Water in a basket (a blog under construction)

Raw sugar, refined lies

By Dalia Céspedes

‘Órbita,’ by Manuel Moreno Fraginals. Unión Publishers, Havana, 2009. 477 pgs.

HAVANA – The history we experience daily, the true history, is never boring. Rather, “those who are definitely bored are us, the historians,” said José Luciano Franco in a famous retort to a journalist quoted by Manuel Moreno Fraginals in his no-less-famous essay “History as a Weapon,” written in 1966.

If Fraginals’ objective as a historian had been limited to not boring readers, he surely achieved it, as we can glean from this anthology. Despite its overwhelming informative volume and numerous technicalities, the book is almost subjugating in the way it mixes events and figures with a provocative vision of those events and figures.

Seen as an attempt at a thesis, this heterogeneous collection of essays seems to point to a definition of the Caribbean starting from its past, as well as a capitalist experiment in plantation economies. Did I say past?

Fraginals decidedly leans to the formation of a history of the present, inevitably built on data from primal stages, in that process that some historians have defined, in shrewd and scary irony, as “the development of underdevelopment.” As we read, we feel that tension between the historical consideration of Cuba as an “atypical colony” and an anthropological view that goes beyond the 19th Century.

His vision of culture appears flexible and unencumbered by the traditional typecastings. To him, 17th-Century books on sailing, such as Lázaro de Flores’ “The Art of Navigation” were more substantial for culture than “all the sonnets being composed in Cuba or Mexico.” And he leans toward an evaluation of art, literature and poetry that are independent of the traditional preserves and reinterpret those manifestations in terms of real life, not only in terms of purely intellectual constructions (read mega-texts. Or, speaking colloquially, mega-bricks.)

Fraginals’ essays hope to investigate the trail of the codices of domination and their submissive counterparts, as well as those interactions that frequently lead to the acculturation of the dominated party. The differences in class, economic inequalities, as well as disparities in ethical or esthetic standards, are frequently disguised by the dominators as “natural.” The same dominators who, according to Fraginals, once at the summit of their historical power, become violently conservative.

The Cuban historian, effusively celebrated for his classic, “The Mill,” sharply analyzes the contradictions of the extensive exploitation of labor that he dramatically describes in a 1970 essay as “the great slave concentrations (the result of market imperatives) whose output per capita decreased in direct proportion to the increase in crews,” explaining that these major concentrations of workers laboring for excessive periods of time are “a typical phenomenon of the moments of great transformations” in which the inconsistent application of technological advances in a tense socio-economic atmosphere highlights “the general inefficiency in production.”

Seldom is history so thrilling as when, involuntarily or not, it casts light on the events of our very own era.

While we read this bitter story about sugar, we cannot help but feel that our past is not so remote and our future not so unfathomable. There is a clear pattern in this centuries-old effort to create peremptory solutions that, in Fraginals’ words, are not solutions “to emerge from the crisis but a recourse to survive within it.”

It is a pattern that, according to the information so neatly gathered in is book, could be summarized thus:

a. A pillaging system of agriculture.

b. Economic, political and social relations dominated by a metropolis (domestic or foreign) in practices of submission-alliance.

c. The annihilation of the so-called “original world” as a practice of eternal return. Over and again, in the mimetic process guaranteed by the Market and its instrument, politics, the “original world” of the present is “improved” in a brutal manner.

d. “Mental colonization,” a unique factor that covers (if not generates) the previous items. Civilization, understood not as progress or improvement of the human condition but only as the imposition of the city (civitas) as the center of our mental universe, has brought to the Caribbean landscape a spirit of fragmentation and indwelling, turning the American Mediterranean into a variation of the mare clausum in Spanish legal theory in the 16th Century. The original world described by travelers (not exactly innocent) as a paradise of nature becomes a tourism and semi-industrial chain inside walled cities.

It is useful to reprise the distinctions that historians in past centuries applied to the island of Cuba as “continental” and “insular” (R. Inglis) or, crudely, “Cuba A and Cuba B” (Juan Pérez de la Riva.)

The Continental Cuba-A Havana-Varadero (why not Miami?), a circle of corrupt cities with service economies, more or less capitalistic, travels through contradictory eras in a continuity of masks, such as “the ante-mural of the Antilles,” “the lighthouse of the Americas,” “the key to the New World,” “an example to the Third World” and serves as a metropolis for an Insular Cuba-B that is painfully agricultural

An emigrant goes from Cuba-B to Cuba-A on his way to Europe and thence to Miami so he can become a tourist in his own homeland. To many, going to Miami is more crucial than going to the university. We can also go to the University of Havana as another step on the way to Miami.

To think of us as brown sugar that must be refined in continental mills; to think that the plantations failed, the slaves were freed and sugar can be used for more than causing tooth cavities is proof that mental colonialism is alive and well in the American Mediterranean.

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