Morúa’s Continuum

Martín Morúa Delgado’s vision for Cuba’s future and his concern for Afro Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits extends beyond the island to the Americas and is found not simply in his literary production but in his translation practice. Completed in the early 1880s in New York City, just as Morúa’s disenchantment with the politics of Cubans in exile began, his translation of James Redpath’s rendition (1863) of John R. Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti (1853), reflects Morúa’s belief that the written word had the power to wield a hemispheric influence and could serve to support political transformation in Cuba and by extension the Americas. Toussaint L’Ouverture and this translation were at the center of this vision, for Morúa would reference the Haitian liberator throughout his literary and journalistic career, thereby expounding his belief that a leader modeled on L’Ouverture would bring true political independence to Cuba, inaugurating social change across the hemisphere. It is through this figure and the translation that Morúa conceived an alternative vision for Cuba and for the Americas, one that did not involve the leadership of the US-compromised Americanized Cubans and Latin Americans he so feared. Countering such political thinkers as Wendell Phillips, Rafael Serra, and Juan Gualberto Gómez, his vision placed Afro Latina/os, Afro Latin Americans, and African Americans as the new foundation of a truly politically and socially free hemisphere, one redeemed of its racial prejudices and biases.