14 - The Invention of the Black Cuban in the Early Twentieth Century

Summary

This chapter examines early-twentieth-century representations of Black Cubans, primarily by white intellectuals seeking to consolidate an assuring image of nationhood that would be understandable within Eurocentric hegemonic epistemology. These include Fernando Ortiz’s early criminalization of Black Cuban religion, viewed as primitive and ignorant; terrorizing warnings by Ramiro Guerra against “Haitianization”; the Black protagonists in the first two novels by Alejo Carpentier, isolated in the first by a lack of agency and in the second enveloped in the uncanniness of the Surrealism-inspired “marvelous real”; portrayals by Lydia Cabrera of religious practices attributed to Black Cubans with condescension; early poems by Nicolás Guillén and his portrayal of “Cuban color” as a mestizo identity; and Ortiz’s subsequent concept of multiethnic transculturation, considered as a more detailed elaboration of Guillén’s earlier idea. But even this “mestizo happy-ending,” the chapter argues, suppressed sexual violence against the stereotyped Black female body, unaddressed until Nancy Morejón, writing after the 1959 revolution, located that experience in the literary renditions of Cuban history.