Aponte’s Legacy in Cuban Popular Culture

Current legends of Aponte's movement claim that it was organized in parallel among Africans, creoles and foreign nationals, it adopted West African cultural forms like a ritual oath of secrecy and that it compiled a library of books and manuscripts on earlier liberation struggles and that Aponte himself headed a Lukumí cabildo. [...]evidence from nineteenth century police reports as well as recent oral tradition from African descendants in Havana and Matanzas indicate remarkable continuity between Aponte's era and later generations. Structural similarities are often pointed out between this image and the official seal of Cuba, supporting claims for the impact of Carabalí people and Abakuá solidarity in Cuban nationalism, and providing concrete evidence for an autonomous, popular historiography.5 The Cuban national seal was created in 1849 as a collage of symbols (fig. 2).6 A Royal Palm tree grows between two mountains; the sun is reflected over a calm sea with land on either side. Resonance between the myth of Abakuá's birth in Africa and founding symbols of the Cuban nation show a slippage between official State history and alternative versions maintained within African-derived initiation systems, part of "the Caribbean's 'other' history" celebrated by Cuban writer Benítez-Rojo "written starting from the palenque and the maroon" (The Repeating Island. 254).9 The connection finds support in documentary evidence: an 1839 police report identified a black militia member who had participated in Aponte's movement as a founding member of an Abakuá lodge, while other police files link Aponte's associates and Abakuá founders to the same social sectors: