Sombras De Pueblo Negro: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Memory in 1930s Cuba1
2006; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-9648
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoMatanza, masacre Desarmados en combate Ocultaron la historia Hoy la memoria Vuelve al ataque iCuba Libre! Cuento con lo que cuenta Para dear lo que hace falta Pedro Ivonnet - Ibae Ni en mambo ni en bronce En nuestro corazon y mente desde entonces Se unen estas voces 1912(2) -Anonimo Consejo, Ashe (2004) In their recent song Ashe3 the Cuban hip-hop duo Anonimo Consejo rap about the early twentieth-century repression of Cuba's Partido Independiente de Color (PIC). Less than a decade after the founding of the Cuban Republic, the PIC was established in 1908 by Afro-Cuban veterans of the Wars of Independence. Its founders sought to condemn the limited economic and political opportunities available to Afro-Cubans due to the persistence of racism, and to make the party a vehicle for the achievement of equality and social justice. Viewing the PIC as a threat to the traditional political parties as well as the island's racial balance between blacks and whites, in 1910 the Cuban congress quickly moved to outlaw political parties based on race, citing their separatist racism. Meanwhile, the mainstream press claimed that the PIC aimed to foment a race war that would result in black tyranny over white Cubans. In 1912, the PIC turned to armed protest to force the relegalization of their party, primarily in Cuba's eastern province of Oriente (Helg 226). The army's violent repression of the protest included the indiscriminate massacre and imprisonment of thousands of Afro-Cubans and other Antilleans in the predominantly black province.4 The epigraph above represents an important part of the song's critique: of the PIC has been silenced in official nationalist histories. The rap lyric points out that even in today's revolutionary Cuba there are no cultural or political monuments to assassinated PIC leader Pedro Ivonnet. Violent repression of the PIC in the political economy of the Cuban republic was accompanied by its suppression in official historiography and cultural production. As Paul Gilroy states, the ideology of white supremacy is maintained through social control in the present and the denial and repression of the (qtd. in Helg 17). The racist violence of 1912 cannot be separated from the epistemic violence that first denied the validity of the PIC's critique by claiming the republic's achievement of racial and then erased its of Afro-Cuban resistance to white supremacy. The of 1912 was silenced by the dominant nationalist myth of Cuba's democracy, which assumes that all Cubans enjoy equal opportunities and that harmony was achieved in the fraternity of the Wars of Independence and with the founding of the republic in 1902. In Cuba's early republican era the ideology of white supremacy was preserved by disbanding the PIC through state terror and its of Afro-Cuban resistance in the nation's official histories. However, while the of 1912 was silenced in official histories, Ashe proclaims that this silencing was not absolute, for it persists in the collective hearts and minds of Afro-Cubans. When they rap, hoy la memoria vuelve al ataque / iCuba Libre!, Anonimo Consejo insists that this is a means to AfroCuban, and thus Cuba's, collective liberation. Memory is key to opposing regimes that forget to sustain racist domination. The song brings to mind Walter Benjamin's assertion in Thesis on the Philosophy of History, that to articulate the historically is to seize hold of a as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Likewise Joseph Roach reminds us that, memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past (33). The song's performative invocation of the of 1912 is not merely fixed in the but is a form of retrospection and anticipation that proclaims the relevance of 1912 to Cuba's present and future. …
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