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.

Against modern thought

The idea that modern capitalism arises from English industrialism, eludes its origin and support by the culture; which had been expanding since the discovery of the so-called New World, flooding the market with sumptuary objects. This expansion, prior to the technological revolution, would determine the consumption habits, stimulating industrialization[1]; as a culture that is not only consumerist, but also dependent on that consumerism, in the artificiality of its economic organization.

As a culture, with its own political expression, this would be what distorts the modern understanding of culture; already in crisis due to its own hermeneutical contradiction, with the political specialization of its middle class, as an intellectual. Neither capitalism nor the bourgeoisie would be then a modern phenomenon, defining the West culture since ancient times; when the expansion of Phoenician trade —outside its own regulatory framework— reshaped the Greek political stratification.

It will be the intellectual specialization of this middle class, with modern commercialism, what will provoke the crisis; and this comes from the political —not economic— conflicts of the transition to the late Middle Ages, with the Carolingian Renaissance. That Carolingian renaissance would in fact be an extension of the Merovingian, but lacking a middle class to become a cultural expression; that only appears with Louis VI in the twelfth century, in his strategy against the expansion of the Angevin empire; and that is why it takes its reference from that Carolingian period, as the closest instance of its political legitimacy[2].

Then, Modernity, with the fall of Granada and the discovery of the New World, would not be an original renaissance; but a reordering of the old one, explaining the postmodern persistence of the feudal political structure; including the tying to the gleba (land), by which citizens cannot move freely between countries. All this implies that modern thought —from Descartes to Kant, Hegel and Marx— develops as a political fiction; hermeneutically conditioned by its economic dependence, on both the aristocracy and the crown that funds it; explaining the period as a progressive disorder, rather than as a cultural order properly speaking.

Hence, the crisis in which Modernity culminates in the nineteenth century is not exactly political but anthropological; surpassing in this that of the Roman Empire —which survived in the Byzantine— and that of archaic Greece; to resolve itself in a postmodernity, which only marks the establishment of a new order, like that of the Germans in Rome. To understand this phenomenon, it is then necessary to overcome its determination, which is hermeneutical; not economic, because the economy only makes possible its historical realization as a political expression, but does not determine it.

Hence, any renewal of the structure will come always from its popular base, ethnically defined in an identity; because this identity is what provides them with the referents of their needs, as existential instead of political. This will reshape that hermeneutic, in its political framework as an order in disintegration, due to its dysfunctionality; but without its determination, given that marginality for which it had resorted to his identity, rather than to political convention.

None of this can be understood by modern thought, as dialectic and not trialectic, creating an epistemological loop; for which it can understand history, but not its determination, which is transhistorical, as a condition of reality. Hence this insufficiency, from which all its projections are contradictory but in dichotomies, not trichotomies; because of its incomprehension of the transhistorical nature of the real, structured in its immanence, not in its transcendence.

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[1] . It refers not only to gold and silver, which facilitated mercantilism by flooding the markets, but also to consumer goods, such as tobacco, alcohol and sugar, which are not as important to existence as English wool, which they displace.

[2] . It refers to the formation of cities under royal protection—with a bureaucratic structure—within fiefs under Angevin jurisdiction; referring to the entity formed by the County of Anjou and the Duchies of Aquitaine and Normandy, owned by the English crown. It’s from this function that is understood the pseudo-aristocratic character of the middle class; because its functional displacement of that aristocracy, providing the State with the new capital of ideology, with its of its intellectual specialization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the series Georgina Herrera I

Regarding women's poetry in Cuba, Catherine Davies points out that until the triumph of the revolution there were no black women writers; which may be excessive, referring more to their visibility than to an undoubtedly improbable non-existence. In any case, the contrast is strong with respect to the sample of black writers, who cover the entire literary spectrum; curiously, with more resonance in conservative media —such as the Diario de la Marina—, becoming even a niche.

In any case, the difference refers to the political precariousness of black people, determining its priorities; more serious in the case of women, even without cases like that of Phillis Wheatley in United States, who had the patronage of her masters. In Cuba, on the other hand, social freedom did not make this type of patronage possible, which alleviated the harshness of the environment; which, though less rude, was still beyond the strength of individuals aspiring to such a specialty as that of poetry. With men it is different, because its projection —and connections— is always political, allowing for other developments; contrary to women, who must leap from the domestic, when this —and not poetry— was the priority, as a primary need.

However, history is not an immobile, universal and abstract phenomenon, to be looked at with absolute parameters; on the contrary, as a reality, it occurs in the concrete phenomena in which it is realized, punctual in its exceptionality. It was then a matter of time before some pioneer would put her pike of blackness in the Flanders of Cuban literature; a development traumatized by the triumph of the revolution, with what that meant institutionally and ontologically.

That is the strange circumstance of Georgina Herrera, who makes her literary debut with the new institutionality; curiously, on the losing (Ediciones el Puente) and not on the triumphant side, which persists in its racial elitism. In fact, her older age compared to her contemporaries exposes her as the pioneer who did not materialize; grouped in an extemporaneity that did not allow her to establish group but only her own references, in her sufficiency.

In another circumstance, Herrera would have renewed the national spectrum with her sentimental existentialism; in her actual circumstance, she was neutralized by her low political profile, persisting in that existentialism. Perhaps this made possible her special sensitivity to African openness, dubious outside of the country's political manipulations; and yet this allowed her to reconnect with a transcendence, in which identity transcends the problems of childhood.

Recognized in all its splendour, her poetry is nevertheless dragged down by the weight of mediocre criticism; that, resorting to the commonplace, still tries to put together a political discourse where there is only personality; It is also about overexploiting that other commonplace of motherhood, more complex and dramatic than idyllic in her. Herrera is, in any case, an enigmatic and complex figure in every sense, from thematic to strictly literary existentialism; because her poetry does not derive from the symbolism with which modernity culminated, in its critical rationalization of romanticism; but matures directly from this romanticism, probably thanks to her formation, unique and sufficient as her self-taught.

Georgina Herrera navigated the iron system with her apparent modesty, camouflaging her haughtiness in silence; which further guaranteed her existentialism, with her persistence in the low political profile, which preserved it. In the end, there is nothing more political than that scandalous silence of her, like the stamp of his African elegance; something that the country insists on disdaining, as if it were not the needle that gives consistency to world, only that she already was and will be.

On the racial contradiction of Cuban government, in the country and outside it

A problem for the existence of black Cubans outside Cuba, is the projection of their own government; exposing them in a special way to the economic impoverishment of the country, but not recognizing this precariousness either. As a principle, the Cuban problem in general is expressed as economic, but it is eminently political; since it consists in the incapacity of that government for that economic development, which it justifies in its historical transcendentalism.

In this regard, the people of Cuba in general suffer the hardships of this inefficiency, which insists on its political nature; in an eternal dispute with the United States, which has historical bases, but involving the government and not the people it sacrifices. In this sense, it is not the nature of this national institutionality to defend that dignity, but of individuals; whom as nationals, would have to endorse with political mechanisms the representativeness or not of that government. That is not possible in Cuba, which thus falls into the conventional category of political dictatorship; even with its violence, which is necessarily directed against the people, as a form of political control.

It is in this situation that black person is particularly affected, given his political precariousness; which is systematic and endemic, preying on the revolutionary process, but stagnating because of it. This may be a common state for the Negro in the West, but here he does not have the resources to solve it; which being in its transnationality, it comes up against the barrier of false solidarity with which its government interferes in these processes.

Indeed, one of the paradigms of the Cuban revolution is that of its solidarity with the international proletariat; as a single category, in which every stratum other than the bourgeoisie, including the blacks, is gathered. The first defect of this category is that as a determination it is political and not existential in nature; but beyond that technicality, the problem is the demonization of Black dissent by the rest of Blackness.

Thus, the black Cuban —like all conservatives by extension— is morally disqualified on principle, as anti-black; identifying racism with capitalism, as if all African development were not capitalist, for example. Worse than that, all of these categories are established by a white, Western, eighteenth-century ideology; which, acting in its own interest, subordinates everything else in its own sense of the historical, including the racial problem.

This would show the inconsistency of discourses on racial identity, at least in their political projection; in which they are only legitimate when they follow a direction, curiously established by the very ones who created the problem. It is not that identity does not exist as a sufficient object, or that it has not emerged from the postcolonial tradition; but the persistence of a political situation of the first half of the 20th century in the 21st, on an ideology of the 19th.

Above all, an ideology so Western that it is a derivation of its culture in the inhumanity of its Humanism; and that for that reason alone, it should force black people to look over the wall, even to contemplate the suffering of their brethren. In an incomprehensible way —or not at all— the intellectual elite of black Americans persists in averting their gaze; which is also not surprising, if they had already subordinated their own blackness, since the dissolution of the Niagara Movement by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Black Problem in the Cuban Revolution

The problem with the Cuban revolution is that, like all revolutions, it justifies itself and within its own parameters; so that it reorders history, in an understanding that justifies it transcendentally, just like religions do. In fact, all this has been happening since Modernity, in which politics assumes the doctrinal character of religions; and in doing so, it assumes its own superstructural function[1], stripping culture of its existential value.

With respect to the Cuban revolution, this means its reordering of history in an ideological sense; which, functioning as a foundational myth, legitimize it in its political behavior as transcendent. The problem with these justifications is that they are proper to the historical transcendentalism, of the idealist tradition; and in this, they do not understand the basic problem of dialectics, as a Manichean reduction of reality, which cannot comprehend this. In this specific case, it ignores the determinations of the real, in its understanding of the historical; remaining political rather than existential, thus violating the effective determinations of history, with ideology.

In any case —consciously or not— this is a political process with existential repercussions, not the other way around; and in this way it will respond to the political determinations —not existential ones— of Cuban society, different from its culture. Cuban culture and society diverge from the determination of the latter, in the feat of independence; which, ignoring the popular will of the country in its relationship with Spain, imposes nationalism as a founding principle.

The problem here is the violence, intrinsic to Cuban political culture, from its origin in the voluntarism of its patricians; whom as warlords, settles their differences with that violence and popular manipulation, in populism. This, coupled with the growing racial differentiation of the economy, will increase these already typical contradictions; which erupts into systematic conflicts, such as successive revolutions and coups d'état, beginning in 1906.

In these conflicts, the Massacre of 1912 stands out, which bloodily culminated the Independent Party of Color; imposing a turn that definitively marginalize blacks, as an emerging force in the political tradition; and whose development, although contradictory and difficult, had led one of them to the presidency of the Senate[2]. Since then, blacks have tended to join the ranks of the Communist Party in politics, due to their patronage; as is characteristic of modern liberalism, insofar as it subordinates it to its own political cause against capitalism[3].

This is the national state in which the Cuban revolution triumphs, but —at least in principle— as a bourgeois revolution; which went against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, precisely by that high bourgeoisie, because of its popular rather than populist character; as indeed it is that bourgeoisie, in its contradiction of this popular character of politics, that belches with Batista's violence. Note that the revolutionary process itself is as violent as Batista's, only justified in its transcendence; which is where the communist forces take it, organizing it ideologically, in the same sense of Christian theology.

In this sense, the advance of blacks is definitively interrupted by the strong political corporatization of society; which, responding to the political guidelines of communism, does not allow individual developments such as those that help black development. This may not be necessarily due to a racist character of the revolution, but to the racial nature of its bourgeoisie; which, being the one that feeds the revolution and integrates its political structure, reproduces typical behavior.

This process is also internal, not visible to the outside world behind the ideological curtain of socialism; which in its struggle against capitalism, subordinates all the contradictions of modern society. Thus, aligned with liberal anti-capitalism, the political emergence of the black Americans does not accede to this reality; having to contend with its own patronage by that same liberalism, which subordinates it to its particular political interests.

In any case, the inefficiency of the Cuban government would not be ideological but practical, due to its economic incapacity; and this is what makes it politically illegitimate, by justifying this incapacity in ideology, without effectively resolving it. It would be in this contradiction that blacks are especially affected, given their own political precariousness; in which they would lack the necessary resources to overcome it, due to the endemic disproportion of their poverty; that in the face of the revolution had alternatives in individuality, frustrated in this strong corporativity of socialism.

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[1] tags. Cf: On the Structure [Politics of Society and Its Substructural Functions]

[2] tags. Cf: Martín Morúa Delgado

[3] tags. Cf: On the Dialectical Contradiction Between Capitalism and Socialism

From the Gustavo E. Urrutia’s series

It cannot be stressed enough the difference between the intellectuality of Morúa Delgado and the political acuity of Urrutia; they only share the pragmatism, which in one is probabilistic and in the other is socially projected, more tactical than strategic. Between them, they illustrate the diapason of black intelligence in Cuba, with all its conservative nuance; which the relative liberalism of exceptions such as Juan Gualberto Gómez barely manage to tinge, pointing out its functionalism.

The difference is not only strange but also functional, which is what makes them both important in this illustration; one with the organization of a cosmology in the dramatic value of the real, whose anthropology emerges in their literature; the other in the understanding of that cosmology, and implementing it meticulously, in the brief piece of journalism. That is why Urrutia can never dare —nor does he care— in a project like Morúa's Political Essay[1]; but he can push that vision, as the other cannot do in his literary excellence, speaking to the common man.

Urrutia's other value is the illustration of Cuban conservatism, in its political advance with the triumph of Batista; that cannot obey just to a folkloric frivolity or a mere immorality, which is what it is reduced to ideologically. Any understanding of Batista is determined by his violence, as if the revolutionary one were not just as vicious; as if violence were not the characteristic of Cuban political culture, from its very genesis in the voluntarism of the Creole landowners of the independence.

This persistence should draw attention to its nature, at least in the case of black Cubans; who since Morúa presided over the Senate, only with Batista —and never again— did they achieve any political preeminence. Batista means something that is more serious than the supposed fickleness of a people that no one bothers to understand; and that secret would be in this sarcastic shadow, which follows him like a sixty-four[2] that the country recurrently encounters.

Urrutia makes it clear that Cuban racism, distinct from its racial prejudice[3], is a mimicry of that of the American; which is why it is typical of a high bourgeoisie with aristocratic pretensions, distancing itself from all petty bourgeois and proletarian ties[4]. That is important, because it is this false bourgeoisie that rejects Batista as well as Cubans in general in politics; and in this game of dichotomies, the Cuban is that sarcasm that persistently crosses it, eventually with its own violence.

This is important, because it diverts to Cuba the possibility of development that is impossible in the United States; since humanity cannot be concretized in this violence of subjugation, if it depends on the will to relate ones to others. That what means Batista's strength, understandable in the incredibly liberal reasoning of Urrutia's conservatism; and it is the kind of subtlety that, in its extreme tactical practicality, escapes the great cosmologies such as that of Morúa and his literature.

There is a detail in the joy with which Urrutia refers to Nicolás Guillén, no matter the obvious ideological divergence; and that recalls the subreptitious persistence with which Guillén maintains the memoirs of Lino Dou and Morúa in the revolutionary Cuba. It is an identity that, not being political, is not racial either —in that same ideological sense— but existential; even if this existentiality comes —as pragmatism— from his experience, in the political precariousness of his race. It is the same silent effort —perhaps unconscious— with which Fernández Robaina collects them all and puts them in order; it doesn't matter if he does it underhandedly, in that context of the Aponte Society in Cuba, which others take advantage of to ripe the new slave market of American Universities.

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[1] tags. It refers to the Political Essay or Cuba and Racial Integration.

[2] . 64, Grand Dead (ancestor) in Cuban Charade.

[3] . Racism and racial prejudice would be distinct categories, one referring to the organization of society as a principle, and the other to a cultural atavism with concrete practices; In this case, Cuban racial prejudice would be subordinated in principle to the integrationism of Iberian culture, while its racism would be subordinated to the mimicry of the Cuban high bourgeoisie of North American segregationism.

[4] . The excessive stratification of modern rationalism tends to identify the bourgeoisie as a single class, unaware of its own formation; with the upper bourgeoisie generated from the financial specialization of a part of it, which allows it to replace the traditional aristocracy, with the transformation of capital, from military to financial.// Cf: Onthe Reactionary Character of Every Revolution

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.