Vindication of Don Martín Morúa Delgado

The figure of Martín Morúa Delgado has been mistreated for a long time, like a traitor to the cause of blacks; and because that Cuban blacks have been deprived of their own reference to the construction of national identity and its political structure. The basis of this rejection is the Morúa amendment, which prohibited political parties on the basis of race, causing the revolt of Evaristo Estenoz; a confrontation that would end in the War of 1912, as the moment when blacks lost the preeminence gained during the wars of independence.

Morúa would be the first black link to the Cuban political structure, and its elimination is the fate of his race; because it is at that moment that blacks are left out of that structure, to which they can then only be subordinated. Before him figures like the Maceos and Quintín Banderas had contributed to the base of the national culture; not to the political structure of a country not yet constituted, but only to that transcendent base of its own.

Even that ancestor of Banderas and Maceos is controversial, and not only because of the excessive violence of the first one; probably more serious, due to the systematic contradiction of the second (Antonio) with the figure of Jose Martí. The establishment of the republic was thus doubly difficult, adding to this precedent that of the North American protectorate; and that difficulty could have been overcome by Morúa Delgado, through the fine rope of political tensions, upon reaching the presidency of the senate.

His nemesis Estenoz, had like Morua the North American segregationist experience, but he had reached other conclusions; That is the normal in the political arena, where individuals represent other interests embedded in their own. Estenoz came from the modernist idealism on which patriotic discourses are based, Delgado from political pragmatism; It is seen in their respective careers, that in the case of Morúa expanded from journalism to literature.

This means that Morúa had access to that special reflective capacity of aesthetics, which is not ideological; because it works like virtual realism, in contrast to the idealism of the great political speeches, like Estenoz's; and like Marti, Estenoz fails to see the big problem of a foundation like a nationality, which is not a poem but a harsh reality. Both are men of their time and contributed the strength with which nationality would be built in the confrontation; Estenoz's problem is that he tries to reproduce the North American segregationist diagram, in a culture that was integrational.

Thus, the discourse of blackness is based on the denial of the patriarch, with the adoration of the hero; but in a speech written by the same liberal structure that resorts to moral sublimation, which is not aesthetic. The moral inflammation that informs Estenoz is counterproductive, no matter if legitimate, because it lacks the strength it needs; which is not that of moral legitimacy but that of political ascendancy, because the problem was political and not cultural, it’s not an idea but a reality.

Since then, the problem is no longer political but cultural, thus becoming intrinsic to the Cuban as part of it; when the same existential reflection of Morúa gave it course, as he showed in his literature as a virtual realism. It is not a matter of shift the weight from one foot to the other, and blaming Estenoz for the contradiction of time; but it does replace the perspective, escaping the binary reductions that distort all history from that French modernity of Franz Fanon and his sublime idealism.

That explains the fervor for Walterio Carbonell, who comes precisely from the revolutionary school; but also that academic and intellectual texture of the treatment of the racial problem, which distances it from popular reality. This is undoubtedly what contributes most to the tensions, in a structure already politically biased to racial subordination; in which the most primary feelings of all trends will prevail, in a general environment of political manipulations.

Poetic sublimation is not reflective but rather discursive, hence its instrumentality for emotional manipulations; that is why it is a luxury that can be spent by economic elites, such as the big cats of the jungle, not for the bottom of the food chain. With Morúa we can explore more effective approaches, capable of understanding reality in its pragmatism; and with it find the place we have under the Caribbean sun, as the meeting point where the West opens its belly to all transcendence.