Afrocuban Autobiography and the Cuban National Narrative

Thursday, January 3, 2019: 3:30 PM
Crystal Room (Palmer House Hilton)
Mark A. Sanders, University of Notre Dame
From the earliest days of the republic, the Cuban national narrative has minimized the role and visibility of the Afro-Cuban. Despite a population between 30% and 60% black, the official history, both pre and post Revolutionary, has implicitly asserted Cuba as the white nation at cultural and phenotypic odds with its black Caribbean neighbors.

Three Afro-Cuban autobiographies challenge and revise the narrative, actively inserting the Afro-Cuban at the center of the national discourse on cultural and political identity.

In his memoir A Black Soldier’s Story, Ricardo Batrell claims for himself and his black compatriots, the mantle of “true liberators.” Batrell’s text strives to remind his audience of the original hope for the republic, as he allegorizes the national struggle for independence as a pitched battle between good and evil with race and black soldiers at the center of the fight.

So too, in his narrative Biography of a Runaway Slave, Estban Montejo claims his status as cimarrón (runaway slave) as pretext for being a black Revolutionary, ultimately in the Marxist/Castro sense of the word.

And finally, in her self-titled memoir Reyita provides an essential correction, as she underscores the intersection of race and gender in her personal and familial struggle for inclusion and equality. Indeed, through this black female voice we can see dimensions of the national narrative obscured by the accounts of the previous two texts.

This paper will examine the ways in which each text provides its unique commentary on Cuban racial politics, and then will assess how collectively the autobiographies revise the national narrative. Ultimately, the three combine to insist upon an indelible black imprint on Cuban national history, an imprint that serves as the basis for claims to citizenship and national belonging.

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