The new Caribbean is one of the three main areas that form what we call "our America". These areas have been called Indoamerica, Afroamerica and Euroamerica and correspond in our subcontinent to what the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro has called "pilot villages", "new peoples" and "transplanted peoples". What these peoples have in common is that they were first colonized and then neocolonized, and were linked, as exploited territory, to the world capitalist system. What they also have in common are a lot of characteristics of very different characters, and that is why they form a unit.
by Roberto Fernández Retamar
AT the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the first actions of the victorious revolutionaries of Saint Domingue, the French part of the island of Hispaniola, was to re-baptize their fledgling nation Haiti, the name by which it had been known by its original inhabitants.
More than a century and a half later, the victorious revolutionaries of Cuba (which had kept its original name) were to change the names of the suburbs round the capital, Havana. Country and Biltmore, the residential areas of those who had benefited from the social order that had been swept away, resumed their ancient names of Cubancan and Siboney.
This sanctioning of liberation struggles by the elimination of place-names of European origin (or, in the case of Cuba, of both European and North American origin) and the reinstatement of names connected with the true discoverers of the region has been a repeated practice in the Antilles. Yet, curiously enough, neither the inhabitants of Cuba nor those of Haiti had any ethnic links with those peoples whose words and names
they brandished to proclaim their determination to achieve complete independence. The landing of the Europeans in the Antilles misnamed "discovery" had heralded the arrival of what the Cuban José Martí, writing in 1877, described as a "devastating civilization, two words which a contradiction in terms and therefore, in themselves, an indictment of a historical process". And indeed, subjected as they were to forced labour, hunted down like wild animals, defending themselves in vain against vastly superior arms, driven to mass suicide or succumbing to contagious diseases previously unknown to them, the indigenous peoples (mistakenly called "Indians" by the Westerners) had been virtually annihilated within a few decades of the arrival of the Europeans. Yet they left behind them words (many of which have entered the European languages), the cultivation of a variety of plants, some artefacts, and habits such as smoking.
Neither the Haitians nor the Cubans could, then, have been intent merely on renewing a tradition that had been cut short
centuries earlier with the extermination of the peoples who had given birth to it and kept it alive. But the reintroduction of ancient words and names harks back to the old controversy about the "noble savage" which is inextricably bound up with all our part of America and especially with the Caribbean. It was sparked off by the sudden arrival in Europe, at a time when capitalist development was in its infancy, of news of a "New World".
The first peoples of this "New World" whom the Europeans came to know were the inhabitants of the Antilles. There is a reference to them in the letter, dated 15 February 1493, in which Christopher Columbus, writing from his ship off the Canary Islands, announced his "discovery" to Europe.
These peoples formed two main communities which had spread out into the Antilles from the northern part of South America the Arahuacos (Arawaks), who also included the Siboneyes (or Ciboneyes) and the Tainos, and the Caribs, who were eventually to give their name to the "Mediterranean of the Americas". The first of these peoples were of a peaceful disposition, whereas the second were warlike. They were to form the basis of the two main images of the peoples of America which fuelled the discussions of European thinkers for centuries.
The first stirrings of this controversy arose among the Spanish in the sixteenth century and centred on the conquest and rights of the misnamed "Indians". Among those who spoke out on behalf of the Indians were men like Bartolomé de Las Casas, the most dynamic and celebrated among them, Fran' cisco de Vitoria, and Antonio Montesino, who in a sermon delivered in 151 1 convinced Las Casas of the rightness of his cause. Among those who were against the Indians, and hence in favour of enslaving them, were men like Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo and Ginés de Sepúlveda. The fiercest polemic was that between Sepúlveda and Las Casas, the man whom Simón Bolívar called the "Apostle of the Americas", for his brave defence of our indigenous peoples.
The repercussions of the reports on these peoples of another world were not confined to Spain alone. As early as 1516, the Englishman Thomas More conjured up his vision of an ideal country, Utopia, whose resemblance to the island of Cuba was pointed out in 1963 by the Argentine writer Ezequiel Martinez Estrada. Moreover, in 1580, the French humanist Michel de Montaigne published his essay Des Cannibales, in which he wrote that "there is nothing barbaric or savage about those nations, from what has been said about them; what happens is that people brand as barbaric everything alien to their own customs".
This assessment, with variations, was kept alive as a sort of working hypothesis by what we would now call the left wing of the Western bourgeoisie in its revolutionary advance and appears to have reached its culmination in 1754, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote for the Academy of Dijon an essay answering the questions: What is the origin of the inequality between men? Is it sanctioned by natural law?
Rousseau has been saddled with the reputation of having lapsed into inane and ingenuous thinking about the purported excellence of the "noble savage". Yet when we read what he wrote, he cannot be taxed with having held such ideas. Perhaps more than anybody else, he stressed the hypothetical nature of such a creature. In his view, "it is not a simple matter to distinguish what is original from what is artificial in the existing nature of man or to be perfectly acquainted with a state that does not exist, has perhaps not existed, andprobably never will..." (author's italics).
There can be no doubt, however, that in developing his hypothesis, Rousseau often had in mind the American peoples encountered by the Europeans, especially the inhabitants of the Caribbean, although this is very revealing he would also make reference to the Black African. The examples he adduced for his "noble savage" are sometimes "black" and sometimes (or at the same time) the "Caribs of Venezuela", the "Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope" and, on yet other occasions, the "savages of America", the latter being the most frequently cited. He was to refer repeatedly to these peoples, and especially to the Caribs who, in his view, were "of existing peoples, those who are least remote from their natural state".
Rousseau's thesis is well known: "those who were responsible for civilizing man... were responsible for losing humankind". His work is a condemnation of what, until then, had been regarded as civilization and the heralding of a fresh start which would preserve the goodness of the natural man in a new stage of development. The course of history being what it was, this new start was to be nothing other than the great bourgeois revolution of 1789.
The Europeans' rather hazy perception of the peoples they encountered on their arrival in the Caribbean was to be used from More (in whose Utopia slavery still exists) right through to Rousseau to defend the notion of the original goodness of the human being, which had been corrupted by society as Europeans knew it, and to form the theoretical basis of a new society. At the same time another very different view of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean was evolving, at first in parallel with the Rousseauist view, but then diverging from it and transcending the context of the Caribbean and even the Americas as a whole. This view, like the first, originated with Columbus who, when translating into a European language what he heard the indigenous people say in a language (Taino) he did not know, mentioned the existence of Caribs, whom he also called Cambas "the people of the Great Can" (The Great Khan it should not be forgotten that, on his first voyage, Columbus thought that he had arrived in Asia) and cannibals, very fierce peoples who were said to eat human flesh.
Whereas the other inhabitant of the Antilles was the conjectural "noble savage", this one was the no less conjectural "ignoble savage", regarding whom the most determined opponent of Las Casas, Ginés de Sepúlveda, resuscitating Artistotle's thesis of the natural-born slave, wrote: "The Spanish are perfectly right to exercise their dominion over these barbarians... who are so inferior to the Spanish in moderation, intelligence and all manner of virtue and human sentiments that they are as children to adults, women to men, the cruel and inhumane to the exceedingly meek, the exaggeratedly intemperate to the continent and
moderate, in short, I was about to say as monkeys to men".
This "ignoble savage" was to be given a literary incarnation as Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Shakespeare's Caliban/Carib/cannibal is a misshapen monster imitating man, a creature whom the European enchanter. Prospero, has robbed of his island home and has taught to speak his (Prospero's) language and who owes his survival to the fact that his labours are essential to his master. Perhaps never before or since has a major literary work shown the frightening reality of colonialism in so clear a light.
The cannibal/Caliban is the hypothetical creation of the right wing of the nascent Western bourgeoisie which spread its exploiting Prósperos and exploited Calibans all over the earth. And here it must be recalled that while the basis for Rousseau's hypothesis of the "noble savage" was sought in the examples of the aborigines of the Antilles and Black Africans, the substantive cannibal, in the sense of a bestial man-eater, was to be applied not only to the Caribs whatever the etymology is worth but above all to the caricatures of Africans with which people throughout the world became familiar through the seemingly innocuous Tarzan films.
It was the sad destiny of the first inhabitants of our region to have inspired admirably evocative verses and celebrated works of art for the burgeoning European bourgeoisie and yet to have failed to survive the brutal impact of its "devastating civilization". Since they had been decimated and since fresh Calibans were needed as labour, millions of Africans were uprooted from their great continent and were set down as slaves in our region, and not a few Asians subsequently suffered the same fate. The Caribbean peoples of today were bom of the still-continuing mix of the descendants of European oppressors and African and Asian oppressed. Only in this harsh light is it possible to understand why the first country of the Antilles to gain its independence and the first to introduce a new social order have both reclaimed their pre-Western heritage, the painful heritage of the exterminated Caliban who discovered and enriched the places where we now live.
However, that heritage alone cannot account for the cultural identity of the Caribbean following the arrival of the Europeans. The new Caribbean is one of the three main areas forming what we call "our America". These areas have been termed IndoAmerica, Afro-America and Euro-America and correspond on our sub-continent to what the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro has called pilot peoples, new peoples and transplanted peoples.
What these peoples have in common is that they were first colonized and then neocolonized, and were yoked, as exploited territory, to the world capitalist system. What they also have in common are a large number of features of widely differing character, and this is why they form a unit.
But that unit does not imply uniformity or monotony, nor does it absolve us from singling out the characteristic specific to each
area. Our area, which is sometimes called AfroAmerica, is that situated around the Caribbean forming the society based on the plantation system, whose rich human inputs of African origin have had a decisive impact on our culture and on our lives and were later supplemented by a variety of Asian contributions.
The history of the immediate past of the modern Caribbean is therefore the history of the sea which, at the dawn of capitalism, witnessed the arrival of the European conquerors and saw them engage in quarrelling and pillage. It was this sea that saw the emergence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of our first victorious revolution, the formidable Haitian Revolution which (before Spain and Russia) succeeded in defeating Napoleon's troops, abolished slavery and paved the way for the independence of Latin America. At the end of the century, that same sea was to witness the first tangible movement, organized by Marti, to stem modern imperialism, then in its infancy, and, in this century, the triumph of the Cuban revolution.
Our cultural identity must perforce refer back to that turbulent historical environment. It does this with a growing awareness of how much we have in common, in spite of having been (and in some cases still being) subordinated to different metropolitan powers and consequently speaking different languages. We have experienced colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, under-development and racism; feudal estates, plantations ar.d one-crop economies; slavery, Atlantic crossings and the slave trade; landowners, overseers, slaves and maroons; sugar cane, coffee and bananas; the sugar mill, the plantation house and the humble cabin.
Although the fruits of syncretism are not always the same, they are at times very similar to each other, as in the case of Haitian voodoo, Jamaican pocomania and Cuban santería. And nothing, perhaps, demonstrates more clearly our shared identity than our wond-renowned music. That "riotous innovation out of the Indies", as Alejo Carpentier has fittingly put it, could be heard from the very first years of the Conquest and continues to live on today in guarachas, rumbas, congas, sones, boleros, mambos, cha-cha-chas, calypsos, reggae, merengues, tamboritos, sambas, bossa novas and salsas. Nor should we forget that the slave culture of the plantations which developed over the centuries also embraced the south of what is today the United States, where the meeting of Africa and Europe gave birth to negro spirituals, the blues and the powerful jazz that are the first cousins of our own music.
We have, however, yet to assume our full identity and we shall not do so until the last traces of colonialism and neo-colonialism have disappeared from the region. Only then shall we be in a position to assert, through the multiple roots that have contributed to making us a world people, our role as an essential meeting-place in the history of mankind, a history in the making of which we shall no longer be passive onlookers but active protagonists. That process is already under way.
