of forgotten tradition. Their memories inaugurate
the time signposted by the poets.
Mysterious horses and lions in the house
of Orisha,
twelve invisible flashes that change the mark
of months.
The twelve. The twelve invisible lightning flashes are Shango’s, and in the poem ‘Epiphanía’ the thunder that changes the age is Shango’s too:
Revolución,
naces y veo la edad cambiada, el trueno
furia y sangre y unas aguas de miedo,
arrasadoras, pasan.
En el futuro halla el hombre su límite.
Revolution,
you are born and I see the age changed, the thunder
fury and blood and waters of terror,
devastating, they pass.
In the future man finds his limit.
An epiphany of Shango, but not here the protector of Stalin. That the revolution is still keeping el hombre within certain limits, and la mujer within others, is no fault of Shango’s, who can pass from one into the other and back again.
‘Para crear es necesario conocer.’ This is even more apparent in the work of the theatre in Havana. The Teatro Nacional as early as 1960 presented under the direction of Argeliers León, who is director of the institute where Barnet and Martínez Furé studied, four successful programmes of Afro-Cuban (Afro-Spanish) ceremonies: Abakuá, with the rites, legends, drumming, songs and dances of the secret cult of Calabar Efik origin; Bembe, of Yoruba origin, including as finale the magnificent chant to Shango; and Yimbula, rites and music of Bantu origin. In his programme notes to the presentation of Abakuá, Argeliers León speaks of the timid and irregular process of mestizaje in Cuba, but adds that now in 1960 the door to ultimate integration had been opened by the triumph of the revolution. The National Theatre, pursuing the policy of research and creation, also sponsored the folklore monthly in 1961, Actas del Folklore del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, which published both new essays on Cuban folklore, mostly of African origin, and reprints of inaccessible articles, like those of Romulo Lachatañere on the religious beliefs of the Cuban Yoruba. This work and the presentations in the theatre were content with simply reporting on the rituals or with displaying them with only the minimum of direction. In the Teatro Nacional de Guiñol, an inspired group of puppet and mask players for adults and children, the legends of the Yoruba have found a true dramatic representation. This work has been encouraged and fostered by the directors Pepe and Carucha Camejo and the dramaturg Pepe Carril. Since the theatre’s inauguration in 1963, it has presented Chichereku (1966), based on some of the Afro-Cuban stories collected by Lydia Cabrera, who is now, to everyone’s regret, living in Miami, and in the following year La Loma de Mambiala, adapted by Sylvia Barros from the same rich source material. In 1966, Pepe Carril wrote Shangó de Ima, subtitled ‘a Yoruba mystery’, which is a chronicle of the life and loves of Shango. One spectator compared Shango to a black Don Juan, and since Ulises Garcia (Shango) was the only unmasked actor in the play, it was inevitable that the main review of the play by the poetess Belkis Cuza Malé should be titled ‘Shangó Hombre’. She praised the play as a true ‘work of our people and the revolution’, and one which confirmed the search for what was truly Cuban through the medium of the negro, rather than a search for the negro himself. No négritude, that is.
But at the same time the Teatro Mella was mounting a production of Aimé Césaire’s play Une Saison au Congo. The free programme was admirably educative, in a way that the theatre programmes of socialist countries tend to be and ours don’t. There were essays on Césaire and Lumumba, by René Dépestre, the Haitian poet now living in Cuba, and by Sartre; the hair-raising betrayal of Lumumba was set out in ruthless detail, and the characters of the international intrigue carefully annotated. But on the stage all the characters shouted at the top of their voices the whole time, so that the only serious thing in the end could have been said in a whisper. The costumes were ‘African’, garish, carnival, and the faces of the Congolese were painted in bright hues. Lumumba did sexual athletics as he delivered his principal orations. One could almost hear that old Afro-Cuban rhythm coming in … rumba Lumumba, rumba, the jungle jangle of the congo bongo. It was embarrassing to learn that the producer Roberto Blanco had spent a year in Ghana. It was all, except for Césaire’s indictment of the Congo episode, an Africa of the mind, in the head. Actors and producers of other theatres tended to shrug and say there was ‘demasiado movimiento, movimiento gratuito’, ‘too much movement, gratuitous movement’. The one visual thing that saved the spectacle were the back projections painted on glass by the Cuban negro artist Manuel Mendive, and a remark I heard in the stalls:
Che was in the Congo, you know. That was quite a surprise when his book came out. But they say he couldn’t get on with the blacks.
The spectacle I really wanted to see, though, was that of Shango possessing, ‘mounting’ his worshipper, as Apollo used to ‘mount’ the Sybil at Cumae. Yes, it still goes on, everybody assured me, all over the place, but a curious unhelpfulness entered into our relations. Granted that in an island where rationing is absolutely total, what food there is, what clothes there are, paper, toys, pencils, a whole goat or a sheep as a sacrifice for Shango might seem a huge extravagance, even for a god, even for a god who had seen service in the Sierra Maestra. But under Cuban socialism even the gods are equal.
Everyone believes here in Cuba. Look, see that guy there with sort of sacking pants. He’s wearing them for Baba-lu-aye, that’s San Lazaro. And that woman we saw; she had a red and white necklace, those red and white beads. She’s a daughter of Shango. Those are his colours, red and white. Blood and bandages. You’ll see necklaces like that on even very high up people in the revolution. Or a little thing of beads round the ankle. Cubans can’t live without it, Santeria, black and white. Our socialism is now a third ingredient in the mestizaje of beliefs. You wait, in ten, twenty years Che will be an orisha, if he’s not already in Oriente Province. Already, well, you know, he was a doctor, a healer. He tended not only the wounded guerrillas, but the hurt Batista pigs as well. There were twelve when they came down from the mountains, twelve barbudos. Che was a great man, an important man … a minister. Maybe he was tempted … but he died a lowly death in the jungle. They hung his body from a helicopter. That was a mistake. You know, the Ascension and all that, Che will be an orisha. They’ll be calling him Jesus. The drums will bring El Che back. They might call him Shango or one of those. Or Jesus. Ten or twenty years. You must think our revolution is very primitive. Notice when you go into any office of the UJC, almost any, you’ll find almost always the table pushed against a wall, and up there above the table, three photos, Fidel, Che, Camilo. There you are already, your altar. Do you think we are very primitive? It’s usual socialist practice to name streets, factories, etc., after heroes of the revolution. When they do that here, Frank Pais, say, they believe that guy’s right there getting on with the work. Really there. It helps the revolution no end.
On 13 August 1969, Commandante René Vallejo Ortiz died. He had been chief medical officer to the army, a hero of the Sierra Maestra, and Fidel’s right-hand man. It had been generally known that he was dying for some weeks before, as a consequence of a cerebral haemorrhage. Some weeks before he died a huge totem pole appeared implanted in the pavement of 23rd Street, ‘La Rampa’, outside a cinema. I thought it was some sort of exotic restaurant sign, like the one for the Carabali (Calabar) almost opposite. But it had been erected, everyone whispered, to preserve the spirit of the Commandante, but by whom no one would say.
He was born in Manzanillo in Oriente, noted for its spiritualism and its communication with the dead. Outside Manzanillo itself there’s a house where 12 santeros live, black and white, who join hands and sing songs in a language none of them knows or understands. But probably African. Commandante Vallejo used to visit them every week. Everyone believes in Cuba, even Fidel. Well, he’s not a true believer bu
t he listens … listened to everything Vallejo told him that the orishas communicated. But Vallejo really believes, believed. He was a famous surgeon, a lung specialist, but some days, you know, he just wouldn’t operate if the spirits said that it wasn’t a good day for it. It was he, well, Vallejo and the orishas who told Fidel to move the army from Oriente to nearer the centre of the island, where the imperialist attack would come. That was at the time of the Bay of Pigs. The orishas advised it. They also say … said that Fidel wouldn’t long survive Vallejo. We don’t know what Fidel will do without him.
So although Shango is culturally integrated, politically he still remains only the power behind the trueno. His presence among the barbudos, bearded revolutionaries, makes Cubans lapse into a kind of inferiority feeling, which is deeply rooted in their colonial past. Do you think our revolution is primitive? And where these feelings exist one has to create a compensatory superiority feeling. I was talking to a middle-aged negro woman from Santiago in Oriente, on holiday in the capital with her family, and when I told her I had lived in Africa for four years, she nodded in that direction with a worried face and said, ‘But over there, aren’t they very backward, uncivilised?’ So I didn’t get to see much of Shango in Cuba, except when he zoomed from the hurricane with ostentatious flashiness and lodged in the palma real, the tree that most distinguishes the island’s landscape, which is his throne and lookout post. And his symbols were unintentionally there in the double axes of the old ironwork of the Paseo José Martí; double axes stuck into a bundle of fasces, like those near a small war memorial near the Prado Museum in Madrid, or, to the acute embarrassment of some Muscovites, in the railings round the Kremlin Park. And as in the famous and beautiful Shango figure of the D’Harnoncourt collection, where the indispensable double-axe motif is left out, it asserts itself in the divided, exaggerated cleavage of the cubana, the doble hacha carved in the iconography of breasts and buttocks that, swaying or bouncing, inevitably turn the head of the Cuban macho. The tighter the skirt or trousers, the better, it seemed, the bigger the arse, the better, rolling like something from our 1940s, when men were men and women were women, before the outrages of unisex. The oddity about the tight garment that accentuates the eye-catching arse is that the zip, even on the female militia uniform, is neither tucked discreetly to the side, nor imitates the masculine fly (that would never do in Cuba), nor is discreetly flapped, but shines and glitters and divides the mountainous buttocks like a rich vein of silver. Odd. My Joycean kids coined an apposite word for the underwear of such Latin flesh: ANDES.
The figures of Shango, even in West Africa, are of ambiguous sex, but in Cuba, once he is syncretised with Santa Bárbara, the Cuban male worries about him/her/it, as if as well as helping to overthrow the Batista regime, he were undermining machismo itself. The anxiety extends even into ‘scientific’ anthropological enquiry. One researcher tries to account for Shango’s association with Santa Bárbara by recounting one Nigerian legend which has him escaping his enemies dressed in the clothes of his wife, Oya. ‘This legend’, he says, ‘has led to the belief that Shango is really a woman. But’, he adds, ‘we have seen un macho muy macho under the skirts.’
And so sometimes the iconography of Shango has to depict the genitalia not debajo las sayas, ‘under the skirts’, but actually over the skirts, as in Manuel Mendive’s drawing of Shango. In the same drawing Shango is holding a sword, a cup and stands by a tower. Mendive went through formal art school education, where he ‘had to draw Greek beauties’, and eventually reacted against the European images towards Africa, and he began painting the legends of the orishas worshipped in his own house. I asked about the tower in the picture. A phallus, he said. And the goblet, I didn’t need to ask, would be a vagina. But, of course, it isn’t and the tower isn’t. They are part of the centuries-old paraphernalia of Santa Bárbara. Her father imprisoned her in a tower. She had a third window put in it in honorem Trinitatis. He cut off her head with a sword, which is why Mendive’s Shango holds one. The tower can be seen in the Van Eyck St Barbara in Antwerp, where the virgin also holds a branch of palm, Shango’s and the martyr’s tree. And the cup? Ah, and here scholarship salivates at the coincidence of History. History is Finnegans Wake. The cup is, of course, the chalice and can be seen in Holbein’s picture of the saint on the St Sebastian altarpiece, in the Pinakothek, Munich, but she did not earn the right to carry it until after 1448, and all due to one Kock. Henry Kock was nearly burnt to death and called upon the saint, who preserved him long enough to receive the last sacraments. So Shango carries the chalice and the host. Kock’s near immolation took place at Gorkum in Holland. I can feel it starting, the great poem on racial integration in Cuba, my masterpiece. It will be called ‘Burnt Gorkum’. But Mendive doesn’t do many drawings. The ones he gave me were all done in hospital, when he was waiting for an operation and couldn’t use other materials. His right foot was crushed under one of our Leylands. He and Jane compared sufferings and became immediately close, ansia negra y ansia blanca. He showed her a huge painting on wood of his accident. Above the bus, the injured Mendive, and the spectators crowded round the orishas in all their brilliance, and above them, the whole thing giving the effect of El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the Egungun, the ancestors, the dead, who in African societies are continuous with the living, who are behind such ideas as ‘African socialism’, who share the earth now with the living and the unborn. In other paintings Shango sat at table with the Mendive family. Jane was wearing red and white. She is the daughter of Shango, Mendive said.
If Cubans are learning and creating their cubanidad from a new discovery of the Afro- part of their Afro-Spanish inheritance, it is likely that it is from both strains that they inherit machismo. Machismo, the stereotype of the big guy, with lots of cojones, or at least two big ones, like money bags full of doubloons. One of the favourite Spanish curses is, ‘By the twenty-four balls of the twelve apostles’. So they were all right. I thought that maybe the greatest blasphemy one could produce in Cuba might be something like, ‘Por los veintitrés cojones de los doce barbudos’. Machismo which makes a journalist attack a poet as a pederast for wearing a psychedelic tie given to him by Adrian Mitchell. A machismo every bit as suspicious and on the defensive as the Andycappismo of northern England. That machismo can undermine the revolution is the suggestion of the third part of that prize-winning film, the trilogy on Cuban womanhood, Lucia, where a country macho resists his wife’s attempt to learn to read with the young alfabetizador during the great literacy campaign of 1962 and, the film clearly states, resists her taking part, her true part, in the revolution. It must have been a great source of anxiety to the Cuban man when he first saw his woman in the olive-green militia uniform, carrying that dreadful penis symbol, the rifle. Machismo:
Sure, sure, we’re scared of homosexuality. It’s a historical problem. Machismo, all the bullshit culture of Catholic Spain. God, they’ve even corrupted the negroes. They’re the worst exponents of machismo. And those fucking, bullshit Panthers. They only come here to bum around and screw. Eldridge Cleaver’s here in Havana, though nobody’s supposed to know. He sends notes round to women he fancies, saying who he is and that he’d like to meet them. He signs himself MADRUGADOR HACHA. You know, even our fags are backward. Greenwich Village, sure they’re a gas, but here … But anyway, last September they rounded up thousands on the Rampa and shoved them inside incommunicado for ten days, all kinds of people, just everyone out there on the street, candidates for party membership, a second lieutenant, a mother with three daughters. Crazy! It was because of pimping for foreigners, payment in radio sets, clothes, and it wasn’t just prostitution of the genital organs either! Well, all the queers, all those they said were queers, they sent to a UMAP in Camaguey. Military psychology … give them some hard graft, put some muscles, put some cojones into, onto them, make them real guys. They showed them porn, hetero porn, movies, and they just laughed themselves silly, the homos, and the colonel couldn’t count one damned er
ection in the whole goddam camp. Then the queers retaliated. They cut up their mosquito nets, and dyed them a pretty pink with mercurochrome, and hung up Priscilla curtains all over the place. They made wads of the netting, and put spots of mercurochrome on them, and went off to the medic complaining of aches and pains, and saying their periods had started. (Note: red and white: Shango, I noted.) They ogled the handsome guards. They drew up a directory of Camaguey fags. And in the end the military, the big, butch machos, just had to let them go, released them. Yes, even now, after that gaff, the military keeps its big, brotherly eye on potential fag centres like art schools. Makes sure they get some real hard cane-cutting in their trabajo productivo and no tomato picking. One girl I know, plays violin, gets her hands so bad out there in the country that she can hardly touch her instrument for weeks, and she can’t be a fag … can she?
Machismo: the reverence for old man Hemingway. If the orishas can open one’s eyes to the Cuban landscape, the official tourist agency, INIT, only seems able to show you the Casa Hemingway. The house ‘just as he left it’. All the whisky bottles a big guy gets through. The obsessive pencilling of his weight on the bathroom walls. The awful bullfight posters like a ladies’ training college or a ‘fifties’ coffee bar. The stuffed heads of his kills. On the way back, with all the Russian tourists, my kids divide up the rooms between them, impressed by the house, its green setting, its views, its clutter: You can have the tower with the big-game guns and the war picture books. And I’ll have the lion’s head and the fishing rods and I want the room where he kept the hundred cats. Then, as we turned a corner into the Plaza de la Revolucíon, with its Che seven storeys high, one of them yelled: Look, there’s the SHAKY FAIRY! But I am thinking all the way back of Hemingway’s last kill, and Shango hanging himself in the forest, like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and of our room on the eighth floor of the Hotel Nacional, with the one bed for the four of us. Already I am bequeathing habitacíon 844 to the revolutionary government ‘just as he left it’, still with the bits of mousy hair in the sink, his, because, although it barely covered his ears, he had been stared at, and even pointed at and tutted at by the lift girl, between ocho and the cafeteria, and his son’s the same colour, also cropped after standing in one of those endless Havana queues, this time for ice creams at the zoo, in front of two kids, a boy who said Max was a girl, and a girl who said he was a boy:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 6