Some Quick Comments on Carlos Moore's PICHÓN
by Walterio Lord Garnés and David González López

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2346.html
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Questions and answers about Carlos Moore's
Pichón
May 4, 2009

Dear Walter and David,

Posted below is a message I received from Margaret Kawamuinyo about the Review of Moore's Pichon. Margaret lectures at th University of the West Indies in Barbados, and is a regular contributor to my blog. She is anxious to get clarification from the authors of the review on a number of points, which you will see below. I hope that they will have the time to respond to her concerns.

Best wishes, Norman [Girvan]

PS I am sending this is as a personal message, but Margaret has no objection to its being used in CubaNews.

MESSAGE FROM MARGARET KAWAMUINYO

Thanks for the review. I read it and was a little taken aback by the weight given to Moore's birth origins and his psychology. Perhaps he is as psychologically troubled as the two writers intend us to understand, but given their background as cultural scholars I was surprised they took as their key point of critique of the book that Moore was born out of wedlock and must have been damaged as a very dark skinned person in a family of lighter skinned people.

I got new insights on Cuba, and on its language history. I would have wished that the authors would have extended their discussion of the issues of criminality and low school performance. Their treatment left me with the, perhaps unintended, impression that most criminals in Cuba are black (not mixed but black) and that "criminality" was uninfluenced by background. In other words, that the black criminal came from among any cross section of blacks. That is no different a picture than is painted by the media in the USA of criminality in that country, which leaves criminality as apparently intrinsic to blackness. It seems insufficient to simply say of Cuba, given its vastly different situation , the same thing that is said by African Americans of the USA situation, that racism explains something about this phenomenon.

The same issue arises in respect of low "education performance" of blacks. Did this mean at any level? Did it mean at all levels? Did it mean that blacks face institutional freedom and access in education as a whole but are still not performing as a race as a whole? I know they argue that lingering racism must explain this "performance" but what exactly is the performance and where might the racism that can acheive this damage exist if not institutionally? I imagine that the authors are well placed to have offered more on this.

Guidance,

Margaret Kawamuinyo


 
RESPONSE BY
Walterio Lord Garnés and David González López

May 17, 2009

Dear Norman:

Sorry for having taken so long to answer Ms Kawamuinyo’s observations. It’s not easy for us two to get together, and we wanted to be sure that every opinion expressed is one reflecting full agreement between us both.

Firstly, as we underline in our comments from the very beginning, Pichón… is not intended as an academic book, but as a memoir. It is, however, a memoir that occasionally refers to race relations in Cuba before and after 1959.
 
Ms Kawamuinyo’s surprise with respect to the mention to the fact that “Moore was born out of wedlock and must have been damaged as a very dark skinned person in a family of lighter skinned people” what not intended as the key point of critique of the book. The major point if Moore’s ignorance of quite a few things Cuban (misquoting José Marti, not having learned about Black heroes in Cuban history, etc.) and his very personal interpretation of certain words in Cuban Spanish that he mostly takes as demeaning or offensive, and this is what forces us to go into linguistics.

Other people who have not read the book are also shocked at the mention of Moore’s out-of-wedlock background. Again, in this case, we would recommend to read the book. You don’t go to Oprah to empty your heart out and then do not expect a review of the show to describe the basic points that you have made. This information was not found through alternative research: it stands out prominently in the book. There is some other shocking information about his mother’s life (that she was raped by her stepfather and from that rape conceived the author’s eldest half-brother; that her final separation from Moore’s stepfather had to do with the suspicion about another illicit affair, etc.), but these are not mentioned in our observations because they are not considered relevant, since they do not seem to have made an impact on the author’s psyche. One must add that in many aspects she seems to have been a brave, outstanding woman. But for Ms Kawamuinyo’s benefit, we will quote here several pages in which the author is explicit about the problem as he feels it:

“I was aware of being the only one in my family whom whites referred to as ‘Mr. Moore’s little blackie.’ I was not my father’s ‘little blackie,’ I insisted, but his son.

“They would chuckle. ‘Señor Moore is a mulatto. You are a negrito!’”

“Mulatto? My parents evasive half-answers only deepened the mystery. It was obvious that, unlike my siblings, I did not resemble our fair-skinned, wavy-haired father one bit, but then many of the families I saw around had children of varying shades of colors and textures of hair. The only evidence I had of anything amiss came from seeing the photographs mounted on the wooden divider in our living room. There were Victor Jr. and Frank, hair slicked to their scalps. Esther and Martha were shown with their hair plaited into coils snaking down their backs. Richard stared out with hair austerely pulled back. Why was there no image of me?

“I was the darkest, a negrito retinto, an ink-black nigger, as Negro hair was designated. I was born with bembas, swollen lips, and my nose was chata, flat. To crown it all, I was cross-eyed.”[1]

“Until I asked, my parents gave no explanation why there was no picture of me in the house.”[2]

Further down, in a chapter called “Child of Anger, My Mother’s Blot,” he describes in detail a particularly vicious assault that he suffered from his mother when he was seven, and concludes with:

“A wild look in her eyes, her hair in disarray, my mother screamed curses while trying to drown me until my father broke her grip.”

“That brush with tragedy became a family taboo, erased from memory. It took thirty-three years –until I was fourty— to learn why I suffered so at her hand. I was the fruit of a clandestine, extra-marital liaison that ruined my parents’ life as a couple. I was an enduring blot reminding her that her rainbows would never come.”[3]

Further down, he notes:

“I was aware of being a problem for her in a way I could not explain. (…) Her beatings, unlike my father’s, were assaults that became increasingly violent. (…) It reached the point where my mother would hit me with anything handy, driven by an absolute frenzy. She would lash out wildly left and right, with full force, not caring where the blows landed and as if she would never stop. None of my siblings was set upon like that. So the idea that my mother hated me was planted in my mind.”[4]

The chapter ends in the description of a particularly violent beating of which he describes every minute detail. He says that this assault produced “the first of a series of seizures that thereafter overtook me. (…) Two scars chiselled on my left upper arm and the traces of several smaller ones remain to remind me of that day when I thought, yet again, that my mother was about to kill me.”[5] He describes the beating, blow by blow:

“But one indelible beating when I was nine erased her from my heart as a mother.” (…) …a new level of terror beyond all the others visited me. The first blow landed on my back, making me spring into the air like an out-of-control acrobat. The second lash missed my face by an inch. When I lifted both hands to shield myself , the whip sliced my left arm. I went clattering down, bleeding from a deep gash. Screaming for help, I writhed on the ground. The strap caught my left arm again, opening an even deeper wound. I was lashed again and again, until my throat was voiceless. My body went limp, and suddenly everything was distant and quiet.”

“Having heard my screams, the white neighbors rushed into our yard, finding me sprawled on the ground, my eyeballs rolled back in their sockets. From what these neighbors recounted later, I had stopped breathing. It was feared I was dead.”[6]

It was not until many years after that, on a rare visit to his mother, she tells him who his biological father was. Then, in an endnote, the author points out that “in 1990, I learned that my mother had unknowingly suffered from bipolar disorder throughout her life. I then knew the cause of her bouts of anger and spells of melancholy. That knowledge gave me a better understanding of my childhood with her, allowing us to make peace with each other shortly before she passed away in 1991.”[7]

So these are the reasons why this issue seems to have indirectly moulded Moore’s initial attitude in life. Of course, many people might have had comparable problems in their childhood, and the way in which these problems might have affected them can vary considerably.

With respect to other aspects of race relations in Cuba, again, this was only, as we state in the title, “some quick comments…”, not intended to explain the whole panorama of race relations in Cuba, but only to reply to some of Moore’s observations and to point to some of the book’s weaknesses. That is why we suggest several additional works that dwell even critically on this topic, for the benefit of interested readers.

The aspects of lower school performance and criminality, these are generally accepted facts. But here comes the problem of statistics. If you accept the official Cuban census figures – 65% whites—, then the black population is indeed over-represented in Cuban jails. Now, if you take Moore’s figures –62% blacks—, then it is not at all over-represented. The fact is that neither one nor the other is accurate. First of all, the US State Department –from where Moore takes his figures— obviously includes mulattos as blacks. But then the Cuban census figures are not accurate either, because people are asked what their race is. And yes, many choose to describe themselves as whites. The alternative is to have the census worker note down the race him/herself; this was tried out in the 1970 census, but with bad results –both authors were census workers on that opportunity and experienced the problem. It’s frequently very difficult to place a Cuban racially. So it’s perhaps more important to ask him/her how he/she sees him/herself, and that is how Cuban censuses are made.

We hope this might respond to some of Ms Kawamuinyo’s observations.
 

Walterio Lord Garnés and David González López 


 


 

[1] Pichón… p. 10.

[2] Id., p. 11

[3] Id., p. 31-32

[4] Id., p. 39

[5] Id., p. 41

[6] Id., p. 40

[7] Id., p.369

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