Mixed Race Studies

For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun

The New York Times
2013-03-23

Roberto Zurbano, Editor and Publisher
Casa de las Américas Publishing House

Translated from Spanish by Kristina Cordero

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it…

…Raúl Castro has announced that he will step down from the presidency in 2018. It is my hope that by then, the antiracist movement in Cuba will have grown, both legally and logistically, so that it might bring about solutions that have for so long been promised, and awaited, by black Cubans.

An important first step would be to finally get an accurate official count of Afro-Cubans. The black population in Cuba is far larger than the spurious numbers of the most recent censuses. The number of blacks on the street undermines, in the most obvious way, the numerical fraud that puts us at less than one-fifth of the population. Many people forget that in Cuba, a drop of white blood can — if only on paper — make a mestizo, or white person, out of someone who in social reality falls into neither of those categories. Here, the nuances governing skin color are a tragicomedy that hides longstanding racial conflicts…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

1. Introduction
2. Independence and Race
3. Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
4. Liberalism and the Indian Question
5. Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
6. The Science of Racism
7. Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
8. Indigenismo in the Andes
9. Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
10. Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of  Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface. On the Translation of Race
• Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
• Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
• Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
• Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
• Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
• Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
• Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000)
pages 87-113
DOI: 10.1353/dis.2000.0007

Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary José Martí, as a fertile location for their project:

For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America’s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fernández 11)

Cuba’s nationalism, from José Martí and Cuba’s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro, has always been a mestizo and mulato nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba’s population in the modern era, “slightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese” (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the “Black Atlantic” and Martí’s Spanish-speaking “Our America” on equal terms.

While the discourse of mestizaje and racial amalgamation nourishes Cuba’s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and José Martí’s “Our America” cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas “Our America” stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Martí’s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage…

Read the entire article here.

Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912

Latin American Research Review
Volume 34, Number 3 (1999)
pages 39-73

Alejandro de la Fuente, UCIS Research Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state’s cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.

In a very real sense, nothing can be more real than the unreal.
Ashley Montagu, Race, Science, and Humanity

Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called it “prejudice against prejudice”; U.S. sociologist Thomas Lynn Smith described it as “a veritable cult.” Both were referring to what has come to be known as the Brazilian myth of racial democracy.

In its simplest formulation, the “myth” is that all Brazilians, regardless of “race,” enjoy equal opportunities and live in a racially harmonious society. It could not be otherwise, according to the myth, because Brazil’s strength and greatness reside in the widespread racial mixture of its population. It therefore makes no sense to talk about blacks and whites in a country in which most citizens are some of both. “Race” in Brazilian society is constructed along a continuum moving from “black” to “white” based on phenotypical features (skin color, type of hair, facial features) and on social factors like education and financial status. Several centuries of intimate contact and miscegenation, biological and cultural, have created a new hybrid race that is authentically Brazilian.

The notoriety of the Brazilian case has been guaranteed by the brilliance of its myth makers, foremost among them Gilberto Freyre. But it has also been sustained by two fundamental facts: no other country in the hemisphere has a numerically larger population of African descent; and no other country enslaved its black population as late as Brazil did, until 1888. A hegemonic ideology advocating some form of racial fraternity is remarkable in a country like Brazil but hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, intellectual elites in numerous Latin American countries have articulated racial ideologies that were similar in purpose and content to the Brazilian myth. Mestizaje was exalted as the true American essence, a synthesis that incorporated (allegedly on equal terms) the best cultural and physical traits that the various ethnic and racial groups populating the Americas had to offer.

Forced to cope with the troubling aspects of a North Atlantic ideology that flatly advocated the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and the deleterious effects of racial mixing, the elites in Latin America had to reach a compromise that would allow them to reconcile the goal of modernity with the undeniably mixed nature of their populations. During this search, the mestizo was invented as a national symbol. The result was an ideological formulation that broke with the past while upholding it. The discourse on mestizaje remained prisoner of the same canon that scientific racism proclaimed as incontrovertible truths—the essentialness of race—but the discourse revolutionized social thinking by minimizing the other central tenet of the hegemonic racial gospel: biological determinism. Although race was still associated with ascribed characteristics as immutable and overpowering as those championed by genetically based racism, the emphasis was shifted to geographical, cultural, and historical factors. This is no small distinction. By placing social factors at the core of their ideological constructions, Latin American intellectuals were openly contesting the notion that their countries were doomed to failure and perpetual backwardness, while asserting (however implicitly) that social transformation was the way to reach modernity. They thus had fabricated a way out of the ideological iron cast that the North Atlantic world had manufactured by means of its high science, universities, and royal societies.

But the escape was only partial. While contesting or just ignoring the idea that racial miscegenation meant degeneration, Latin American thinkers accepted the premise that ample sectors of their populations were basically inferior and that their human stock needed to be “improved” Such inferiority was to be explained in terms of culture, geography, or climate rather than pure genetics, but the dominant vision still presented the lighter end of the spectrum as the ideal and denigrated the darker end as primitive and uncivilized. In this formulation, whiteness still represented progress. Miscegenation was perceived as the way to “regenerate” a population unfit to perform the duties associated with a modern polity, with white immigration serving as a precondition for progress. The idea that regeneration was possible at all subverted biological determinism, but the expressed need for regeneration presupposed acceptance of the idea that “race” explained the “backwardness” of Latin American societies. Whitening became the way to remove a surmountable, albeit formidable, obstacle on the road to modernity.

Read the entire article here.

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

New York University Press
November 2012
272 pages
10 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814765463
Paper ISBN: 9780814765470

Antonio López, Assistant Professor of English
George Washington University

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.

López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Cuban surrealist Wifredo Lam fetches record price

BBC News
2012-05-24

A painting by Cuban surrealist artist Wifredo Lam fetched a record personal price at a Latin American art sale at auctioneers Sotheby’s in New York.

An unnamed South American collector paid $4.5m (£2.9m) for Lam’s 1944 Idol (Oya/Divinite de l’Air et de la mort), well above the $2m-3m guide price…

…But Diego Rivera’s 1939 painting Girl in Blue and White, considered the main attraction, remained unsold.

The work by the Mexican artist had been expected to sell at a price between $4m and $6m.

In contrast, Lam’s piece, which had been in private hands since 1947, sold for more than double the previous top price for his paintings.

An Afro-Cuban, Lam died in 1982 and was heavily influenced both by surrealism and by santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion based on Yorùbá and Roman Catholic beliefs…

Read the entire article here.

“Custodians of History”: (Re)Construction of Black Women as Historical and Literary Subjects in Afro-American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing

University of Texas, Austin
August 2005
500 pages

Paula Sanmartín, Assistant Professor of (Afro) Caribbean and (Afro) Spanish American Literature
California State University, Fresno

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy

Set within a feminist and revisionist context, my dissertation examines literary representations of the historic roots of black women’s resistance in Cuba and the United States, by studying texts by both Afro-American and Afro-Cuban women from four different literary genres: Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical slave narrative, a neo-slave narrative by Sherley Ann Williams, the testimonio of María de los Reyes Castillo (“Reyita”), and the poetry of Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera. Conscious of the differences between the texts, I nevertheless demonstrate how the writers participate in black women’s self-inscription in the historical process by positioning themselves as subjects of their history and seizing discursive control of their (hi)stories.

Although the texts form part of separate discourses, I explore the commonalities of the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies employed by the authors as they disassemble racist and sexist stereotypes, (re)constructing black female subjectivity through an image of active resistance against oppression, one that authorizes unconventional definitions of womanhood and motherhood. My project argues that in their revisions of national history, these writings also demonstrate the pervasive role of racial and gender categories in the creation of a discourse of national identity, while promoting a historiography constructed within flexible borders that need to be constantly negotiated.

Putting these texts in dialogue with one another both within and across geopolitical boundaries, my project is characterized by a tension between positions, from close textual readings to historical commentaries, as I develop multilayered readings drawing on sources that range from cultural history and genre studies to psychoanalytical theory and black feminist criticism. The authors’ literary representations of their culture of resistance constitute an essential contribution to literary and historical studies, suggesting a dialectic model for “reading dialogically” such concepts as “subjectivity,” “discourse,” “tradition,” and “history,” by simultaneously exploring multiple, contradictory, or complementary discursive spaces. This dialectic of identification and difference, continuity and change, serves to describe the intertextual relationships within Afro-American and Afro-Cuban literary traditions. Simultaneously, drawing on dialogic relationships can open up new lines of enquiry and redress the historical imbalance of Western historiography by presenting black women’s history and subjectivity as multiple and discontinuous.

Table of Contents

• Introduction. “Custodians of History”: (Re)Construction of Black Women as Historical and Literary Subjects in Afro-American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing
  1. Gender and Genre
  2. Authorship and Authority
  3. Rebellious (M)Others
  4. National Identification
  5. Revising (Hi)stories
• Chapter 1. “We Could Have Told Them a Different Story”: Harriet Jacobs’s Alternative Narrative and the Revision of the White Transcript
  1. Hybrid Genres: Assimilation and Subversion in Autobiographical Slave Narratives
  2. The Female Slave Author and the Dialogic of Discourses in Incidents
  3. “The War of Her life”: Harriet Jacobs’s Rebellious Motherhood
  4. Split Subject/Split Nation: Abolitionism, Miscegenation and Black Women as National Subjects
  5. Rewriting the Slave Woman’s “Histories.”
• Chapter 2. “They Mistook Me for Another Dessa”: Correcting the (Mis)Reading Techniques of the Master(’s) Narrative
  1. Neo-Slave Narratives and the Revision of the Slaves’ Texts.
  2. “Twice-Told Tales”: Real and Fictive Authorships in a Black Women’s Double-Voiced Text
  3. Devil Woman or Debil Woman?: Asserting Rebelliousness Through an Interracial Sisterhood
  4. One Single Nation?: Interrelation of Communities in Dessa Rose
  5. Revising the Fictions of History
• Chapter 3. “In My Own Voice, In My Own Place”: The Continuous Revision of History in a Black Cuban Woman’s Testimonial Narrative
  1. The Dialectics of Testimonio: Past, Present and Future?
  2. A Family Feud? “Authority-in-Process” in the Production of Reyita, sencillamente: testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenaria
  3. Like Mother, Like Daughter: The Rebel/Revolutionary (M)Other
  4. Black and/or Cuban: The Black Female (M)Other of the Cuban Nation
• Chapter 4. Revolution in Poetic Language: (Re)Writing Black Women’s History in Black Cuban Women’s Poetry
  1. Neo-Negrista Poetry? : Searching for the “Authentic” Black Female Subject
  2. Authorship and (State’s) Authority in Black Cuban Women’s Poetry
  3. Black Cuban Women Poets and the Revolutionary Black (M)Other
  4. “National” Poetry? Diaspora and/or Transculturation in the Representation of Cuban National Identity
  5. (Re)construction of (Revolutionary) History
• Bibliography
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902-1958

University of Texas, Austin
343 pages
August 2011

Takkara Keosha Brunson

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Introduction: Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902-1958
• Historiographical Contributions
• Mapping the Dissertation
• A Note on Terminology
• Chapter 1: Patriarchy and Racial Progress within Afro-Cuban Societies in the Early Republic
  • Patriarchy, Racial Progress, and Social Hierarchy
  • Afro-Cuban Organizations during the Republican Era
    • Gender, Patriarchy, and Respectability
  • Afro-Cuban Social Life during the Early Decades of the Republic
    • Class, Gender, and Society Life in Santa Clara
  • A Shift in Discourse: Morality
    • Women, the Family, and Racial Regeneration
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Exemplary Women: Afro-Cuban Women’s Articulation of Racial Progress
  • Racial Progress and Republican Womanhood
  • Republican Womanhood and the Work of Racial Improvement
    • Writing Republican Womanhood
  • Women of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Colored Party)
    • Patriarchy and Women’s Contributions to the PIC
  • Minerva and the Emergence of Afro-Cuban Feminism
    • Marriage and Divorce
  • Patriarchy and Political Voice Through Letter Writing
    • Writing for Work and Educational Opportunities
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Visualizing Progress: Afro-Cuban Womanood, Sexual Politics, and Photography
  • Theoretical Framework and Methodology
  • Photography and Racism in Cuba
  • Afro-Cuban Photographic Portraiture and Racial Progress
  • Staging Racial Progress Through Adornment Practices
    • Racial Womanhood and Understandings of Beauty
  • The Legal and Moral Family
  • Modern Womanhood and Photography during the 1920s
    • Amelia González: Afro-Cuban Society and Modern Womanhood
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: La Mujer Negra (The Black Woman): The Transformation of Afro-Cuban Women’s Political and Social Thought during the 1930s
  • Popular Mobilization and the Tranformation of Gender Ideologies
    • The “Triple Discrimination” Confronted by Black Women
    • Political Debates on Race, Gender, and Citizenship
  • Black Women and National Politics
    • Afro-Cuban Feminism in the 1930s
  • Afro-Cuban Feminists and the Third National Women’s Congress of 1939
    • Black Womanhood and the Third National Women’s Congress
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Enacting Citizenship: Afro-Cuban Womanhood in a New Constitutional Era
  • Political Alliances and Democratic Discourses
  • Afro-Cuban Women Communists in the New Constitutional Era
  • Labor and Citizenship
  • Afro-Cuban Women Communists and Popular Protests
    • Economic Reform and Anti-War Protests
    • Connecting Local Issues to Global Struggles after WWII
    • The Democratic Cuban Women’s Federation
  • Nuevos Rumbos (New Directions) and the Struggle for Citizenship
    • Women’s Political Representation and Civil Rights within Afro-Cuban Publications
  • Anti-Racial Discrimination Campaign
    • Racial Discrimination and the Law
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: “Úrsula Coimbra Valverde,” Minerva (15 December 1888)
• Figure 2: “Úrsula Coimbra Valverde,” El Nuevo Criollo (17 December 1904)
• Figure 3: “Consuelo Serra y Heredia,” El Nuevo Criollo (18 June 1905)
• Figure 4: “Consuelo Serra y Heredia,” El Nuevo Criollo (18 June 1905)
• Figure 5: “Esperanza Díaz,” Minerva (September 1910)
• Figure 6: “Inéz Billini,” Minerva (30 September 1910)
• Figure 7: “Juana M. Mercado,” Minerva (15 December 1912)
• Figure 8: Advertisement for Pomada “Mora,” Minerva (15 December 1914)
• Figure 9: Portrait of Martín Morúa Delgado and his daughters, Arabella and Vestalina. Published in Rafael Serra’s Para blancos y negros: ensayos políticos, sociales y económicos
• Figure 10: Portrait of Martín Morúa Delgado, his wife, Elvira Granados de Morúa, and their daughters, Vestalina and Arabella. Published in El Fígaro (12 September 1910)
• Figure 11: “Amelia González,” El Mundo (1 December 1922)
• Figure 12: “Dámas de Atenas,” Revista Atenas (1931)

Rumblings of The Earth: Wifredo Lam, His Work and Words

Filmakers Library (an imprint of Alexander Street Press)
1996
23 minutes

Denise Byrd

Awards

• San Antonio CINEFEST, 1996
• Latin American Studies Association, 1995

The Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam played a leading role in bringing the art of the non-white world to the attention of the international community. Of mixed race and cultural heritage, he was born in 1902 in Sangua La Grande, Cuba to a mother who was a descendent of slaves and a father who was a Chinese immigrant. In his youth he was exposed to the rich heritage of African, Santaria and Confucian traditions. These traditions affected him deeply and are reflected in his art which is in the collections of major museums here and abroad.

This film follows Lam from student days in Havana through his development as an artist in Europe where he became a close friend of Picasso and other luminaries. Upon returning to Cuba, Lam rediscovered his roots, became a leader in the Négritude movement, and produced his most famous work, “The Jungle.”

This richly illustrated film uses Lam’s paintings and writing along with interviews with authorities on art and Caribbean culture to trace the evolution of a unique and truly multicultural twentieth century artist.