Cuba and Its Deep Africanity

Such images-stunning women on sun-drenched beaches, distant palm trees in flights of fancy, copper-skinned men relishing the scent of the enormous cigars that they are a fraction of a second away from lighting-seem to show a need to perpetuate in our eyes those first landscapes painted by the conquistadors in their journals: that is, a setting devoid of violence, replete with elemental harmony, almost uninhabited, or artificially inhabited (for the eye that sees) by tropical sirens of the sort that frequented ancient Ithaca and the Mediterranean lands on which Fernand Braudel once held forth. Neither paradise nor inferno, Cuba is an actual occurrence, made up of men and women, old people, youths, and children, whose signs of social change and progress feed the noble desire for Utopias that has beset all humankind since the middle ages. Cuba enjoys a character and a culture of symbiosis, of radical confrontation with anyone who tries to destroy it, drawing on the solid values of a moral world forged through long struggles for independence; a character and a culture of legitimizing its otherness-the otherness that Montaigne analyzed from his undisputed vantage point as the precursor of the finest European humanism, when he stated that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. began to invade civil life in the provincial cities, especially in the eastern part of the island after the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898), and an heir of the abolitionist struggle (he himself was the son of slaves who had purchased his liberty), Juan Gualberto Gomez was a patriot among whose ideas the equality of the African component of Cuban identity shines brightly.