For My Teacher, Walterio Carbonell

This essay is dedicated to Walterio Carbonell (1920-2008), the controversial Afro-Cuban Marxist thinker, on the 50th year of the publication of his masterpiece Como Surgió la Cultura Nacional (“On The Emergence of National Culture”). It was published in a 1961, a year marked by the official declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution, the victory of Playa Girón (the “Bay of Pigs”), and the launching of a massive literacy campaign. Carbonnell’s text confronts the traditional version of Cuban history, which assigns the leading role of the gestation of Cuban nationality to an enlightened aristocracy of White Creoles of Spanish origin. According to this version, such intellectual groups generated an ideology of independence that led to the beginning of the anti-colonial wars against Spain in 1868. Today, this explanation, with slight modifications, continues to be the most widespread in Cuba.