culture sugar created barnet

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The Culture That Sugar CreatedAuthor(s): Miguel Barnet and Naomi LindstromReviewed work(s):Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 8, No. 16, Hispanic Caribbean Literature (Spring,

1980), pp. 38-46Published by: Latin American Literary ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119209 .

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The Culture that Sugar CreatedByMIGUEL BARNET

Sugar made Cuba coalesce. The culture that grew around it is today thenational culture. The sugar plantation seedbed ? germ cell?contributed to thefusing-together of all the values that gave rise to our country. There, the basiccurrents of our being came together in a shaping embrace just as, earlier, the

African currents had come together on the slave ships, in the barracks, in themeeting-halls and finally in the solar (tenement house).The African culture that arrived in Cuba in intermittent waves becametransformed and created new human groups and categories. This process ofsynthesis that had begun on the African coast along theGulf of Guinea and allthrough sub- Sanaran Africa now developed with greater force and complexityin the American lands. The process of synthesis went on and on, because itunfolded in dynamic and continuous fashion. Along with the different ethnicgroups that arrived from Africa came their forms of cultural expression,religious as well as artistic. And this whole human conglomerate was led outinto the fields to be used for cultivating, principally, sugar cane.The small cell of the primitive grinding-mill, which would later grow intothe huge complex of the sugarmill plantation, was the ground where thesecomplex and heterogeneous human masses came together. Blending with thewhite Spanish immigrant, or native-born Cuban, the African culturesreceived, first from one another and then from the white groups, a changingimpact which resulted in the creation in our country of a new form of culture,affecting the whites as well.The sugarmill system fostered that integration and synthesis. The largeplantation was the place where that great willful venture, as Elias Entralgo liketo say, took place. On the plantation, white and black came together for thefirst time. The first night a black woman and white man spent together markeda turning-point for our country, and a day aglow with light dawned for theculture of the Caribbean. Thanks to this union, two factors were conjoined forthe first time, later to play the definitive role in the shaping of Cubannationality. The union, which first occurred to the rhythm of sugar farming,created the Cuban in all his complexity and richness. The mulatto, a type ofindividual newly introduced into society, would now stand as living symbol ofthe fusing of the two races :white and Black. It all began in this genesis, in that


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The Culture that Sugar Created 39

cultural and racial product. The mixture of elements, the interchange and themiscegenation at a cultural level, emerged from the first coming-together ofthese two worlds. And this meeting did not mean one strain's domination of theother, but a purely cultural integration that gave rise to a reality now existing inour continent.

Like a little tropical Tower of Babel, the sugar-workers' barracks broughtabout this meeting, not without its racial tensions. Later, the sugar plantation,with its social stratification and its historically-determined characteristics,would be the prime mover in the agglutination and symbiotic integration ofSpanish culture (atavistic and feudal) and those cultures of the Africancontinent, with their tribal traits. A statement included in the proceedings ofthe second conference of theNational Union ofWriters and Artists sums it allup clearly: "Cuba is an example of a 'new people,' Afro-American or, asFidel Castro would say : 'Latin-African. 'Ours is a region that, throughout theCaribbean, is the maifestation of a society arising from the plantation system,with a rich human contribution from itsAfrican roots that makes a decisivedifference in all of national life."

Along with the creation of uniquely Afro-Cuban cultural forms and themovement toward a suigeneris national character, this process gave rise to asense of national or island identity. Long stretches of unbroken flatlands, orgreat, nourishing rivers, fostered the travel and dissemination of linguistic andcultural elements. The land itself, favored by nature and a climate thatencouraged expansion and opening-up, became the essential sustenance forthe development of a sense of "what we are. " The Spaniard, affected by blackculture, ended up assimilating itunconsciously, though he might deplore itandeven ban it.As Nicol?s Guillen says inhis " Song of the Bongo" :"Here eventhe finest gentleman must harken to my call."

Perhaps because of all of this, our country ismore homogeneous and ournation more solid and self-defined. All our being and effort have always gone,and still go, toward a search for a historical and social synthesis. In thatsearch some relatively worthless elements have been discarded, while others,of more deep-rooted and permanent value, have been preserved. This give andtake, this transculturation, as Fernando Ortiz put it, defines us as a people inthe one-of-a-kind mix that comes from factors of varied origin.Our identity as a people is the gift of the plantation system of sugar-canefarming, especially as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, whenthe black population outnumbered the white, when ethnic groups of unlikeorigin?the salaried white who worked on the plantation as an overseer as wellas the white peasants who mixed with the slaves to barter such products ashoney or salted meat-first helped foster the cultural unification of what wouldlater produce social cohesiveness. That's why I asserted that sugar had madeus coalesce. Indeed, when Cuba became the world's first sugar producer anddisplaced Haiti as the prime exporter of sugar cane, our country consolidated a


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40 LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW

onecrop industry thatmanaged, among other things, to unify cultural currentswhose sociological and political results can be defined in a single, deeplysignificant word: Cuba.The history of Cuba is, then, indissolubly linked with that of the sugarindustry. Itwas a Cuban triumph, for all the world to see; we announced wewere a nation and wouldn 't it the archaic feudal standard the Spaniards soughtto impose. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, in his excellent book The Sugarmill, hasseen clearly this entire process, to which we will now turn.This development of the sugar industry, and of our own native way of life,

was a revolutionary phenomenon, home-grown on our own island. But itwasonly a partial revolution, a revolution for the white, but not for the black livingin subhuman conditions, seeking refuge in his mystical union, in his culturaland religious patterns which he used as armor against the cruel battle of theclass struggle. The tremendous contradiction of selling merchandise on theworld market and at the same time holding slaves was painfully reflected in theideological world of the sugarocrat (as Moreno Fraginals calls the white

Cuban sugar-mill owners). He had one foot in the bourgeois future and theother in the remote slave past. In this vacillating position he aspired, on the onehand, to the highest bourgeois conquests, all the superstructure made possibleby free production; and on the other hand, he wanted to retain the protectiveshield of the slavemaster. Thus when he appropriated the revolutionary cry ofliberty he castrated itwith an inevitable suffix: freedom for the white man.Sugar with its slave labor made the genuine bourgeois concept of libertyimpossible in the island.1 The contradiction between trying to achieve

bourgeois status and clinging to the slave system would not allow him to expressfully a desire for the freedom commensurate with his role as founder of a newnation. Only a half-nation, blocked and stymied, could come from such agroup of still-born men, as Jos? Mart? would say: men tied to an economicdependence and to an ideology ravaged by the cancer of slavery.

Pushing aside the black and the mulatto, the native-born whites, with asense of moral superiority, promoted the false myth of a unified nation, failedand went under. The white got credit for everything, even for achieving aneconomy kept afloat by slave labor. Even the abolition of slavery wassupposedly a triumph of the slave masters, when in point of fact "abolitionbecame a reality when the revolutionary action of the people imposed it; itdidn't come out of the overheated heads of the white landowners," as the

Cuban economist Ra?l Cepero Bonilla so well put it.2With their consciences torn asunder by a flagrant contradiction, theslaveowners tried to raise to the level of a nation what was only

a one-crop,slaveowners 'regime. A slaveowner's morality and later a colonial one reignedfor over five centuries inour island. And what sort of nation could they hope tocreate? The very nation we had until Fidel Castro landed on the Cuban shoreand opened up the second stage of our country's history. With the War of


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Independence, blacks, whites, Chinese, and everyone else had come togetherin a momentary embrace, to announce what only later, with the resoundingtriumph of the Socialist revolution, would become the true Cuban nation, freedfrom racial prejudice and on the road toward the elimination of the classstruggle. The white man, devoid of true cultural roots, and the black man, yetto be born, would with their union make a reality ofMart? 'sdream that Cubanmeant more than black and more than white.

The white man, son o? conquistadores, heir to a mystic, RenaissanceSpain already indecline, and inmost cases a gambler fleeing from the law or apriest under sanction for his doubtful faith and even more doubtful morals,came impelled by greed. But the black was captured and enslaved, masteredrather than domesticated, as Franz Fan?n puts it; he brought his own closeknit culture, cosmic beliefs rooted in saving myths, that gave him a securitydenied to the white, attached first of all to gold and later to the sugar-producing

machinery. These two currents, each with its own peculiar cultural projection,formed, in a traumatic synthesis, what was Cuban. The white didn't come tosettle, but to get rich, while the black, under the whip of the vilest subjugation,longed for his lost country and sought to find in the new one material andspiritual substitutes for it.

The white dominated technical know-how and the economy. He wasmaster of everything. The black, on the other hand, taking refuge in his mythsand his gods, dominated religion. But he produced goods with his hands andhis blood: " Sugar ismade out of blood. "And since he produced material andspiritual goods, he was producing culture, a culture that was the synthesis andcollective expression of a class: the class of the exploited. In the world of theblack, we find general laws and a philosophy. The world of the white offersnothing but contradiction and an obsession with everything non-Cuban, firstwith the European mecca, and later with the capitalist one.Both were dependent worlds, colonized world-views. The world of theblack went back and forth between the barracks and the bush. It was anintimate working life, a shared ritual life. The black was just another pawn. He

didn't count in the class or status systems. The white, however, wanted tobecome a technologist, hoped to take possession of the machine. His ambitionwas to be the ruling bourgeois, but the frustration of this ambition left himalienated. The white, then, knuckled under, became fragile, dependent,remained subjugated to an economy that absorbed and dominated him. Helived a life adrift, without any goals, degraded by economic forces that blockedhis ambition and that he could not grasp. He was an unfinished product, a

mask, a contradiction. The black, with his ritualistic beliefs, reduced to a cogin amechanism alien to him, dug down into his world of values, harked back toAfrica during his daily chores in the field, or found an escape in themountainsthat were familar terrain to him and where he found resonance of his far-offland. The same ancestral divinities lived in the Cuban bush as in the African


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jungles. At least, the black found them there. By a prodigious feat of alchemy,the mountains of Cuba transformed their native soil into that of the Africanroots. The mountains were the refuge of the black African inCuba, his heaven,his headquarters, his temple, his Nirvana.

The African's contribution to Cuban culture, which has its beginnings inthe sugar plantation, contained a strong dose of rebellion against theoppressive environment. The culture that the African constructed inCuba wasan entirely defensive one. That iswhy itwas so long-lived and well-integrated,despite the variations and diverse shadings ethnographers have discovered.Even today this ferment underlies the music, dance and poetry. The culturalactivity of the African is revolutionary by nature; it is a method of inwardliberation and a way of seeking security. Prayer, revelations, spells, dance

rituals, all are directed toward finding salvation.The runaway slave who escaped to the mountains was looking for his

native land. Palenques were created (that is to say, maroon strongholds orsocieties) inwhich village lifewas re-created. With stones and the branches ofthe guayac?n, they built impregnable fortresses, all their labor motivated bythe need to be free. The chains of slavery condemned the legs of the slaves,bound their arms, but could not stifle their spirit. Anselmo Su?rez y Romerodeserves credit for being the man of his time most sharply aware of the poeticriches hidden in the folk songs of blacks and peasants, the latent treasure in theCuban folk tradition of dances and legends, of songs of the earth and ofrhythms transplanted from Africa:

The drum, for those of the Black race and the whites who grew up withit, sends them outside themselves, steals away their souls. Hearing it,they feel themselves to be in heaven. But there are drumsongs thatnever vary because they were composed

over inAfrica and came overwith the Blacks. What is extraordinary is that they never forget thesesongs. They arrive here as children, years and years go by, they

grow old and later, when all they are good for is to be watchmen, theystill play these songs to themselves, in a hut full of ashes, keepingwarm by a fire. They remember their homeland even when theyalready have a foot in the grave.3

Juan Marinello was right when he pointed out how deeply rooted the black manwas in the Cuban soil; here he found a refuge that made him the equivalent ofan indigenous native American.


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From the start, the black, because he was a slave and a cog in themachine,had to identify with the telluric forces of nature on the island. In so identifying,he grew strong, he set down roots, even when the African patterns were thedominant ones in his new cultural mix. The black's efforts to become part ofthe island were creative in every sense. As he sought new elements to replacethe old, driven by an evolutionary force, he was creating, comparing,associating, using his powers of invention. So he substituted antelope pelts forgoatskin, adored the ceiba and palm trees instead of the baobab, instead of thecola nut used the fruits of the palm trees or corn kernels, and replacedje/a?the

magic powder of elephant tusks?with powdered yucca or ?ame.Faced with the flimsy Christianization campaigns on the plantationsduring the nineteenth century, faced with the imposition of gods unknown tohim, the black man responded by working out his own models; he substituted,establishing exact or approximate equivalences, worked with parallel concepts, related matching features, associated colors and symbols. He wasaffected byWestern culture, was permeated with it, had to speak its language,adopt the crucifix, learn by rote a new set of behavioral norms, but heheroically preserved his concepts of family, his cuisine, his songs and dances:his culture.

Where the white responds with reason or force, the black responds withthemagic he reasons with in emergencies. C .L.R. James tells how a slave wasloaded down with potatoes he'd stolen from a field when the overseer spottedhim. The overseer demanded an explanation and the black replied that hewasn't carrying potatoes, that they were stones the devil had loaded him downwith as punishment. The overseer grabbed him by the shirt and the potatoesrolled out all over the ground. His answer is language at its purest, mostdefensive and most naive. The plantation bell calling him to the implacablechores of the day had much greater significance than the bell on the chapel; thework-bell was resonant and cruel, the worship-bell dull and hollow.

Much as the slavemasters might try to justify slavery with their religiousdoctrines, passing off the plantation as some sort of temple of salvation (asMoreno Fraginals would say), their attempt was a failure. The missionarieswere not convincing and those they catechized were not true believers. Theculture that emerged in the world of the sugarmill was a defense against theabsurd, incongruous penetration of a Christianity the black man could notassimilate because itwas deeply alien to his unique character. The church, notthe slave, gave in. In fact, the slave grew even closer to his blood-brothers andto that community that had sprung up on the slave ships ;that " shipmate bond"Orlando Patterson spoke of acquired a new and productive vigor.Out of this unity and the results of its subsequent transculturation with the

world of the salaried white and of the peasant, came the traditional popularculture of our country. First the barracks, the cabildo (societies for slaves andtheir offsprings), the plantation and later that cellular unit, the solar,


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functioned as social curators of the most valuable part of the African heritageand its interaction with the psychology of the middle-class white and thesimple worker.

Sugar-cane, the plantation system, stimulated the flow of our culture andchanneled the most popular currents into a definitive national stream. Sugar,in short, made us what we are. It was the origin of our entire being, the homethat formed our personality. We think in terms of sugar and thus are a productof it. Sugar swallowed up everything; it swallowed up coffee, it swallowed uptobacco, it swallowed up the woods and finally it tried to swallow up the Cubanhimself.From this devastating economic and physiological process the only onesto emerge intact were those who did not depend on its power. Whoever wasfully aware of his exploited condition survived; the revolutionary whoovercame his alienation and opposed despotism survived. In the nineteenthcentury, the slave survived because of his own independent world. His outlookwas deeply permeated by cosmic beliefs that allowed him to hold onto hisindividuality, a rudimentary mechanism whose first great breakthrough inawareness was escape into the mountains and whose fullest expression was thearmed mambi who fought in the War for Independence.

This, the epic of our nation, becomes the substance of all poetic creation,of every social and political event. The Cuban, while remaining himself, canbecome a new person, can transform his image. And this is an absolutecharacteristic inherited from our historical past. The image of the Cuban isinconceivable without the joint effects of these originating factors, of these firststeps.

Symbol of this epic, the machete is the indispensable attribute of therunaway slave and typical weapon of the mambi, inherited from the sugarplantation. Symbol of freedom, it is the instrument of national defense. "All Ineed is a machete," repeated Esteban Montejo, protagonist of my

Autobiography of a Runaway Slave and hero of a hundred years ofstruggle. The machete is a cry, the cry that comes forth from the economy ofsugar to liberate the country from its colonial yoke, and it is taken up by anentire people acting as one.The effects of slavery traumatized the Cuban people, leaving a deep gashinwhose depths is founded our desire for freedom. That iswhy we have boldlyassumed the task of revealing the human condition through Socialist revolution. Religion and poetry, individual experience and social experience, all hadtheir origin in the sugar-growing environment. What product of traditionalculture did not have its origin there? The best of our music and dances-didn'tthey dance the mani, the yuca, the garabato, the matuca, the dances of

Ocha, the caringa and the zapateo on the sugar plantations? The best of ourrumba music?Columbia and y ambit?didn't it grow out of the mostbooming sugar-growing area, the broad plain of Col?n? Our fables and


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legends with their anthropomorphosis of Cuba's fauna, ouryoruba tales, theonly body of myth we truly can claim as our own, the finest oral literature of thecanecutter?isn't it all full of references to the sugar world, to the cutter'shabitat? The danz?n and the son -don't they come from sugar-rich areas,where the plantation system was the lifeblood of the economy? The mostfamous guarachas sung in our popular teatro bufo?don't they make someallusion to life on the sugar plantation, the master, the overseer, thesupervisor, the slave? Didn't the Cuban press begin as a vehicle forcommercial sugar trading? It is the same with our novels, our popular

musicals, our poetry. How well Cintio Vitier put itwhen he said that the poem"La Zafra" ("The Sugar Harvest") carries the entire weight of the tragedy ofthe Cuban people, and didn't Nicol?s Guillen express the entire drama of theso-called "republican" era in Cuban history in his "Elegy for Jes?s

Men?ndez?" Even ?lite cultural forms make constant direct allusions tothe world of the sugar farm. As the oil industry is toVenzuela and the banana to

Costa Rica, so sugar cane is to Cuba: the axis of our culture.Our whole lexicon is rife with terms that plainly denote this influence,from the multiple connotation attached to the words for cane, sugar and

sugar harvest, to the lingua franca spoken by the bozal?n, a sort ofAfro- Spanish mixture that had a notable influence on the colloquial Spanish ofthe entire land. The saved-up bits of African language jealously hoarded in thenotebooks of the priests of the various cults stimulated the survival oflanguages and dialects originating on the African continent. Many of thesenotebooks were old account-ledgers from the plantations or school or officenotebooks. This language, rich in organic philological life, is being studied inour country by linguists and grammarians. Because it is no capriciouslanguage, dreamed up by some magician, but a serious historical product, weneed to interpret and analyze it. In its forms, in its content, lies the foundation

of all our being. That language, which still lives on in everyday speech, hasplayed a part in the psychological process of identification with the sugarworld. Our oldest stories, our myths, our fables are, more than isolated ormulticultural items, the expression of our common destiny rooted in the onecrop system.

Christopher Columbus, referring to Cuba, called it "Island of sweetestbreezes" and when he spoke of the Indians who lived there, "of sweetestspeech." With this description, an appeal to the senses, he seems to haveforetold what would later be the essence of our economy and our life. Amongthe things Admiral Columbus never caught on towas his own gift for prophecy.Indeed, sugar took over. But it came to corrupt us. It made us terriblydependent on a colonized economy. The sugar quota hung over our heads likeDamocles ' sword. "Without sugar, there isno country "was the desperate cryof the Cuban bourgeoisie. With the triumph of the Socialist revolution and theradical elimination of the class conflict, that cry, along with the menacing


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sword, disappeared. Sugar continues to be our principal industry. But now itbelongs entirely to us. We are the owners of the sugar plantations, of the landthat produces the sugar cane. Sugar exporting is no longer monopolized by anycountry. We are free and sovereign. Traumatic dependence has beenabolished from our consciousness. On January 1,1959, we were redeemed asa nation and as a people. The entire culture that grew out of sugar, our populartraditional culture, as well as expressive forms arising from the associatedeconomic systems, were embraced together by our people in a natural andspontaneous movement.

When class distinctions cease to exist, when all vestige of stratification isabolished, popular traditional culture is one and indivisible. For the first timeinour country the people are achieving a national identity and showing off withpride the product that as a historical result was created in the canefields duringslavery and the pseudo-republican r?gime. Without discrimination, withoutthe burden of the class conflict, with one voice, in a unified expression whereall the elements that make up the Cuban converge, we are. It is possible we donot yet know very well who we are. I don't believe that is all that important.

What is important, because it transcends all doubts, is that what we arebelongs to us. What is ours, for the first time, is truly ours. We were nature andnow we are history. The history of a nation developing toward the perfectsociety, asMarx meant it to be, without class conflict. Sugar unified us only toenslave us and now it brings us together again in liberation.Those who came in shackles from their original lands, those who werealienated by an economy dependent on foreign powers, contributed to ourbreaking the yoke of cultural and political slavery. This is an almostunbelievable paradox. We were saved from being the product of a decadent,semifeudal regime and from being dependent on a semi-colonial one. Weceased being Spaniards to become Cubans. And when our "Cubanness" wason the verge of being lost, we saved it.We ceased being pure white to becomeCubans, which ismore than white and more than black: "Everything mixedtogether," as Nicol?s Guillen said, in the bubbling cauldrons of thesugarmill.

Translated by Naomi Lindstrom, University of Texas, AustinNOTES

1 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill. The Socioeconomic Complex ofSugar in Cuba 1760-1860, tr. Cedric Belfrage (New York: The Monthly Review Press,

1976), p. 60 (The first edition of the original is from 1964, Ed.)2 Ra?l Cepero Bonilla, Az?car y abolici?n (apuntes para una historia criticadel abolicionismo) (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1977 [ 1st ed. 1948]), p.?212.3 Art?culos de costumbres (Havana: Editorial Nacional, 1963), p. 242.

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