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Linguistic Representations of Black Characters in Cuban Fiction of the
New Millennium: A tale about continuity and subversion
Catia Dignard
University of Toronto
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
ABSTRACT
If scholarship has focused on the return to the
stereotypical portrayals of black characters
during the 1990s, and that were common to the
pre-revolutionary era, what had not yet been
addressed is how differentiating linguistic traits
(manner of speech) have been used to represent
black characters in more recent Cuban fiction, a
narrative strategy that goes back to colonial
times. Apart from conveying “authenticity” (i.e.
the details of the Havana slang) when building
fictional characters, such a literary device, I
contend, was also a way to emphasise the Island’s
socioeconomic and cultural decadence or “involution” during this decade of economic upheaval.
Since the second decade of the new millennium,
other voices, namely from the Caribbean side of
the Island, have emerged and imposed themselves in fiction, leading me to explore the other
levels of significance of this narrative strategy.
What follows is a tale about continuity and
subversion.
Keywords: Linguistic representations; Black characters; Cuban
Fiction; Special Period; New
Millennium; marginality;
otherness; Caribbeaness; Haiti
BIO
Catia Dignard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her dissertation examines the topic of Linguistic Representations of Black Characters in Contemporary
Cuban fiction, and how these reflect evolving notions of nationhood, class and race relations on
the Island. Her doctoral research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (2020-2022), and draws upon literary and critical theory (postcolonial, critical
race and disability studies), sociolinguistics and anthropology.
This article is an adapted version of Catia’s talk given at The New College 2020-2021 Senior
Doctoral Fellow Speakers Series (Caribbean Studies) on May 5, 2021, in which she explained the
process leading to her current research and preliminary conclusions.
© 2021 Catia Dignard
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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journalist, Manuel Vázquez Portal was
approached by a young Portuguese student
seeking advice for writing a thesis on the
topic of “Blacks in Cuban literature.”
Half-jokingly, he responded categorically
that she would have to read “all” of Cuban
literature.1 Vázquez Portal’s comment
points to the long history of the representation of black characters in Cuban fiction:
a cycle beginning with abolitionist novels
such as Cecilia Valdés (1882) by Cirilo
Villaverde; followed by the Cuban Revolution’s interlude of relatively “silencing”
the racial question, leading to literature’s
(few) black protagonists serving mostly to
demonstrate the benefits of the Socialist
2
5HYROXWLRQEHIRUHWKHVPDUNHGWKH
return to the stereotypical portrayals of
black characters that were common to the
pre-revolutionary era, such as their “sexualisation” or “criminalization”.3 To go
back to our anecdote, the theme of the
student’s thesis and their meeting with
Vázquez Portal are both related to the
“new Cuban boom” - promoted largely by
European publishing houses and coined
Special Period Fiction by Esther Whitfield.4 A genre popularized particularly by
writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s own brand
of “dirty realism” (or “realismo sucio”),
which featured emblematical depictions of
Havana’s marginal and mostly black
populations, namely in his notorious
.98
5
7ULORJtDVXFLDGH/D+DEDQD
However, it is important to consider that
&XEDQILFWLRQSXEOLVKHGIURPWR
2004 has been significantly influenced by
the overall context of the economic crisis.
Critics and authors themselves have
demonstrated and commented on the
pressure to reveal and depict at length the
grim realities of life in this “still-socialist
society” 6, and thus at times catering to
foreign demand’s thirst for both "authenticity" and dark tales about a Socialist
Utopia gone dystopia. Beyond the facts
and figures illustrating the economic
impacts of the disintegrating USSR –
which demonstrated Cuba’s high degree of
commercial dependency on soviet subsidies and Eastern European markets –
Cuba’s Special Period can also be considered a “defining category of experience”
that “brings up memories of deprivation
and hopelessness; of hunger and heat; of
wheeling and dealing, of dreams of a life
7
HOVHZKHUH´,QQDUUDWLYHVXFKWHVWLPRnies/depictions have also revealed “zones
of silence” in which Cuban reporters had
been kept away by the State controlled
press. Such zones refer to specific neighbourhoods – with ground zero, Centro
Habana – largely populated by the poor,
marginalized and mainly black Cubans
who seemingly have been left unaffected
by the Revolution’s socialist agenda and
it’s “social homogenizing forces”.
1
Carlos Uxó González, Representaciones del personaje del negro en la literatura cubana: una perspectiva desde los
estudios subalternos. (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2010), 13.
2 This perspective is shared by Casamayor Cisneros, Odette. 2002. “Études et essais: Les masques du Noir: Quelques
approximations sur la présence du Noir cubain dans le récit cubain contemporain.” Cahiers d’études africaines 42,
no. 1 (2002): 7–30 and Carlos Uxó González, 2010.
3
Carlos Uxó González, 21.
4 Esther Katheryn Whitfield. Cuban Currency the Dollar and Special Period Fiction. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
5 For a more in depth analysis, consult Odette Casamayor-Cisneros.“Blackness, Cubanness, and the End of an Era.”
Black Diaspora Review 5, no. 2 (2016): 12-23.
6 Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 74.
7
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1HZ<RUN3DOJUDYH0DFPLOODQ
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During a conversation/interview I had
with him in December of 2019, seated in
the lobby-bar of Hotel Sevilla, in close
proximity to the emblematical neighbourhood of his novels, writer Pedro Juan
Gutiérrez, still a journalist at the time
while writing “a bit in secret” his Trilogía
and El Rey de La Habana, commented a
tad more on what he termed “zonas de
silencio” (zones of silence). In his words,
these referred to “zones of society in
which reporters did not enter normally. No
news story would take place here, in a
solar, in Centro Habana. No mention was
made of poverty in Havana; no mention
was made of the centro-habaneros’ religiosity…Poor people did not exist. It was as
if journalism made-up this fantastic
world…in which we were all heroes.
Then, my books started to appear in which
I talked about the anti-heroes, those who
have been left behind, those who have no
voice. So, I do it deliberately because I
lived there, right there.” 8
.99
Gutiérrez’s “proximity” and “skill in
remaining faithful to the details”.9 In other
words, he wasn’t “faking it”. Moreover,
such “details” also concurred with
academics from inside and outside of
Cuba who documented the plight of the
mainly black segment of the population
who would become further disadvantaged
by Cuba’s opening to tourism and foreign
capital’s discriminatory policies (official
tourism industry) and thus, since 1989, the
“reappearance” of social re-stratification
according to racial background.10 However,
it is noteworthy that if Portela also signals
the “truthfulness” of Gutiérrez’s dialogues
in El Rey de La Habana (1999), for their
“authentic rhythm and colouring, their
faithfulness to the details of the Havana
slang”11, what has not been addressed are
the many other levels of significance
associated to this literary strategy.
While the works of Carlos Uxó and Jorge
Hernández examine the literary construction of linguistic otherness as a way to
signify subalternity of the black subject in
the Cuban context, they focus mainly on
colonial texts. This is a period in which
mainly white writers would caricaturize
the spoken language of their black characters, stressing in their texts the "imperfect"
pronunciation of Spanish. This narrative
strategy finds its precedence in the teatro
bufo, a Cuban version of “blackface
Because Gutiérrez’s depictions dealt with
marginality as well as the lived experiences of criminality, incarceration and
violence all intertwined with ethnicity,
poet and critic Victor Fowler Calzada
considered El Rey de La Habana “one of
the few works to give the margins a space
in contemporary Cuban literature,” while
writer Ena Lucía Portela insisted on
8
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Interview by Catia Dignard. Personal interview. Havana, 12 December 2019. Translation to English
mine.
9
Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 111.
10 These conclusions are based on the analyses by María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles. “Cuba: la dimension raciale dans le
processus de reproduction de la pauvreté.” Alternatives Sud 17, no. 2 (2010): 135-156, and by Alejandro de la Fuente.
“Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s ‘Special Period.’” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (2001):
65–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300108428278.
11 Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 113.
12
Christina Civantos. “Race/Class/Language: ‘El Negro’ Speaks Cuban Whiteness in the ‘Teatro Bufo.’” Latin American
Theatre Review 39, no.1 (2005): 49. According to Civantos, the figure of the negro/negrito bozal refers to a “recentlyarrived African who speaks a pidgin form of Spanish known as macúa or bozal…literally a muzzle” and thus, “the term
negro bozal reflects the perception of the recently arrived slave as incapable of speech, or at least muzzled by his/her
inability to speak Spanish.” (50)
99
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comedy akin to U.S. minstrel shows” and
sub-genre, negro catedrático (“black
professor”) plays, by which blacks or are
ridiculed “for not being able to speak
properly” – such is the case of the
negro/negrito bozal figure – or, rejected
for speaking too “properly,” that is, with a
high degree of over-correctness, in the
case of the negro catedrático.12 In this line
of thought, Civantos signals the important
role the plays, namely those by Bartolomé
José Crespo y Borbón who “first established the figure of the bozal,” have had
on constructing this “white vision of black
speech.”13In narrative, these linguistic
representations have being sustained,
notably, by the foundational Cecilia Valdés
(New York City, 1882 definite and extended version), in which Cirilo Villaverde
offered a panorama of the linguistic
varieties of his coloured characters, which
in turn has served as an example for other
realist genre oeuvres.14 This cataloguing or
imitating of black voices persists well into
the first two decades of the twentieth
century, for example, in the realist novels
by Miguel de Carrión (1875-1929), such
as Las honradas (1917) and Las impuras
(1919). Another noteworthy example is the
vignette “El negro viejo” in Estampas de
San Cristóbal (1926) by Jorge Mañach
(1898-1961).15
.100
This research being part of a larger
project, my main objective is to analyze
the significance of this literary device and
which translates itself by the ‘voicing out’
of historical anxieties related to race, such
as the return to the primitive, Africanness,
the trope of Haiti as Cuba’s radical Other 16
and the perils of the (re) creation of a
“Black Republic”.17In other words, by
establishing the link between perceived
“blackness of language” and “decadence,”
I wish to demonstrate that the use of such
a literary device was a way to emphasise
the Island’s socioeconomic and cultural
“involution” during the Special Period.
This is part of a broader discourse that
since the nineteenth century has associated
these tendencies to the “African” or
“black” part of the Island’s population. If
José Antonio Saco (1797-1879), who
considered “the progressive blackening of
Cuba [fuelled by the Plantation economy]
would lead to its ‘slow decadence, its
18
certain intellectual ruin’,” Rojas signals
the re-emergence, at the beginning of the
Special Period, of discourses tainted,
namely, by the ‘Haitian peril’ and overall
rejection of Cuba’s “Caribbean” character.19
By extension, we could add to this, the
stigmatization of linguistic traits associated with Caribbean Spanish - traditionally
13 Christina Civantos, 50.
14 According to E. Rodríguez Herrera (1953), in his prologue to this pre-Revolution edition of Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde’s
effort in integrating different types of speeches, particularly those of his black characters, and in spite of its shortcomings, was
to be “celebrated”, given the novels’ realist genre: “Hay que estudiar detenidamente este lenguaje tan variado en la Cecilia
Valdés de Villaverde, porque es uno de los méritos de la novela, por más que a veces falla al poner en boca de algunos esclavos
palabras como Cruz, dispué, y otras en vez de Cru y dipué o dimpué, como se advierte en algunos pasajes.” Cirilo Villaverde, a
nd Esteban Rodríguez Herrera. Cecilia Valdés; o, La Loma del Ángel, novela de costumbres cubanas publicada en New York
en 1882. (Habana: Editorial Lex,1953), xliv. Emphasis in original.
15
These oeuvres from the first decades of the so-called Republican (or pre-revolutionary) era will be the object of analysis in
a forthcoming chapter of my doctoral dissertation.
167KLVWRSLFLVH[WHQVLYHO\DQDO\VHGLQWKHZRUNE\(O]ELHWD6NORGRZVND(VSHFWURV\HVSHMLVPRVௗ+DLWtHQHOLPDJLQDULR
cubano. (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009).
17 The long standing recurrent “fear” which stems from the events in the neighbouring island and that have served to “stir
ZKLWHIHDUV´LQRUGHUWRSRVWSRQH&XED¶VLQGHSHQGHQFHIURP6SDLQLVGLVFXVVHGLQ$OHMDQGUR'HOD)XHQWH$1DWLRQIRU$OOௗ
Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 27-28.
18 Alejandro De la Fuente, 49.
19 Rafael Rojas. Essays in Cuban Intellectual History 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 98.
100
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attributed to the lower classes, dominated
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construct otherness, in contemporary
Cuban fiction of the 1990s has not been
studied and has persisted, to a certain
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that reflect, namely, on the Special Period,
I will first consider briefly Pedro Juan
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“setting the stage”. Second, I will be
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connected to the Caribbean side of the
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cally with the racial question and integrat
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some preliminary conclusions with regards
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been termed “linguistic experimentations,”20
and the factors that may explain, after a
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readings of these.
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drawing attention to the topic of language
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ters). At this point, I will argue that apart
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ty” and offer an account of language
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ing to “primal times,” namely with the
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represents the figure of the refined mulata,
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is said to be “pasando un muerto”), her
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en español enredado y en congo, casi
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22
most unintelligible Spanish). For exam
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20 For an interesting discussion on the topic of linguistic experimentations, which presence marks a shift in Cuban fiction since
WKHVFRQVXOW+XHUWDV%HJRxD(QVD\RGHXQFDPELRௗODQDUUDWLYDFXEDQDGHORV¶ /D+DEDQD&XED&DVDGHODV
Américas, 1993).
21
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22 El Rey de la Habana, 48.
23 El Rey de la Habana, 48.
24&LWHGLQ6HUJLR9DOGpV%HUQDO/HQJXDQDFLRQDOHLGHQWLGDGFXOWXUDOGHOFXEDQR /D+DEDQD
Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1998), 75.
101
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arrastre grande, que viene de atrá [deletion
of final /s/] pero te cayó a ti. No é [instead
of ‘es’] un sorbo. Es un arrastre de cadena
23
pesa, pa’toa [para toda] la vida”. To
summarize, this passage is both reminiscent of colonial literature’s tendency to
imitate black voices, and of the Island’s
first lexicographers, namely Dominican E.
Pichardo with his Diccionario provincial
casi razonado de voces y frases cubanas
(1849), to characterize “black speech” – at
the time, of the so-called “Negros Bozales
o naturales de África”- as “disfigured
Castilian” (“castellano desfigurado”).24
Secondly, Rey’s speech acts, that is, his
limited and “ruinous language”, both
recall the claustrophobic and ruinous
space of Centro Habana in which he
wanders and conditions his “limited vision
of the world”. If Sandra alludes to the
“language issue”, that is, Rey and many
others’ systematic use of the informal
register by the term “malhablados,” and
which has given rise to certain anxieties
concerning the perceived linguistic
“impoverishment” on the Island, a debate
that has also been racialized on both sides
of the Florida strait, 25she/he is also aware
of Rey’s lack of “linguistic capacities” as
noted by Anke Birkenmaier. For example,
when Rey asks “¿Qué es fascinado (captivated)?” Sandra responds by a “No,
nada…¿quieres comer algo?” (“No,
.102
26
nothing, do you want to eat something?”).
Additionally, if the critic contends that the
novel “needs a narrator to fill in the gaps
in Rey’s language” and that Rey’s actions,
namely to kill hunger, are what is important in the novel, “not his speech”,27 I posit
that, au contraire, Rey’s language and its
deficiencies are important in several
respects. First of all, his language serves
as a marker of the island’s social and
cultural decadence. Secondly, it participates in the aesthetics of the ruins that
permeates the novel. In other words, we
may establish an analogy between the
“gaps” in Rey’s language (e.e. elision,
contractions) and the ruins that surround
him as an allegory of a crumbling social
project. Thus, if when representing
Havana’s landscape “architectural ruins
stand as readable figures for the decay of
28
Cuba’s socialist dream”, so do Rey’s
linguistic limitations.
Since the second decade of the new
millennium, other voices, namely from the
Caribbean and Central part of the Island,
have emerged and imposed themselves in
fiction, leading me to explore the other
levels of significance of this narrative
strategy. In fact, such “exploration” was
contingent in receiving books written by
authors residing outside of Havana, given
the scarce attention to the topic of race in
narrative written from the capital, in
25 This part of my analysis is based first on Carlos Paz Pérez’s 1988 study that explains the “impoverishment” of Cuban
Spanish as a result of the particular slang spoken by “antisocial elements,” many of them clearly identified as members of the
Abakuá secret society, an AfroCuban fraternity with “marked features of decadence.” De lo popular y lo vulgar en el habla
cubana. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1988), 19, translation mine. Second, for pointing to the explicit
racialization of the debate, I refer to Luis A. Ortiz López. Huellas etno-sociolingüísticas bozales y afrocubanas. (Frankfurt an
Main: Vervuert, 1998), 156. Finally, for it’s transnational and very politically charged dimension, I refer particularly to studies
based on perceptual dialectology, which investigate “nonlinguists’ beliefs about their own [language] and other varieties.”
Gabriela G. Alfaraz “Dialect perceptions in real time: A restudy of Miami-Cuban perceptions.” Journal of Linguistic
Geography, 2.2 (2014): 74). The studies conducted by Alfaraz (2002; 2014) and by Andrew Lynch (2009a, 2009b) point to the
fact that negative perceptions of Cuban Spanish spoken on the Island from the Miami side have been linked to beliefs about
race and poverty.
26 Anke Birkenmaier. “Más allá del realismo sucio: ‘El Rey de La Habana’ de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.” Cuban studies 32 (2001):
27 Anke Birkenmaier, 46.
28 Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 100-101.
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particular by the Novísimos and then,
Generación Cero authors.29
Hence, in order to compare the “Special
Period” linguistic characterizations to
those of newer generations of Cuban
authors, I analyzed Cuban fiction of the
second decade of the “new millennium,”
namely “Virgen en la pradera” in El
crimen de san Jorge (2012) by Michel
Encinosa Fú (La Habana, 1974), short
stories “25” and “32” in Apuntes de Josué
1994 (2015) by Nelton Pérez Martínez
(Manatí, Las Tunas, Oriente, 1970) and La
catedral de los negros (2015) by Marcial
Gala (Havana 1965). These authors are,
amongst the newer generations of narrators, those who, from the Island, have
dealt more directly with the racial theme
and its socio-historical basis, and also
because of their use of vernacular
language or other “linguistic experimentations” that to varying degrees revisit the
narrative strategies of their predecessors. I
also have included works by Nelton Pérez
and Marcial Gala, whose voices are more
connected to the Caribbean and Central
part of the Island along with its specificities and literary traditions; “spaces” that
are seemingly more inclined to experiment
with language, may it be for aesthetic
reasons or for the sake of realism, such as
the remarkable example of Guillermo
Cabrera Infante (Gibara, 1929 - London,
2005), as well as two writers that have
pursued in this tradition: José Soler Puig
(Santiago de Cuba, 1916-1996) and
Guillermo Vidal (Las Tunas, 1952-2004).
.103
Before presenting my preliminary findings
with regards to the different levels of this
narrative strategy, what emerges from
these three texts is that they not only
integrate vernacular language (to stress the
orality of their black characters) for the
sake of “realism” – how people really
speak in certain regions or sectors of
Cuban society (including their lexicon) -,
but their characters themselves allude to
the “language issue” or this tendency to
use manner of speech as a marker of origin
(geographical-cultural) or of group identity (youth, marginality). If Ashcroft
reminds us that voice differences, which
include language, dialect or accent, along
with body differences, are the “most
common and superficial features by which
the subject is the most directly and imme30
diately othered,” these “voice differences,” I will argue in a more positive way,
point to the coexistence of diverse cultural
identities and how these are negotiated on
an individual and collective basis in the
Caribbean, conceived as a multi-linguistic
space.
Furthermore, I contend that the way
language is inscribed in these works both
reinforce and flow from Cuba’s “Multicubanidad,” that is, its “redefinition” since
the 1990s as an “ethnic and cultural
community”31This viewpoint not only
contrasts with the prior stress on “homogeneity of experience” within the Revolution’s socialist cosmology/agenda,32but
also permits counter narratives to
discourses such as Ortiz’s Cubanidad,
29 I am greatly indebted to Havana-based Generación Cero writer Raúl Flores Iriarte for receiving these books, for my Fiction
of the New Millennium corpus of study, and for facilitating my interview with one of it’s author, Nelton Pérez. For a thorough
discussion on these two younger generations of authors and their tendency to steer away from “Special Period” topics,
including the topic of race, consult the works of Uxó (2010; 2015) for the Novísimos and the introduction to the dossier on the
Generación Cero by Monica Simal and Walfrido Dorta. “Literatura cubana contemporánea: lecturas sobre la Generación Cero
(introducción).” Letral: revista electrónica de Estudios Transatlánticos 18 (2017): 1-8.
30 Bill Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006),
31 Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 72.
32 Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 3.
103
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based on the ajiaco metaphor (melting-pot/mestizo nation), by celebrating
black’s “otherness” and cultural differences even within Afro-Cubans. In other
words, a position that claims “not the
essential integration of African elements
into national culture, but the impossibility
of such an occurrence” and which implicitly link culture and its varied manifestations with race, also emerges within this
space of debate. Rogelio Martínez Furé
34
0DWDQ]DV WKHOHDGLQJSURSRQHQW
of this viewpoint, illustrated it in this way,
alluding also to diversity versus homogeneity in manner of speech (extract):
A mulatto Cuban from Baracoa, the
descendant of Haitian émigrés in a
coffee-growing area, is not the same as a
black Cuban descendant of Arará from the
province of Matanzas, a sugar-growing
area, or a fair-skinned Cuban from Pinar
del Rio, a tobacco-growing area, the
descendant of Canary islanders. They are
all Cuban, but there are differences in
food, speech, psychology, religious beliefs,
and phenotypes. I believe it is important to
accept plurality and free ourselves from
the monomania, according to which we
are all the same. 35
.104
Afro-Cuban culture and Caribbeaness. If
these texts vindicate in many ways their
“Caribbeaness” and, by extension, what
Benítez Rojo would qualify of “la
afirmación de su propia Otredad, su
asimetría periférica con respecto a Occidente,” 36nonetheless the specter of Haiti
persists as the uncanny neighbour that stirs
up anxieties about this place where we
don’t want to go back to or become.37This
is particularly relevant in Apuntes de Josué
E\3pUH]DQG/DFDWHGUDOGHORV
negros by Gala, in which the re-emerging
tropes of radical alterity, “Haiti” and
“Oriente,” are also bound up with the
linguistic factor.
Thus, to make sense of all that precedes I
have summarized the significance of this
narrative strategy of integrating black
speech in three instances: 1) As a signifier
of socioeconomic, cultural, moral decay;
2) As a marker of group identity, codes of
conducts in poor and marginal neighbourhoods, and Cubanness; 3) As a pretext/way to revisit the nation’s history (colonial transaction and the society it fostered,
migrations, national symbols, archetypes
and stereotypes).
These works of fiction also enter in
dialogue with other “Caribbean-centric”
texts, whether intertextually, by referring
to foundational oeuvres that vindicated
34 Rogelio Martínez Furé is an Afro-Cuban writer, scholar of folklore and religion and founder of the National Folkloric Ballet
of Cuba (Conjunto Folklórico Nacional). Consistent with his stress on Cuba’s multicultural nature, State sponsored EcuRed
mentions Martínez Furé’s “rich and diverse ancestry” that includes: “mandingas, franceses, lucumíes, españoles, chinos y,
muy probable, de algún indio en lontananza”. Very recently, on Feb. 8, 2021, the documentary film on his life: “Rogelio
Martínez Furé: A Cuban Griot” (Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, 2014), was presented at the University of Missouri, College of
Arts and Science- Black Studies in which he is portrayed as “a contemporary griot, a repository of oral tradition who recovers
and guards Afro-Cuban and Caribbean silenced memories and true identity (blackstudies.missouri.edu).
35 Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 83-84. Emphasis mine.
36%HQtWH]5RMR$QWRQLR/DLVODTXHVHUHSLWHௗHO&DULEH\ODSHUVSHFWLYDSRVPRGHUQD +DQRYHU1+(GLFLRQHVGHO1RUWH
37
Rafael Rojas explains the persistence of Cuba’s uneasiness (read “rejection”) when facing its Caribbean identity and this, in
spite of revolutionary rhetoric on racial equality and African cultural legacy, by the fact that according to the imaginary of the
Revolution and of the left in general, Cuba was considered a “leading country in the Third World,” but also “not so very Third
:RUOGXQGHUGHYHORSHGRU/DWLQ$PHULFDQGXHWRLWVEHORQJLQJWRWKH6RYLHWEORFDQGLWVVRFLDODGYDQFHV´ *LYHQVXFK
discourse, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico came to represent “negative archetypes” for the nationalistic rhetoric,
JLYHQWKHLU³FRPPRQHOHPHQWRI+LVSDQLF$IULFDQPHVWL]DMH´ HPSKDVLVLQRULJLQDO³(VVD\VLQ&XEDQ´
104
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First, and as presented in my analysis of
Gutiérrez’s El Rey de La Habana, the
linguistic characterization of the black
subject is used mostly as a signifier of
socio-economic, cultural and moral decay
by which the protagonist’s speech acts
mirrors the ruinous city of Havana, which
in turn stands as an allegory of a crumbling social project. In addition to the use
of narrative strategies reminiscent of
colonial literature, namely the example of
the “negra Tomasa”, which I have argued
served to emphasize the Island’s historical
involution, the incursion of lexicon
derived from Afro-Cuban popular religiosity also adds another layer of “otherness”,
by relegating spatially the black protagonist to Africa rather than Cuba, a narrative
strategy also reminiscent of colonial
literature.
In “Virgen en la pradera” by Encinosa Fú,
apart from restaging an “African space”
there is a commentary on the degradation
of education, culture and morality in this
microcosm of Cuban society; the animalization and hyper-virility of the black
subject, the incursion of a disabled character when touching upon the children’s
depravity, referred to as “the tribe”, and
the linguistic codes/manner of speech that
emphasizes this barrio’s marginal status.
In Gala’s La catedral, the idea of the
ruinous city of Havana is displaced to the
fictitious mostly black and marginal
neighbourhood of Punta Gotica, Cienfuegos, and by which the most stigmatized
linguistic traits and swearing are ascribed
to the mothers of certain characters, all
part-time prostitutes (as was the case of
.105
Rey’s mother), giving way to their son’s
comments such as Barbarito’s “my mother
spoke that way”.38
Relative to the second instance of this
narrative strategy, given that both “Virgen
en la pradera” and La catedral de los
negros are set in poor and marginal
neighbourhoods, the informal register is
stressed, namely with the many incursions
of the colloquial and street talk/lexicon
proper to marginal sectors, including those
derived from Afro-Cuban popular religiosity, integrally part of the cultural setting.
However, not only manner of speech
serves as a marker of group identity and
codes of conduct proper to these spaces,
but also of cultural identity and Cubanness. What Gala termed “ese especial
modo que tenemos los cubanos de hablar,”
(“this special way we Cubans speak”), 39
includes the use by the people of particular
narrative strategies. Set in the Special
Period, Gala’s novel also includes expressions and the lexicon that emerged at that
time. According to Jorge Hernández, these
years of crisis gave way to an “abundante
repertorio de frases y vocablos, marcados
en su mayoría, por la interpretación
irónica, paródica o poética,” a repertoire
not yet collated, but nonetheless, dispersed
in chronicles, articles and works of
authors.40 One of these “literary strategies”
used by Cubans in reaction to their daily
hardships and State censorship, demonstrating both creativity and resilience, has
been to engage in a great deal of ‘metaphorizing’. Consequently, to allude to the
mothers’ dealings in prostitution, they are
said to be “en la lucha,” (instead of
38 Marcial Gala. La catedral de los negros 2ª ed.. (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2015), 17.
39 Cited in Frígoli, Leandro. “La catedral de los Negros: una mirada sobre la obra del poeta, narrador y ensayista, Marcial Gala.
” Marcha. marcha.org.ar. 14 de junio de 2017. www.marcha.org.ar/la-catedral-de-los-negros/
40 Jorge A. Hernández,. Hablar entre cubanos. (Santa Clara, Cuba: Editorial Capiro, 2013), 103.
41
Jorge Mañach. Indagación del choteo (1928). Tercera edición revisada. (La Habana: Editorial Libro Cubano, 1955), 60.
105
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“prostituirse”). Gala also exploits culinary
metaphors, which go back to Jorge
Mañach’s seminal text Indagación del
choteo who “serves us” an example of this
Cuban tendency to equate bodies to meat, 41
with the serial killer El Gringo’s mastering
of this type of choteo, and which variations go beyond the realm of metaphor,
which in turn leads us to the objectification of the white body. Interestingly, this
particular use of language or wordplay
(choteo) also becomes a way to subvert
the traditional power dynamics between
Blacks and Whites.
In a third instance, manner of speech or
the “language issue” serves to anchor
other discussions or becomes a pretext to
revisit Cuba’s particular history, Afro-Caribbean legacy, and social dynamics,
which in turn inform current conflicts that
the economic crisis of the 1990s permitted
to unleash. The use of this narrative
strategy is particularly emphasized in
Apuntes de Josué 1994 by Nelton Pérez, in
which the nation and the re-emergence of
specific social conflicts during the Special
Period are also reflected upon and worked
out at sea in the balsas/rafts in the context
of the Balsero crisis. 42 In fact, it is in his
vignettes or apuntes “25” and “32” in
which the Cuban “holy trinity” of nation,
identity and race figure, that Perez’s
linguistic experimentations are more
clearly racialized, racial stereotypes are
voiced out, and in which the specter of the
.106
Haitian as Cuba’s radical other invites
itself. For example, the incursion of Yorqi
Dubois Lescay, a black character which
surname clearly denotes his Haitian
ancestry, not only permits to allude to
Cuba’s neo-colonial context by which
Haitian and Jamaican braceros migrated to
work on US owned sugar plants at the
beginning of the twentieth century, but
discuss the “language issue,” by which the
protagonist’s manner of speech with
supposedly “French creole influences”
confers him radical alterity.43
Nonetheless, it is important to specify that
if black characters are singled out by their
speech acts in these two vignettes by a
mainly “white” crew, the incursion of the
“Haitian” character is also met with
suspicion by it’s black Cuban counterpart,
which adds layers and nuances when
touching upon discrimination and otherness in the Caribbean region. In La
catedral de los negros, El Gringo mistakenly takes a certain “Pierre Giscard” for an
Haitian, and this, mostly for his “linguistic” features, namely, for his voice “cargada de erres” (“full of R’s”) that he “did not
like from the very beginning” (“que no me
44
gustó desde el principio”). This last
example underlines once more the
Haitian’s “radical alterity” in the Cuban
imaginary at large.
42 The Balsero crisis refers to the massive migrations of Cubans on rafts of fortune during the summer of 1994, at the height of
the Special Period of the 1990s. However, this type of migration had already started since 1991. According to Ackerman,
already between 1991 and 1994, “a total of 45,575 Cuban balseros (rafters) were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. Of those,
16,778 entered the United States immediately. The remainder were sent to "safe haven" camps located at U.S. military bases in
Guantánamo, Cuba, or Panama” (169). In Holly Ackerman. “The Balsero Phenomenon, 1991–1994.” Cuban Studies (1996):
169-200.
43
Sklodowska also discusses the Haitian’s already “linguistic otherness” for his “uso preferido del créole” and for being
associated with the French heritage of this part of the Island, at a time when Cuba’s Republic of Letters voice their
“preocupación por el «afrancesamiento» de la lengua española”. Worthy of note is to what extent White creole anxieties
towards racial mixing are transposed at the linguistic level when considering this concern for maintaining the purity of the
6SDQLVKODQJXDJHIUHHRIIRUHLJQFRQWDPLQDQWV )UHQFKDQG&UpROH ,Q(O]ELHWD6NORGRZVND(VSHFWURV\HVSHMLVPRVௗ+DLWt
en el imaginario cubano. (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009), 68; 69 note 6.
44 La catedral de los negros, 169.
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Furthermore, these linguistic portrayals of
black characters in narrative are conditioned by three main factors. First, by their
temporal proximity with the Revolution’s
cosmology and its social modernizing and
homogenizing effect when writing on the
Special Period. Second, the shift brought
by the discourse of “multi-cubanidad” –
i.e. “we are all Cuban, but we are not the
same” – that opened narrative to multiple
voices and regional linguistic differences.
Finally, the particular literary traditions of
the Caribbean and Central region of the
Island, more open to linguistic experimentations and reflections on the topics of race
relations within the Caribbean region.
A tale about continuity and subversion…
Given that the backdrop of these three
texts is Cuba’s Special Period, or have
been written partly during that time
(Pérez’s Apuntes de Josué 1994), they do
retake, to varying degrees, the more
sociological angle of documenting the
plight of Blacks who had been hardest hit
by the rise of inequalities, and the narrative strategies established in fiction of the
1990s to add “authenticity”, including at
the linguistic level, and thus, the integration of the notorious Havana slang.
Corollary to the realization that if “we are
all Cubans, we are not all equal,” is the
re-emergence of integrating discriminating
linguistic features pointing to race. In
addition, the sense of “end of the worldness” expressed by certain authors, namely
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, also accounts for the
trope of the ruin and by which the black
body becomes a metaphor for a crumbling
social project.45
.107
In “Virgen en la pradera”, Encinosa Fú
picks up many of the topics, archetypes
and stylistic codes proper to Pedro Juan
Gutiérrez’s realismo sucio. However, if
language still serves as a signifier of
socioeconomic, cultural, moral decay,
there is a shift in perspective insofar as the
author-narrator leaves a certain space for
other voices to emerge and point to the
perils that lie within this black community
for those who do not conform to its
particular codes of conduct. In other terms,
whites are “other” and acting “like
whites”/”wearing white masks” is stigmatized in these mainly Afro-Cuban spaces.
Gala pushes this even farther in La
catedral de los negros by eliminating
completely the omniscient narrator and by
giving voice to those who live in the
margins of the city. Given this change of
perspective, the rich whites from the
upscale Punta Gorda (Cienfuegos) and the
white guajiros from neighbouring provinces become the “other”. As mentioned
previously, language does not serve
explicitly to stigmatise the black subject in
these settings, but rather to point to the
people’s resilience and the degree in which
language use can serve to subvert traditional power dynamics, if we refer, for
example, to El Gringo’s special brand of
“metaphorizing”.
Ultimately, what we may perceive as an
“evolution” in the way language is used to
reflect Cuba’s Afro-Caribbean legacy, that
is, from a narrative strategy serving to
construct otherness, to one conveying
Cuba’s multicultural/regional and socioeconomic realities, neither is it a process
devoid of tensions, nor is it generalized in
more recent works of fiction. My main
45 This additional insight draws on long enduring discourses by which Blacks in Cuba have historically been associated with
“crumbling” political regimes. See Alejandro de la Fuente. “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s ‘Special
Period.’” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (2001): 65–91, p. 90..
107
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objective in this part of my current
research was to dismantle this “last
frontier” in which the topics of race,
language and the Island’s Caribbeaness are
intertwined and discussed, and this, taking
into account these “spaces” and literary
traditions that permit such linguistic
experimentations/reflections.
108
.108
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.109
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