentalism— but an existential dynamic; by which in its realization, as a political expression, the human being cannot overcome his individuality; and acts according to his interests, first individual and therefore as a class, corrupting that transcendentalism.

That is why its nature, at the height of its contradictions, produces its structural crisis in as a political expression; but existential in this critical sense, because of the contradiction of its immanence, in that transcendentalism. As a historical figure, assimilated to Yakutá, Shangó thus reorders the meaning of the pantheon, inaugurating the political; who’s potential then lies in Oggún, unfolding the cosmic drama in tension with him, through Yemallá.

Like Shangó —but unlike Oggún— Yemallá is a historical figure, assimilated to the divinity of Olokun; referring to the end of the age of the Erumales[2], more conceptual than the Greek cosmogony at the end of the titanic age. As an example, the personalities associated with Shangó are also associated with politics, or at least with its pretensions; but they are in themselves tragic and controversial, tending to the violence and existential frustration of this realization.

In an explanation of the example, a primordial myth of Shango explains its tragedy, similar to that of Heracles; bringing himself the misfortune of his house, with the careless manipulation of his powers over lightning, causing his madness. Note that, with Shango as a historical figure founding the political expression of the real, this is born of water; reproducing the dynamics of the Bantu cosmogony, although not in a consequential but converging, in parallelism.

That would point to a practicality, as not arising from nothingness but from the formless, like the Greek Chaos; whose first current connotation is in the wild, the Mount (Mayombe) as the spirit (Elán?) that expresses itself in the real. As a space of effective and non-symbolic value, this is the transcendent city of literature, in its referential function; from the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21:1-2) to the City of God, which ranges from Platonic Idealism to the humanism of Thomas More.

In that same function, but symbolic (political) rather than as a efferent, it appears in contemporary literature; in the transcendentalism of the so-called Magical Realism, from Santa Monica de los Venados, Macondo and Nueva Venecia. However, contrary to those previous cases, this space is not an abstraction (Eidos) that culminates the real (Power); but its Potential, to which the real turns in search of its references, which are existential, not political determinations like the former.

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[1] . Cf: Rómulo Lachatañeré, El sistema religioso de los afrocubanos [Oh, mío Yemallá!], Ed. Ciencias Sociales, La Habana 2001. // It should be noted that, contrary to Lachatañeré's mestizo and popular origin, Cuban ethnography is mostly the work of whites of bourgeois origin.

[2] . Erumale means radiance in the Yoruba language, explaining the emanationism of this cosmology, with the erumales coming from the absolutivity of God, while the orishas (Igbamoles) come from the Igba (güira) formed by Obatalá and Oduduwa.

Bantu persistence in Cuba, another prelude to the MogiNganga

One element slips away its silent presence in the political violence of Cuba's history, and that is its undeniable raciality; it may be invisible today, given the trauma that paralyzed all processes in the country, but latent in its rawness and potential. Of course, even the political trauma of the Cuban revolution exhibits its racial nature, in its own recurrences; but it has also camouflaged this nature of the conflict, with the myth of priorities, avoiding its transhistoricity.

Cuban racial violence would be submerged in politics since independence itself, which was already artificial; if in fact it did not count on the will of the people to redeem, but on the interests of his economic elite, which it legitimized. The first break would occur with the very first conflict of the republic, given its inconsistency, not directly but laterally racial; capitalizing on racial resentment in the face of the apathy and cynicism of that economic elite, which was already also political.

That would not be gratuitous, coming from the arrogance that justified this violence, with its literary and political fictions; which is the perversion inflicted with Martí's martyrology, like a useless Christ in that idealism of the modern spirit. Nor will it be gratuitous that the expression of times and place is Modernism, with its symbolist grandiloquence; surreptitiously perpetuating the postposition of black people, which is the one bringing some realism, in his existential pragmatism.

From there, like everything that is denied, that element will feed on its own negation, growing in its potentiality; not so total as to annihilate the nation, but enough to wash it down, in its impossibility. However, nothing can hide the contradiction, transparent in the inconsistency of the country's projections; and in which, what is frustrated with surreptitious racism is reality itself, rather than the black who expresses it.

The Negro, as a person in whom reality as a human is enhanced, cannot be frustrated in the face of difficulty; but only to remain in that same latency, looking for the way out in which to realize itself as that reality. Racial frustration is here the political trick with which he is manipulated, to tie him in symbol to transcendentalism; which as historical instead of metaphysical, does not offer him any possibility, but is what keeps him unreal.

The conflict then erupted in 1906, with Quintín Banderas, executed by the arrogance of his own naivety; in which, like the mythical popular simple faith of Catholicism, he mocked those he executed, in the name of his executioners. The conflict thus becomes scandalous with the massacre of 1912, but it is insidiously hidden, blaming Morúa Delgado; who covers the bastardy of José Martí, like the cursed inheritance of a nation arisen against the will of its people.

That’s why the conflict is retracted to the crisis of the Batistatos, making it clear that the problem is of a cultural nature; it is transhistorical instead of historical, not of transcendence but of immanence, denying the cosmos that sustains the black; and with it the whole adjustment of the Western culture, as the force in which the Negro would realize himself, if he overcomes the difficult. The peculiarity consists in the double religiosity that permeates Batista's culture, blackened in its popular character; with strong and cunning officials, such as the Coc of Buena Vista, positioned over the corpse of the one from San Isidro.

It is known that Morúa Delgado was a Freemason like Martí, it is speculated if that —unlike him— he could be a palero too; but it is known that Gustavo E. Urrutia was a palero, with fables of cauldrons buried in the gardens of Miramar; signifying, to the horror of Cuban Catholicism, that cultural advance, insidious because of hermeneutical in existentialism. Nor can it be gratuitous that the political violence against Batista was led by the Catholic university students; with a systematicity that provokes a reaction in accordance with its bloodthirstiness, but unforgivable for what it meant.

New Abakua Suite, prelude to the MogiNganga

To Ediel González

Because of false political miscegenation, much is known about Abakuá mythology, but little of its political ascendancy; when it emerged as the Ekpe Society, putting an end to the slave trade, basing the economy on palm oil[1]. The process was obviously more complex than merely political, but it implied a clear purpose of resistance; which is extremely original, since in that same process, the Ekpe society was an emerging, unconventional alternative[2].

In fact, it would be as a result of this that the Calabar region would lose its commercial supremacy, with the railroad; which allowed the relocation of colonial authority to Lagos, without depending on the coastal privilege of the Efik culture. This would undoubtedly demonstrate great maturity and political will, to negotiate a commercial specialization; moving from the assured success of the slave hunt, to an economy of production, not of mere consumption.

This is especially important, conditioning the anthropological narrative, which explained trafficking in culture; without considering that, even if exceptionally, there were degrees of extreme maturity and will in this regard. The same would happen with the Igbo geronto-democracy model, which is common to the Cameroon area; including that Efik culture, and the complex cosmogonic movements with the Efut and Efor, from which the myth Ekpe is taken.

What this highlights is that capacity of this cultural phenomenon in its political emergence, emulating the original crisis; when the decline of the original cult (Ndem), with the development of new lifestyles, broke the social structure. Then, as now, the Ekpe Society was only a mutualist society, interested only in the priesthood; and the latter even with an openly political interest, because of the susceptibility of the traditional priesthood to sorcery; which is what beats in the gender conflict of the founding myth, after the drama of Princess Sikán, of Efut origin[3].

The secret character of the magical aspects of the phenomenon, would be what shows its political, not practical, nature; from the capture of the ekpe in the original ceremonies, producing the sound —but not the vision— that betrays its presence. This is later reduced to liturgical value, strengthening its doctrinal function, in what is already a convention; sufficient to sustain society in its emergence, with a moral code, which legitimizes the individual in his social function.

This would have been the previous cause of Ndem religiosity, due to the social disorganization in the cults of the forest; which empowering the individual with his private practice, returns to that sense with the domestic ascendancy of the female priesthood. As a political phenomenon, the organization of the Ndem cult then becomes entropic, displacing the private potential; which comes to transform itself through the female priesthood, until it also becomes politically conventional.

In any case, what this shows is the political sufficiency of that cultural structure, subsumed by the Cuban one; that in its surreptitious racism, refuses this emergency, since its most serious outbreak in the cabinet of Fulgencio Batista. However, what this process also shows is its inevitable character, as trialectic rather than dialectical; mediating throughout the Cuban internal conflict, as its true backbone, in the resilience of the black world.

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[1] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Religion in Calabar, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1988, p 42.

[2] . The Ekpe Society appears as a mature entity by the mid XIX century. Cf: Michael Ukpong Offiong The ancestral cult of the Efik and the veneration of saints, Pontificia Facultad Teológica Teresiana, Roma, 1993., p. 28.

[3] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Op. cit., pp 34-35.

Frantz Fanon against Negritude, the mask

If Leopold Sedar Senghor is the capital figure of Negritude, Frantz Fanon is the reaction that tries to make it revolutionary; an effort in which he ends dissolving it, because it precisely attacks the exceptionality that gives it its meaning. Fanon's dynamic in this sense reproduces that of self-confessed communism, as in the case of the Haitian René Depestre; but it is more interesting than this, because his anti-culturalism is pseudo-culturalist, in his psychological diagnosis of the political problem.

To begin with, it is impossible to have an anti-culturalism that does not participate in the culturalism that is criticized, as it’s determination; the praise of Jean Paul Sartre, the target who rationalizes Senghor's poetics, subordinates it to him, is enough for suspicion. As with Senghor, Sartre seizes Fanon in the prologue to The Wretched of the Earth, imposing his exegesis; which responds to that false universalism of political determination, to which he reduces Marxism even from its economism.

In fact, Fanon's critique of Senghor —about the idealization of the African past— is erroneous and uncomprehending; for although Irrationalist is not romantic, and even romanticism is not historicist but referential in its reflexivity. This type of reduction is recurrent, precisely because of this misunderstanding of that object, in its extrapositivity; clarifying their incapacity, both to understand the real, and to provide a viable solution to their contradictions.

As if in an act of mockery (MogiNganga?), Fanon wears the black mask on the white spirit of Marxism; and gives lessons —although putting the body as a neo-cristical praxis— of how blacks should not be blacks but proletarians. Unfortunately, Fanon does not have the reference of English liberalism, which gives existential scope to W.E.B. Du Bois; his whole life is of a pure praxis, which does not allow him to peer into the paradoxical walls of history, but only to suffer it, at its feet.

Hence his poetic enthusiasm for the second verse of The Internationale, which still moves even its victims; even more so to his revolutionary and practical sensibility, not an intellectual one, exhausted in that pure existence. The mistake is in giving intellectual connotation to the groan of the slave who cannot maroon, believing in the contra mayoral; that Sartre of a ladino Marxism —not theoretical but political— as a monk who weaves theological subtleties about Marian virginity.

Fanon's books are thus only manuals of revolutionary theology, their reference is morality and not intelligence; and Negritude can do nothing in the face of this, because it is not a reality but a necessity, supposed as formal. Negritude, on the other hand, is another extension, not necessary but possible in its own formality, which is therefore not constrictive; instead of rational dogmatism, it responds to irrationalist probabilism, not to the psyche but to poetry, as poetic.

Fanon nevertheless has a capital value, enhancing the hermeneutical density, still necessary, by contradicting it; a function that becomes more amiable in that anti-culturalist pseudo-culturalism of his, instead of the political aridity of Depestre. After all, Fanon does not speak to the wretched of the earth but to himself, as yet another among them, hopeful; while Depestre participates in that elitism of the Haitian mestizo bourgeoisie, without the level of praxis that Fanon exhibits.

Leopold Sedar Senghor, or the Hermeneutical Contraction of Western Culture

In the spirit of civilization, Sedar Senghor stresses the political importance of art, but as a cultural function; not in the discursive sense of W.E.B. Du Bois[1], but of the analogical quality of aesthetic reflection as an existential function. Of course, that is only in principle, and requires the adjustment that makes it functional, in a gnoseological rather than a political sense; in a systematization, in which it already loses that analogical specialty, but is organized in a conventional hermeneutics.

This is what religious thought resolves, in its practical principle, organized in a mythological body; by which it represents an understanding of the real in its cosmic dramas, in relation to the specific culture in question. This peculiarity would then be common to all cultures, resolving the projection of the human as real, in its political expression; but also susceptible to distortion, due to the eventual superposition of that political expression, as determination; which would happen with the inevitable development of this expression, at the basis of its existential practice, as a religious one.

The contradiction is not paradoxical but apparent, due to the diachronic nature of the processes of these cultures; differing in this affectation from one to another, with their successive collisions, as they relate to each other. In the case of the West, the problem would not be in its final monotheism, which reflects —but does not determine— that superposition; but would come from the other development of philosophy, also peculiar, as a specialty of its culture.

The problem with this peculiarity would be in the political function, that this philosophical practice acquires; replacing the religious one, with conventions such as power, in an abstractionist hermeneutic, allowing its economic isolation. This would have caused the political overdimension of power, as a problem of that culture, more than in any other; since in the others it would lack this abstract nature, which allows its ideological manipulation, as the center of its ontology.

As an example, Western ontology is always resolved around the problem of Being; to the point of providing the nomenclature for its reflection, from the second generation of physiologism[2]. This is the problem of the Heracliteo-Parmenidean contradiction, from the preoccupation with the real of his first generation; that from Thales of Miletus to Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, dealt with the real as the mythological tradition, as a totality.

Being, however, is not isolable, not even in its individual condition, making this nomenclature problematic; to the point of confusing the early schools of Arab realism, trying to order the Aristotle's determination of the substance; which own condition is simultaneity, even in the other diachronic condition of these determinations. This is nevertheless compatible with quantum exceptionalism, reconciling even Einstein's doubts in a moderate determinism; treating the real no longer in the conventional abstraction of a nature, as an extension, but as a condition of phenomena, in their punctual realization.

In turn, as a body of cosmological reference, mythology had practical and existential sense, not conceptual; organized into representations, similar —as systematic— to that of Aristotle's determination of the substance; whose realism was a contraction to the efficiency of mythology, as opposed to Plato's idealist abstractionism. This will be what affects the Western religious base, conditioning its realistic probabilism with determinism; solved reflexively with its hermeneutical rationalism, no matter if it is eventually and necessarily contradicted by culturalist eruptions, as Romanticism and Irrationalism.

This is what Senghor's contraction with Negritude is about, as probably the final crisis of that tradition; in which he participates, in his parallelism to the hermeneutical emergence of science, like a postmodern physiologism. For this reason, his recognition of the special function of black art lacks the Platonic sense that it has in W.E.B. Du Bois; but allowing a conciliation with its ontological efficiency, by providing the hermeneutical framework it needs in its existentialism. Du Bois is thus the Hegel of black ontology, making it immanentialist, and Cornel West the Heidegger who explains it; Senghor is then the Marx who gives it political scope, from the anthropological sense of the Haitian Jean Prince Mars; all of them in this contraction, which culminates the hermeneutical tradition of the West, in the New Black Thought.

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[1] . Cf: From aesthetic thought in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Harlem Renaissance, in From the Niagara Crossing to the New Black Thought, Kindle 2021.

[2] . Here the problem subjacent is the inability to separate the verb “To be”, as “being” and “be”, like in the romance languages; in which “To be” could mean “to be something” or “to be somewhere” or “in some way”.

On the mystical and recurrent ghost of Duvalierianism

One of the most incomprehensible and strange phenomena of Haitian political culture, is the recurrence of voodoo; as an example, by Western standards, of the primitivism of this culture, whit repercussions on its social backwardness. In the first place, the problem would be that Haitian political culture does not respond to these parameters of the West; not being able to materialize as such since its emergence as a country, product of the same Western political crisis.

In this sense, and beyond its historical references, Haitian political tradition and culture is hard broken in its periods; without a connection between these, allowing the consolidation of any residual tradition, to be used as a reference. The first problem here is in the French pressure, posing the economic debt that prevents this organization; not only in that conflict of the nineteenth century, but also in the present, with the American interests, throughout the twentieth century.

It should be remembered the creation of the Haitian central bank, transferring the debt to the United States; and the occupation of the country for two decades, creating the imbalance that conditions any attempt at restructuring. In this context, Duvalier's rise to power —like that of Batista in Cuba— responds to this structural deficit; which is of a sufficient political tradition, and dates to the destabilization caused by the Petion-Boyer’s republic.

This instability is not due to the brutal tribalism of Dessalines and Christopher, with their monarchical pretensions; but precisely to the idealistic pretensions about a democratic republic, without the economic resources to do it. Due to the early stage of modern humanism, the incomprehension of this is easy to understand, as with any development; but no the persistence of those pretensions, despite the evidence of this importance, while still not allowing this development.

Strangely, this is what explains the ascendancy of mysticism, as a substitute for an organized political culture; which, not being able to establish itself, subsists in that perpetual —and certainly brutal—contraction of religious functionalism. This is what the monarchism of Dessalines and Christopher meant, legitimizing itself as a revolutionary mysticism; from that Boukman's proclamation to the Bondye, in which the revolution began, to Louverture's struggle with the French recalcitrance.

The answer to the Haitian political problem is thus anthropological, because the problem is first anthropological; emerged from the great crisis that was the French Revolution, as an anthropological disaster of West culture. This does not mean that the alternative to Haiti's political deficiency is Duvalier's violence, but only that it’s deficiency; and its solution would be an emergent development, by which these contradictions are appeased, in a national reconciliation; allowing the weaving —as anthropologic— of economic relations at popular level, no corporate and less still of foreign.

This is the meaning of Haitian gangs, which are also popular and not elitist, as an alternative to interventionism; whose violence is not different from that of the recurrent dictatorships, because it fulfills the same coercive function. In fact, it is not new but the same as the movement that opposed the martyrdom of Charlemagne Peralta to American interventionism; which resurfaces after the same threat of intervention, from the dictatorship —no less brutal— of Raoul Cedras.

No one will ever want to accept this premise, because of the idealistic faith that keeps the whole West in crisis; not just Haiti, which is only the place that lacks a sufficient tradition to assimilate and consume that disaster; but to the entire West, converging in the transitive —even racial— tension, that begins in Haiti and culminates in Cuba. Haiti is then only the extreme expression of that crisis, which by its dimensions resembles the Minoan cataclysm; now reproduced as culture, thus preventing its recovery, as that of Phoenician commerce on Mycenean population.

So spoke the uncle, introductory review to the book

This major catauro by Jean Prince-Mars ispublished by Memories of the Inkwell, explaining its synthesizing function; by which, even with political value, it is in truth an understanding of politics in its anthropological, not ideological, value. This already establishes it as the updating and adaptation of all the references in this regard, from Antenor Firmín, who establishes them as the very principles of humanism, but which Mars applies to Haitian singularity.

At both extremes is the development of that understanding of blackness as a nature, in Blackness as a possibility; which as typical of the West culture, adequate its idealistic excesses, with the realistic practicality of African cosmology. We must be careful with this, because there are many meanings of Realism, most of them of a materialist nature; but here the notion of realism refers to reality —or the real— as the object of reflection, distinct from its transcendent determination. It is from this that this black cosmology is understood as a new pragmatism, but already practical in realism; not idealistic, like that one —lacking the Dasein— of the tradition it opposes, as Western Idealism in general.

Mars begins his treatise asking —without rhetoric— whether the body of Haitian traditions are their own or assimilated; this allows him to establish the measure of consistency and uniqueness of this culture, and therefore its value, if any. The book then proposes an inquiry, which allows this probabilistic development of realism, in its pragmatic approach; avoiding the errors of extreme positivism, which does not differentiate between appearance and reality, or in fact dissolves one into the other.

Of course, none of this is possible ignoring that dense extension of the Haitian enlightenment, crowned by Mars; especially if it is based on a conditioned approach such as that of René Depestre, who precisely says goodbye to Negritude. But that does not have the fatality of the oracle either, since Depestre is only an ideological and not a philosophical wall; beyond him, the rainbow of communism dissolves his optical illusion into Haitian reality, and this is narrated by Mars, not by him.

Mars's analysis is acute, he uses a principle of discrimination instead of infinite sum to organize this body; starting from a demand for idealist rationality (Leibniz), which guarantees him the right understanding of reality. This is the kind of subtleties that culturalism resolves as a practical realism, in its reflexive pragmatism; Mars's contribution is thus philosophical, with the adequacy of transcendental pragmatism (Peirce) in Du Bois; which is here immanentialist, and thus more efficient in its probabilism, as the realistic basis of black thought.

By rationalizing this body of traditions as folklore, Mars distinguishes the analysis of the masses from that of the elites; obviously opting for the popular, which in its pragmatism extracts the desideratum from all traditions, even those of others; appropriate in their practicality and not because of their apparent necessity, in a function that is then existential rather than political. Blackness is important here, because it is that African cosmology —not western philosophy— what allows this realism; which survives in tradition, and not —Mars clarifies— as a vestige of the past, but actualizing the functional principles of the social structure, as a culture.

The Western defect is to ignore this cultural nature, solving its structure in its political expression as a determination; thus provoking the crisis of modern humanism, from its origin in medieval Christianity, which inverted that order. The Haitian enlightenment —as of blackness— is the effort to reverse this disorder, which is the entropy of the West culture; renewing its structure, with that contraction to the functional principles in which it organizes, through the reflexivity of African cosmology.

Welcome Back to Blackness

The conflict that Captain General O'Donnell faced in Cuba was not one of effective rebellion, but of cultural blackening; as a danger emanating from the recent Haitian republic, providing a paradigm political for black Cubans. This does not translate into dangerous uprisings, which the geography of the country would have allowed to control easily; but the formation of an enlightened focus in Santiago de Cuba, which would hinder the primacy of the white sacrocracy.

It is no coincidence that the Independents of Color rose up in Santiago, nor the Haitian ascendancy of their leaders; nor that this was also the ascendancy of Rómulo Lachatañeré, the black anthropologist who questioned Ortiz. Santiago de Cuba was undoubtedly a focus of new hermeneutics, arising from the conflicts between Haitians and Dominicans; who landed there with their problems, even of identity, immersed themselves in their discussions, foreign to Havana.

The reference is strong, with an Antenor Firmin who challenges the founder of French anthropology in France; and a Joseph Janvier who rescues the discipline to its own value on humanity, from its ethnological reductions. Black tension is strong in Cuba, with the West threatened on two fronts, not only the one at the East; there is also that of the trade with Louisiana, to where fled Haitians and French, mixed in their disagreements.

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Meanwhile in Cuba, the most that can be done is to launch that dove of intellectual flight of miscegenation; which is postulated as pure logical necessity, but of difficult reality in this fiction of political syncretism. In short, miscegenation is not only an abstract and conventional category, but also conditioned by its subordination; while people behave like blacks or whites —no emulates— relatively but also firmly.

Mestizaje cannot access the intricacies of politics, which reacts angrily every time the rule is broken; that is what the bourgeoisie did not forgive Batista, justifying the violence against him as revolutionary. Behind Batista was the broad wing of black conservatism, which had bourgeois aspirations in its proletarian character; and that was unthinkable, like that constant threat emanating from the Caribbean, until the revolution was able to control it.

That is what René Depestre's work consists of, with a title as illustrative as Welcome and Goodbye to Negritude; but so meticulous that it collects and organizes even his own political shortcomings, with which he dissolves the movement. This book by Depestre emulates the dissolution of the Niagara Movement, by W.E.B. Du Bois, in North America; subordinating all possible American blackness to the political strategy of liberalism, which is ideological and white.

Depestre's critique focuses on the culturalism of the movement, as a futile effort to establish a new ontology; not seeing that it was a matter of recovering the original ontology of black ancestry, adequating the defects of the Western one. He could not understand it —as it cannot yet be understood— because the problem is not only ontological; it is in fact hermeneutical, because that dependence of Marxism on the Idealist tradition from which it evolves, even as its expression; and whose transcendentalism derives to the historical, trying to resolve some immanentism for its lacks, but unsuccessfully.

Blackness still offers that capacity for renewal for the whole of the West, which stubbornly refuses to do so; not because it is perverse but childish in its stubbornness, given that insufficiency in which it cannot understand its shortcoming. The New Black Thought, by reorganizing the phenomenon, can make up for this lack, which is hermeneutical; and that due to the enlightened excess of modernity, has precipitated its entire civilization into entropy; which is not serious, if after all there is Haiti, ready with its own enlightenment, welcoming Negritude again.

About the return to the native land, from Cesaire to Depestre

Cuba's impact on the projection of blackness as an identity is important, because of the problems it poses; first, it allows us to understand the legitimate function with which liberalism appropriates the problem and capitalizes on it. Even if it is presented as historical manipulation – which one is not?—, this has a raison d'être, also historical; which, in this sense, is not unaware of this emergence of the phenomenon as part of anti-imperialist and decolonization efforts.

Before the Cuban process, and for whatever reasons, England led anti-slavery efforts in the world; adding the payment for the manumission of slaves in their territory, with a debt that only ended in the twentieth century. The rise of the scientific-technical revolution can be argued, which required the development, production and sale of machinery; more efficient, but requiring a heavy investment, compared to the slave method, more onerous but already established.

We should remember that, at the height of the Enlightenment in France, it suffered a depression in England; which reaching the closure of universities, sees its elite emigrate to North America, refunding them in line with this process; which does not include this abolitionist aspect, at least as a political priority, but does include strong industrialization. But even in America, the emergence of the Democratic Party does not occur as a harmonious an organized liberalism; and the racist reticence of the first workers struggles in the United States, is soon overcome by a more radical faction.

This is the one that monopolizes, pointing to an openly socialist formula, and capitalizes on the racial cause; not the Republican Party, whose strategy is one of accommodation and appeasement with the country's sequential segregationist legislation; but that elite —Enlightenment if you will— that will lead the violent struggle for civil rights on the legislative front. The important thing here is not that it is a manipulation, but that it is already a legitimate historical fact; and which cannot solve the racial problem, because it’s not interested in it as such but as a class; but at least it does allow the development of this new phenomenon, although it must consolidate and mature by itself.

This is what dilutes the phenomenon of Blackness —like the so-called Harlem Renaissance— in its contradictions; given by its inevitable immaturity, as the first stage of that development, in which it will acquire that maturity. That maturity is what comes gradually, with the correction of precisely these problems and contradictions; as the set in which this phenomenon will organize its own hermeneutical spectrum, with its respective ontology.

That ontology in turn, obeying the decline of that of the West, would be the one that works regressively; as a recovery of the original reflexive functions, prior to modern political determinism of Modern philosophy; which, arising from the apotheosis in that sense of Christianity, would reach its own apotheosis in the Enlightenment. Therefore, these are not illegitimate or incomprehensible processes in any way, but only defective; which must be resolved in a constant and inevitably critical correction due to its contradictory nature, like all development.

Therefore, it is not strange but illustrative, that in this whole process contradictory and internal reflections arise; above all that these occur in art, at least in the case of the Francophonie, because of their reflexive scope. The example here is Aimé Cesaire's Notebook of Return to the Native Country, not A rainbow for the Christian West; but it is the complexity of Depestre, not the consequence of Cesaire, what will unfold all these contradictions with his life. That is why it is like the appropriation —in such a transcendental universal authorship— of one by the expression of the other; because in the end both are the expression of the same phenomenon, which is all less harmonious and clear in its ambiguity.

Negros cubanos del exilio

Por supuesto, los negros tendremos que organizarnos si queremos tener alguna influencia en el desarrollo de cuba; pero para eso tendremos que entender las experiencias anteriores, y la recurrencia con que fallan. El problema parece ser la ambigüedad, por la que la red de intereses personales se expande en los políticos; como una proyección social de los mismos, que es lo que los explica en su autenticidad, pero también los pierde.

Eso es entonces apenas natural, ya que los intereses no existen en abstracto sino en esa consistencia de lo personal; pero como una relación peligrosa, en que el peso del egoísmo y la mezquindad arrastra a la inteligencia en su falta de alcance. Es por eso que este esfuerzo no debería estar sesgado por esas limitaciones personales, no importa la premisa; y eso por una cuestión incluso práctica y no moral, en tanto proyección personal, que nunca generará la confianza que necesita.

La experiencia ha mostrado que como objeto común, la expresión política ha de ser colegiada; asumiendo la reunión de todos los intereses, no importa lo difícil que sea, y hasta las contradicciones que eso implica. En definitiva, la contradicción es sólo el condicionamiento de toda proyección, más allá de lo personal; que así deviene en práctica, en vez de sublimarse en el idealismo, cuya falsa moral la hace inconsistente.

Los negros cubanos podemos seguir intentando todas las exclusiones que queramos, legítimas o no; es la realidad misma la que se impone, decidiendo qué tiene futuro y qué no lo tiene. El error es la persistencia de posarse sobre el ego, ansioso de reproducir el poder blanco; porque esto es lo que resta posibilidades a toda proyección, con la misma soberbia que dice combatir.

El mismo hecho de que alguien lo reconozca y no se atreva a cruzar ese límite, sería la señal de peligro; que no reside en la legitimidad, sino en la inconsistencia, terminando por socavar esa legitimidad. ¿En definitiva, si una proyección es tan personal, cómo puede ser legítima y coherentemente política?; ese es el contrasentido que secuestró a la revolución cubana, conduciéndola al desastre antropológico que es.

Eso es lo que, por ejemplo, permite la manipulación en discursos que secuestran la fuerza colectiva; haciendo que los conflictos sean insolubles, abstraídos a su legitimidad, tras el prestigio personal; que es en definitiva aparente, ocultando sus falencias inevitables, y que no tendría que ser tan importante. Lo práctico es entonces lo que permite la solución de los problemas, explotando todas sus aristas; pero para lo que tiene que ir más allá de lo personal, desconfiando de ese genio sublime que no puede negociar.

El ejemplo de esto sería la incapacidad de los negros, para establecernos como fuerza política en el exilio; no importa el crecimiento proporcional desde el éxodo de 1980, que reconfiguró al exilio histórico. Quizás el problema esté en sus genios, ocupados en construirse un nicho político en la élite blanca de ese exilio; en vez de dirigirse a una mediación con los afro norteamericanos, que redunde en el debilitamiento de su liberalismo.

O quizás no, sino que ese puede ser precisamente el propósito, en un esfuerzo solapado por ese ascendiente; que con su fe en lo político marca al liberalismo desde su nacimiento, con la Modernidad. También quizás, esto provenga de que esos líderes no son genuinamente negros, sino sólo por defecto; porque los blancos les recuerdan que no son blancos, siendo negros por resentimiento y no por valores positivos. Esto explicaría esa dependencia del liberalismo blanco, que a cambio los usa como moneda de cambio; pero debilitándolos tanto que no pueden intentar ningún esfuerzo efectiva, dado que su consistencia es ideológica y no existencial.

Eso explicaría la incapacidad anterior para actuar en una mediación efectiva ante la fuerza política de los afroamericanos; a los que no se puede presentar una alternativa suficiente, en esa inconsistencia, que nos sume en su misma ambigüedad. Para eso necesitaríamos una proyección que comprenda incluso nuestro conservadurismo, que es pragmático y no moral; e incluso la verdadera hondura en una nueva profundidad ontológica, en vez de repetir lugares comunes con la mera esperanza de —por fin— hacer filosofía.

Black people on the political contradictions

The biggest political contradiction is that being dialectical it can be solved, not even in that fantasy of synthesis; since that would be the end of history, and history is the experience of life measured with time and space. So what happens with the political contradiction, is that it continues through the functional two parts it reduces society to; the one with power and the other without power, being power the object for which they both collide in their confrontation.

This is not the natural progression of history, but it’s what has become with the transformation of capital; which at the beginning was just force, and thus becomes the military, but then becomes ideological. This is happened with the ascendance of Christianity, as a way to secure the power in an understanding of reality; but as a contraction to its idealistic nature —as ideology— that thus lost its consistency as reality behind. This is why at the same time of that transformation of Capital to ideology, it organized its residuals in its potential; convening the money as a way to that same power, in direct contradiction of the ideology as nature of Capital.

This is why Christianity was reduced to Manichean puritanism, opposed to any and all form of materialism; which then get represented in money, as the way to gain power besides the conventional structure of ideology. So this is how the actual political contradictions are the same born with Christianity, in the peak of Medieval times; organized as the same confrontation between functional substructures of power, like that of aristocracy and monarchy.

This is what came to Modernity, and transforms then as a class confrontation, but fake in that contradiction; because the proletariat is never the subject but the object of power, always solved in the upper class of society. What happened was the transformation of monarchy and aristocracy, through that other transformation of economy; which as industrialization, ending the technological revolution of medieval times, continues through the new classes. This was the State as the main claim of sovereignty, and the financial elites as the new aristocracy; both of them fighting for the effectiveness of political power over the society, in its middle and lower classes.

This is the actual contradiction, with none of them actually interested on the real people but in their own interests; for which they manipulate those of the excludes by theses interests of them, as their supposed representation. Although the whole system is dialectically organized in that political perversion of political duopoly, it has no solution; except that other —and diachronic— process of entropy, for which the whole system would crumble in its own excesses.

Let’s be clear about this, because any attempt to interfere with the process becomes a part of the same; as this is proper of the same structurality of the system, and so it’s ineludible in its own structural nature. This doesn’t mean that society is condemned to its doom though, but that this model of society surely is; and at some point, of its progressive weakness, a group with political ingenuity and recursive will lead a new development; resulting in the stabilization of the whole structure, but as an adequation of those same excesses.

That was what happened to Roman culture —not the empire— with its demise in the western side of the empire; when it was reduced to crumbs with the Germans, which then reestablished the whole structure as political. In this case here, that would be the function of black people, in the United States as the crumbling new Rome; not because an ability to organize in an alternative development, always sabotaged with its political perversion; but because in their precariousness and marginality, they would be the remnant on those crumbles, and so would find the ingenuity for the reconstruction.

Georgina Herrera on Cuban’s Language Day

Miguel de Cervantes was born on April 23, 1547, and William Shakespeare was born on the same date, but in 1564; because both of them, this date is recognized as the day of the Spanish and English languages, which reach their maturity with the work of the latter. This points to the undeniable transcendence of these men, because it is in literature that language is organized and matured; as an external support, which enhances reflection as existential, as a peculiar understanding of the world.

On that same date but in 1936, Georgina Herrera was born in Jovellanos (Cuba), giving a similar value to poetry; not yet to language, which has matured since Cervantes, allowing this other maturation of poetry in Cuba; but to this poetry, which is peculiar because it renews the instrumentality of language for reflection as existential. It is, therefore, an event of similar significance, although the proximity somewhat clouds this scope of hers; because it will be in this instrumentality that culture achieves its best integration, as specifically Cuban.

Namely, as a reflection of reality, culture is a network of relations as chaotic as the former; but now —different from the former— with a sense on its own, because of the peculiarity in which it is carried out, even more as Cuban. In fact, Cuba is the critical point at which Western culture bubbles, unable to materialize due to its innumerable contradictions; which can only be reconciled in a functional integration, starting from a given and progressive understanding of reality.

This progression is what language would provide, as well as its own development and maturity, given in its functionality; and this is what would reside in its ability to reflect the real, in a poetic structure that unveils the meaning of life. This is what recognises the transcendence of art and literature, explaining the scope of Cervantes and Shakespeare; such as Georgina Herrera, whose poetics constricts the formal nonsense of Cuban literature to its existential function.

We should remember that Cuban literature has been distorted by political determinism since nineteenth century; when pseudo-realist symbolism prevails over the nascent national costumeries[1], provoking the bitter critique of the real. This is the drama that unfolds from Cirilio Villaverde and Morúa Delgado, and extends throughout the national novelistic; but unresolved, because the novel —distinct from poetry— is too susceptible to the author's interference.

For this reason, the Cuban novel can only expose these contradictions, but not solve them as poetry can; and this not for its own sake or in fact, but to the extent that this poetry escapes that same political determinism. Herrera does this, as the link that unites the two periods of splendor and decadence of Cuban culture; emerging as a power that sums up the first, to materialize itself through all difficulties in the second. The undeniable transcendence of Cervantes and Shakespeare is given by their immanence, no less undeniable; Georgina Herrera's remains to be seen, but like that lies in this existential —not political— nature of her poetry.

In all three cases, it is the durability that guarantees the functionality of the form, already excellent in its own value; in the latter case, because of that stubborn existentiality that denses it, beyond the political flourish and even the beautiful phrase. Herrera's poetry establishes a hermeneutic from which to reflect on the existence of the nation in its culture, that is its value; and it is functional, fulfilling Morúa's claim to Villaverde, with that effective integration of the political margin into its existentiality; not as a black —although because her blackness— nor as a woman —although because her femininity— but in her extreme humanity.

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[1] . It refers to “Costumbrismo” as a literary stile, based in the description of social costumes with similar sense to the Critical Realism of French modern literature.