Notes Introduction 1. Among many examples are: Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination, also his On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture, and Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy; Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic; Morley, McGillion, and Kirk, eds., Cuba, the United States, and the Post–Cold War World; Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986; Pérez-Stable, The United States and Cuba: Intimate Enemies; Franklin, Cuba and the United States; and Morales Domínguez, and Prevost, United States–Cuban Relations. 2. Ó Tuathail, “Thinking Critically about Geopolitics,” 1. 3. This notion corresponds with philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theory that human actions, just like works of literature, “display a sense as well as a reference.” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 16. In other words, the coexistence of internal and external systems of logic facili- tates both interpretation and explanation. 4. Ibid. 5. Throughout this work, the term africanía defines both an essential quality of Africanness as well as the accumulation of cultural reposi- tories (linguistic, religious, artistic, and so on) in which the African dimension resides. 6. On the other hand, several shorter analyses were published in the form of essays and journal articles. A few worth mentioning are: Casal, “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba;” Taylor, “Revolution, Race and Some Aspects of Foreign Relations;” and the oft-cited contribu- tion from David Booth, “Cuba, Color and Revolution.” 7. Butterworth, The People of Buena Ventura, xxi–xxii. 8. Marti, Nuestra America, 38. 9. Martí, “Mi Raza,” 299. 10. Ibid., 298. 11. Guillén, “Sóngoro cosongo,” 114. 12. In de la Fuente, “Race, National Discourse, and Politics,” 58. 13. Bonnemaison, Culture and Space, 17. 14. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 163. 15. Feierman, “Africa in History,” 40. 16. Bonnemaison, Culture and Space, 119. 186 NOTES 1 Slave Nostalgias 1. I have presented the unnamed Doctor as a semifictitious character by whom to introduce the intertwined concepts of slaves and sentiment, but he is in fact based upon a real historical personage, the Spanish physician Francisco Barrera y Domingo, who practiced medicine for almost two decades throughout the Caribbean, finally settling in Havana in the early 1780s. Barrera started life in a rural hamlet in the Aragon region of Spain, and went on to study medicine in Zaragoza, before finding employment with the Spanish Royal Navy. A more detailed biographical record including background informa- tion about Reflexiones can be found in López Denis, “Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology,” 179–199. 2. López Denis, “Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology,” 192. 3. Ibid., 185, 183. 4. The original novel, Francisco (written by Anselmo Suarez y Romero in 1838–1839 and published in 1880), came out of the literary salon of Cuban landholder, Rodrigo del Monte. It was commissioned by the British ambassador to Cuba, Richard Madden, who hoped that an abolitionist novel would assist his efforts to put pressure on Spain to abolish slavery. As Giral depicts in the film, Madden’s campaign was inspired more by the desire to create new markets for British agricultural innovations than by humanitarianism. 5. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 65–88. 6. Seliger, Marxist Conception of Ideology, 30. 7. López Denis, “Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology,” 183. 8. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 54. 9. José Luciano Franco, “Africanos y sus descendientes criollos en las luchas liberadoras, 1533–1895,” Casa de las Américas, 93, Nov-Dec (1975): 16. 10. Abrahams, “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism,” 23. 11. Abakuá members might well give an alternative interpretation of the sacred symbols in this emblem, but I consider my version to be suf- ficiently informed by Central African cosmology (especially the cos- mograms of the BaKongo ethnic group, located in the modern-day region of Angola) and other esoteric symbolism to claim some valid- ity. See Delgado de Torres “Marked Bowls, Cross Symbols” and also Ballard “Dikenge, Nganga” for more information on the history and interpretations of dikenge (cosmograms), 12. Glissant exhorts, “We must return to the point from which we started . not a return to the longing for origins, to some immu- table state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ulti- mately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.” Caribbean Discourse, 26. 13. Verde Olivo, May 5, 1972: 8, emphasis added. NOTES 187 14. Whereas metaphor, as a device of poetic or ritual speech, contains an element of alienation, that is, the linking of entities that are basically dissimilar, metonymy is a mode of association whereby the part has come to stand for the whole (as in synecdoche). Furthermore, meton- ymy is sequential (implies cause and effect). Therefore, we could say that metonymy in language is always used to create a chain of events or the idea of continuity. 15. In this regard, I am following Michael Taussig’s definition of trickery as “subterfuge but also something that highlights nature’s mysteries as well as those inherent to social institutions and personal relation- ships.” Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 155. According to him, trickery requires three key elements: “inordinate skill, inordinate technique, inordinate empathy with reality.” Ibid. 16. Cited in Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, ix. 17. The Japanese philosophy of design, expounded by the Ikenobo approach to flower arranging, holds the tree-line design represent- ing heaven, man, and earth as the most important. Heaven (Shin) is the line that towers over the rest. At the base is the earth line (Tai or Hikae). In between the two, as in between heaven and earth was the man (Soe) line. 18. Castro, My Life, 306. 19. Cited in Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 23. 20. In an exchange of email with the author in May 2010, Sergio Giral explained that it was a directorial decision not to translate the African dialogue in the subtitles, but regretted that it was so long ago he could no longer explain the impetus for the original decision. 21. For more details, see Martínez Furé, Diálogos Imaginarios, 203–205, 215. 22. Most of the controversy stems from the book’s contentious assign- ment to the literary genre of testimonial. In particular, criticism has centered upon the unequal nature of the collaboration between Barnet and Montejo, and on questions of authenticity. For a highly informative treatment of some of the salient issues, I recommend Kutzinski, “The Cult of Caliban.” 23. Barnet, Biografía de un cimarrón, 12. 24. Quoted in Julia Lesage, “The Other Francisco.” 25. The term was coined by Cuban intellectual Ambrosio Fornet to describe the bleak era of artistic and ideological repression begin- ning in 1970 after the failure of la zafra de los diez millones (the 10 million ton sugar harvest) and the subsequent tightening of political and economic ties with the Soviet Union. Controversy exists over the exact length of the “greyness,” with some commentators suggesting that it persisted for a decade or more. Although strictly speaking a term for the repressive, antiexperimentation phase in Cuban cultural 188 NOTES policy, the term quinquenio gris also refers to the general climate of conformity in other cultural areas, such as religion or fashion (cloth- ing, hairstyles, etc.), with individuals who adopted styles related to exogenous subcultures, such as hippies, coming under particular pressure. 26. Hernandez, “Multiracial Matrix.” 27. The interview took place at the Fundación Fernando Ortiz on March 30, 2008. The researcher is a long-standing Africa special- ist and former associate of distinguished professor of African his- tory, Armando Entralgo. Soon after I began to describe my research project, the researcher gently corrected my supposedly mistaken suggestion of a link between el tema negro and Africa, asserting that the process of transculturation began as soon as the slaves arrived in Cuba: from that moment, they ceased to be Africans, and so the term Afro-Cuban is a misnomer. I pondered these words later on the walk home along Calle 25 and could not agree. In fact I became convinced of the antithetical view, that the slaves did not become Africans until they arrived in the New World. The institution of slavery dispossessed these men, women, and children of all mean- ingful tribal affiliation, and forced alliances across the divisions of language, caste, and religion. At the same that the forces of colo- nialism went to work on the African continent carving up ancient kingdoms according to an abstracted European political model, the enslaved peoples from that continent confronted a similar process, that is the breaking down and dissolution of all previous societal and political forms in the interest of plantation industries (sugar, cotton, tobacco, and so on). An African could therefore be consid- ered as a “new” man or woman, a sort of hybrid construction of the European imagination. 28. Kapcia, Cuba: Island of Dreams, 135. 29. López Denis, “Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology,” 192. 30. Guillén, El diario que a diario, 18. 31. This quotation appears in Miller, “Slavery, ‘Cimarronaje,’ and Poetic Refuge.” 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Nancy Morejón, “Mujer negra,” Casa de las Américas XV, 88 (1975): 119. 35. Miller, “Slavery, ‘Cimarronaje,’ and Poetic Refuge.” 36. R ei na ldo Peña lver Mora l, “Gu i nea: encr ucijad a de c u lt u ra s ,” Bohemia, May 12 (1972): 32, emphasis in original. 37. Morejón, “Mujer negra,” 120. 38. Niane, Sundiata, 56. 39. Hall, “Economy of the Gift,” 191. 40. Ibid. NOTES 189 2 The Public Lives of Santería 1. “hasta hablar en público del negro era cosa peligrosa.” Fernando Ortiz, “Sin el negro Cuba no sería Cuba,” La Jiribilla, 18, septi- embre (2001), http://www.lajiribilla.co.cu/2001/n18_septiembre /fuenteviva.html, accessed January 12, 2009.