How Cuba's national culture came to be
(chapter 1) 
 

Walterio Carbonell

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Original:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1984-espanol.html

Spain and Portugal used their ships, as well as systematic violence, to bring together Africa and America, two continents otherwise far apart. Year by year, the slave traders delivered valuable reports about Africa: in the World at issue, as narrow as the distance is between these two, it’s impossible to talk about America with no mention of Africa. Without the latter, the New World would have never received so many millions of black slaves in a period of three and a half centuries, anymore than such a huge number of human victims would have been dragged out of their soil if it weren’t for the former. So says José Antonio Saco, and rightly so, in the first volume of his book Historia de la esclavitud. We all know why the world powers decided to bring Africans to America and mix them with the native population: they wanted a gigantic crowd of slaves –blacks and natives– for their mines, coffee plantations and sugar cane fields, and make a fabulous profit out of their work.

For as long as the slave trade lasted, Cuba was one of the countries in the American continent with more information about Africa.

To get an idea of our immense wealth of knowledge about Africa, suffice it to say that from 1800 to 1850 most people in Cuba –between one million and one million and a half at the time– were of African origin; African religions had many more followers than Catholicism, and its music more performers and fans than Spain’s. Very little was known of China, India, etc., as landowners, businessmen, colonial officials, bankers and priests had a passion for Africa, as did all those overcome by a thirst for profits. Day and night, priests and bankers anxiously awaited the arrival of slave ships, while the colonialists met in political venues like City Hall, the Consulate or the "Amigos del Pais"  Patriotic Fellowship in Havana to discuss what fate might have in store for the sugar and coffee industries and public services if England ever decided to stop the slave trade. These gentlemen reached very pessimistic conclusions: were traffic in slaves really come to an end, the outcome would be nothing less than wrack and ruin.

Cuban landowners had notions of African culture: they knew which races were best suited for agricultural work, which were the most quarrelsome, the most docile, or even the most likely to spark rebellion against their masters. They were familiar with many features of the tribes from Guinea, Nigeria, Congo and the Gold River. Africa was of so much significance that it was not by chance that the most important work written in the three hundred and fifty years of colonization was José Antonio Saco’s Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américo-hispanos, a book which –by a strange twist of fate– historians seldom quoted and intellectuals never read.

The end of Spain’s colonial domination in Cuba drew a veil over the African continent. Since it was no longer appealing from the economic viewpoint, there was hardly a chance to gain new cultural knowledge: slavery was over. Africa was frequently mentioned by politicians and writers who longed for the heyday of Spanish power, but those of the bourgeois republic chose to forget all about it. What was the point? The new republic had no need for Africa. Funny that the same landowners, businessmen, bankers and priests who had spent many sleepless nights waiting for shiploads of human wealth were the first to cast the African continent into oblivion from the start of the republican era. Africa had become an annoying word among the so-called cultured people, a sort of Babylon whose name was reminiscent of concupiscence. And they were right. Africa was concupiscent in both senses of the term: lust, and the desire for worldly goods that all these hypocrites put into practice with Africa’s children in their plantations and churches. They turned black males into assets, earthly goods, a merchandise to be traded, and females into an object of twofold possession: for labor and for sex. Those who in colonial times accused the few people opposed to slave trade of being enemies of the King, property and religion were the same ones who in republican times outlawed the word Africa, the source of wealth upon which the bourgeoisie laid its foundations later on. But since its name brought to mind the abominable origins of their wealth, it had to be erased from Cuba’s political and cultural life, and all its religions, music, habits and cultural values banned as they had been under Spain’s rule. No wonder that Antonio de las Barras y Prado wrote in his Memorias de La Habana a mediados del siglo XIX:

“Listing the greatest bloody crimes committed on Earth would be like a never-ending story, and it can’t be otherwise if we bear in mind that all those who work on it do it outside the Law: from the hard-working captain to the most fearsome seamen, people who had nothing to lose but were as adventurous and resolved as needed to defy the dangers posed by such a cruel traffic. Since the only discipline that prevailed aboard these ships was that imposed by brute force, there were plenty of cases of uprisings to rob captains of the money they kept to buy black slaves, and many of these officers ended up dead after a fierce battle against a mob of ferocious bandits who would then run the ship aground on any desert coast and escape by foot. Therefore, they carried a pistol and a knife at all times, these captains, who were no less crooked than their sailors and whose lives hanged by a thread when they set out on a voyage like this”.

Antonio de las Barras y Prado also reminds us that slave trade unleashed the colonial society’s deepest emotions:

“There are many here, as everywhere else, who are keen on all sorts of deals which, risky though they may be, yield a fat profit on a good day; that is why there’s also those ready to take an interest in slave trade. Hardly surprising these days, when money is held to be man’s only happiness and most people want to get rich as soon as possible without paying heed to the means, as conscience has become a myth and principles are for fools. Such eagerness to make money that fuels a fondness for gambling in hopes of getting in one minute what you would commonly need to afford a high number of slaves is nothing but a game of chance in which, leaving aside the great risks any act of smuggling entails, the banker is the exploiter and the well-intended gambler the victim. The fact that there are further victims in these cases makes it a crime against humanity.

“Just like in fairs or gambling dens where cardsharps entice any dupe at hand, most slave shipowners here plan an expedition to fleece the unwary who sign up as stockholders, a practice accounting for many a fortune made and  increased as if by magic in the Island of Cuba.

“Provocative as it is to lure the naïve who fall for the assertion that every peso they invest will pay back between twelve and fifteen, the business has against it the British and American cruisers patrolling the African coasts, the Spanish ones in Cuba, and Mr. Crawford, the British consul in Havana, always in the lookout and ready to warn the Spanish authorities of disembarked expeditions to be chased after. And even if they manage to dodge these dangers, there’s still a much bigger and unbeatable risk: the shipowner’s bad faith.

“To make the usual procedures of this kind of deal easier to understand, I’ll use an example: let’s suppose a subject of good standing in certain circles of chance enthusiasts shows up one day and invites his friends, with promises of a rosy future, to take part in an expedition. Not more than 25,000 or 30,000 pesos, he tells them, and the ship I have waiting for us can easily hold 700 to 800 blacks who, sold for 40 ounces a piece and deducting the cost, will bring us a net profit of ten to one. Then come details about the route and predictions of success, since the patrolling in Africa is rather lax lately due to the war in the Far East and, according to recent news, there’s little or no surveillance in the spot where the ship will be loaded. As to the return trip, he had a very safe spot to land, official permission to do so and all sorts of means to unload the Negroes at very low cost. In light of such a tempting proposal, they’re all quick to accept. Then the shipowner receives from each their share in cash and, as soon as everything is in place, lets them know of the overall cost by showing them the calculations, because no receipt or document of any kind is issued, as befits all forbidden transactions, so everything is done by word of mouth. Cases arise sometimes of dealers who keep the money without an expedition ever taking place, a scam which, once discovered, you can only fight back with personal revenge. “That must have been the case of Don J. G., a wealthy owner who lived in a beautiful house at Olimpo [Obispo] Street.

“Said gentleman, whose capital was said to have originated with and gradually multiplied through slave trade and perhaps other similar industries, was a real hypocrite, as is often the case with dishonest men, and pretended to be quite religious. He was, as they say, a sanctimonious person. Kneeling one day in church, who knows if haunted by remorse or perhaps praying to God for the doubtful salvation of his soul, he didn’t notice that a man was approaching from behind who poured on his head a liquid that run down to his eyes and blinded him. The perpetrator was a Çatalonian doctor whom Don J.G. had refused to give back a certain amount he had been entrusted with in the past. Following the attack, the doctor committed suicide right there in the church. Until then, the victim was believed by society to be a respectable man. So [it happens] with the likes of Don J.G., here and elsewhere.”

What’s so odd then about the republican bourgeoisie’s silence about the name of Africa or its discriminatory policy on people of African descent? After all, it was the same bourgeoisie which had stood by the slave system decades before, a faction of the Spanish International which killed every Cuban native in sight and destroyed their culture. All of them were in the clan of adventurers who ruined the Mayan, Quechua and other civilizations and exterminated thousands and thousands of natives across the American continent.

What could be expected of republican bourgeois types who had been born and raised in the middle of vice and dishonor and had no qualms about selling their colonial soul and slave-trading leanings to the new cartel of traffickers run by Yankee monopolies? But then again, why wouldn’t they sell out to the new Wall Street-based International, great heiress of the Sevilla Trading Company where the local slave traders of days gone by had come from? The bourgeois republicans was made up of merchants, landowners and the clergy, that is, the same Cuban classes and sectors slave trade had made rich in colonial times.

All these people who governed the bourgeois republic were a major faction of the International of plundering, piracy and slavery in our continent, and had no scruples about rallying to Wall Street’s banner, which deserved no reproach, as its morals were those of the New International. Why not join those of their own ilk? They had nothing against Wall Street except its ways of distributing the wealth resulting from mass exploitation. To the bourgeois went the smaller part of the spoils. So their faultfinding was of course no different from the reproof the slave traders made to the merchants and the Spanish monarchy.

Going over completely to the Wall Street’s International brought no pang of conscience to the bourgeois. Didn’t Morgan and Rockefeller exploit the natives and blacks with as much rigor and voracity as the Sevilla Trading Company? Weren’t other slave-trading companies from the 16th to the 19th centuries the pioneers of present-day monopolism? In ‘Book One’ of his Das Kapital, Marx said that the colonial regime gives birth to these trading companies, endowed by governments with the monopolies and perks they need to sell their output and facilitate the dual accumulation of merchandise in the colonial markets. The treasures directly seized by Europe, the hard labor of enslaved natives, extortion, pillage, slaughtering… whatever benefits Spain is turned into capital.

These merchants, bankers, priests and landowners whose wealth has just been expropriated by the Revolution and are now yearning for their native land as they wander around Miami and New York should have no regrets, because the Revolution has done them a great service by letting them form the closest of bonds with people of their own sort. Had they not sealed their union since the times of Jefferson and the affluent Aldama? Well, now they’re all where they had wanted to be since the 19th century: living like a family.

The bourgeoisie only had a good memory to remember how much ‘suffering’ they had been through, but not how much the slaves had suffered. They only remembered some political restrictions endured by the landowners in the 19th century, the excessive taxes and the peals of bells in La Demajagua, but not the tyrannical, barbaric way they had treated their slaves. Why remember the black slaves, killed by the thousands at the hands of the landowners and their foremen? Why remember their hunger, misery, flogging, monstruous tortures and eighteen-hour-long shifts in the fields? Why remember the past of those bankers, wholesalers, priests, landowners and all the learned people that the bourgeois republic had sanctified? For the real past, they had no memory.

What makes the past of the bourgeoisie in eighteen-century France different from that of the Cuban bourgeoisie is patently obvious. The former made its fortune through free trade and the wage-system industries in Nantes and Bordeaux,while the latter got rich by shanghaiing men, women and children from other continents, flogging, the pillory, shackles, crime and slave labor.

By 1902, almost the entire Cuban population was living in abject poverty, with the wealth in the hands of just a few. When and how did they get it? Did they get rich the same day that General Wood raised the Cuban flag in El Morro castle, or was it much before the U.S. intervention? Check No. 2. It was during all that period when they became slavery’s true Founding Fathers.

They hushed whatever could hurt their morality and hailed in platforms, the Parliament, the University and the history books whatever could work to their benefit. Bourgeois domination leans on the power of capital and bayonets, but also on more or leass ‘honorable’ morals. The bourgeoisie’s past, however, was hardly honorable, and their morals fragile, because their past and their colonial doctrine were based on black slavery. Much progress would have been made in the struggle against bourgeois domination if a group of radical men had systematically brought to the surface, since the very beginning of the Republic, the roots of their wealth and the methods they had used to become tycoons. Thus society would have made out the face behind the democratic mask they were wearing. But since no one was brave enough to come forward and pull its mask off, the bourgeoisie remained in power. The so-called sacred bond among the Cubans, the appeals to a Republic “with all and for the good of all”, the defense of national interests and all that hot air rendered the ends of bourgeois domination a wonderful service.

So, even if the bourgeoisie is a remnant of past times, it’s a very good thing that Fidel Castro reminded people of the old bourgeoisie’s background, given the prejudice and moral failings that many people still have in their conscience, instilled by the social conditions of that time. It’s still useful to remember the real bourgeois history, distorted by politicians, professors and historians alike, because the bourgeoisie founded its authority on economic and political power as well as on the power of lies spread by its educated subjects and still held to be true in many cases, even among the revolutionaries who helped Cuba get rid of such domination but have been unable to totally rid themselves of the bourgeoisie’s ideological influence. We must make people aware of at least a century and a half of historical facts so that they have the entire record card of the true characters toppled by the Revolution: landowners, bankers, priests, big shopkeepers… There’s nothing better than the whole file on the overthrown subjects for our people to clear their conscience of stale notions and, once they’re free of them, build a stronger and healthier society.

By pulling down the bourgeoisie’s ideological conceptions we make a Revolution. The bourgeois intellectuals painted the past of their class in the most beautiful colors, rendered its pro-slavery practice as an ideal, and stretched its merits to infinity, everything in detriment of the people’s heroic past and for the benefit of the very intellectuals in charge of telling lies. We must emphasize the role played by land- and sugar mill-owners, the ruling class and the slave traders, who up until 1868 were just active instruments of the colonizers and did nothing but curb national progress and independence.

We must teach about the pro-slavery 19th century, precisely when idleness was at its height, as the bourgeoisie had historians, journalists and professors to write heroic fables about its exploits that the people would take for granted and accept its domination. It’s for all these reasons that the 19th century needs to be revised to clear the conscience of our revolutionary people of the clay gods they still harbor: dark figures of the worst kind like Arango y Parreño, tormented slave traders like José Antonio Saco and Luz Caballero, enemies of revolution and democratic coexistence, all made into domestic gods by bourgeois historians, professors and politicians who can just have no room in the Revolution.

These men represented Spanish colonialism, which they strengthened as best they could and by the worst means: slavery. Never did they question the slave trade or Spain’s colonial thirst, nor did they contribute a single progressive idea to our nationality, loyal as they were to the metropolis until the very end. For instance, the controversial José Antonio Saco opposed the 1868 uprising. There’s no reason to mistake the contradictions among the various slave-trading groups for a sense of nationality or national culture, unlike some left-wing revolutionaries believe, and no need to overstate the impact of such contradictions as a disintegrating gactor of the Spanish colonial system. On the other hand, even if the contradictions between these groups and Spain before 1868 ever helped form the Cuban nation, it doesn’t mean that the said gentlemen were nationalists. The existence of class contradictions within a social system is one thing, but men’s perception of them is another matter altogether. One of the tasks of a revolutionary writer of our time is to make our historical past crystal-clear, for such clarity is a foremost ideological mission of the Revolution. As long as confusion about our ideological past prevails –like Karl Marx said about the 1848 revolution in France– we will suffer not only from the evils of the present but also from those of the past. We will make further emphasis on this further on.

---ooOoo---