

































Linguistic Representations of Black Characters in Cuban Fiction of the 
New Millennium: A tale about continuity and subversion 

Catia Dignard
University of Toronto
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

If scholarship has focused on the return to the 
stereotypical portrayals of black characters 
during the 1990s, and that were common to the 
pre-revolutionary era, what had not yet been 
addressed is how differentiating linguistic traits 
(manner of speech) have been used to represent 
black characters in more recent Cuban fiction, a 
narrative strategy that goes back to colonial 
times. Apart from conveying “authenticity” (i.e. 
the details of the Havana slang) when building 
fictional characters, such a literary device, I 
contend, was also a way to emphasise the Island’s 
socioeconomic and cultural decadence or “invo-
lution” during this decade of economic upheaval. 
Since the second decade of the new millennium, 
other voices, namely from the Caribbean side of 
the Island, have emerged and imposed them-
selves in fiction, leading me to explore the other 
levels of significance of this narrative strategy. 
What follows is a tale about continuity and 
subversion. 

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Linguistic represen-
tations; Black characters; Cuban 

Fiction; Special Period; New 
Millennium; marginality; 

otherness; Caribbeaness; Haiti
B I O

Catia Dignard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her disserta-
tion examines the topic of Linguistic Representations of Black Characters in Contemporary 
Cuban fiction, and how these reflect evolving notions of nationhood, class and race relations on 
the Island. Her doctoral research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research 
Council of Canada (2020-2022), and draws upon literary and critical theory (postcolonial, critical 
race and disability studies), sociolinguistics and anthropology. 
This article is an adapted version of Catia’s talk given at The New College 2020-2021 Senior 
Doctoral Fellow Speakers Series (Caribbean Studies) on May 5, 2021, in which she explained the 
process leading to her current research and preliminary conclusions.

© 2021 Catia Dignard
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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98

    Carlos Uxó González, Representaciones del personaje del negro en la literatura cubana: una perspectiva desde los 
estudios subalternos. (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2010), 13.
    This perspective is shared by Casamayor Cisneros, Odette. 2002. “Études et essais: Les masques du Noir: Quelques 
approximations sur la présence du Noir cubain dans le récit cubain contemporain.” Cahiers d’études africaines 42, 
no. 1 (2002): 7–30 and Carlos Uxó González, 2010.
   Carlos Uxó González, 21.
   Esther Katheryn Whitfield. Cuban Currency the Dollar and Special Period Fiction. (Minneapolis: 
      University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
   For a more in depth analysis, consult Odette Casamayor-Cisneros.“Blackness, Cubanness, and the End of an Era.” 
Black Diaspora Review 5, no. 2 (2016): 12-23. 
     Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 74.
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���������1HZ�<RUN��3DOJUDYH�0DFPLOODQ�����������

 
        

 

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journalist, Manuel Vázquez Portal was 
approached by a young Portuguese student 
seeking advice for writing a thesis on the 
topic of “Blacks in Cuban literature.” 
Half-jokingly, he responded categorically 
that she would have to read “all” of Cuban 
literature.  Vázquez Portal’s comment 
points to the long history of the represen-
tation of black characters in Cuban fiction: 
a cycle beginning with abolitionist novels 
such as Cecilia Valdés (1882) by Cirilo 
Villaverde; followed by the Cuban Revo-
lution’s interlude of relatively “silencing” 
the racial question, leading to literature’s 
(few) black protagonists serving mostly to 
demonstrate the benefits of the Socialist 
5HYROXWLRQ���EHIRUH�WKH�����V�PDUNHG�WKH�
return to the stereotypical portrayals of 
black characters that were common to the 
pre-revolutionary era, such as their “sexu-
alisation” or “criminalization”.  To go 
back to our anecdote, the theme of the 
student’s thesis and their meeting with 
Vázquez Portal are both related to the 
“new Cuban boom” - promoted largely by 
European publishing houses and coined 
Special Period Fiction by Esther Whit-
field.  A genre popularized particularly by 
writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s own brand 
of “dirty realism” (or “realismo sucio”), 
which featured emblematical depictions of 
Havana’s marginal and mostly black 
populations, namely in his notorious 

7ULORJtD�VXFLD�GH�/D�+DEDQD����������
However, it is important to consider that 
&XEDQ�ILFWLRQ�SXEOLVKHG�IURP������WR�
2004 has been significantly influenced by 
the overall context of the economic crisis. 
Critics and authors themselves have 
demonstrated and commented on the 
pressure to reveal and depict at length the 
grim realities of life in this “still-socialist 
society” , and thus at times catering to 
foreign demand’s thirst for both "authen-
ticity" and dark tales about a Socialist 
Utopia gone dystopia. Beyond the facts 
and figures illustrating the economic 
impacts of the disintegrating USSR – 
which demonstrated Cuba’s high degree of 
commercial dependency on soviet subsi-
dies and Eastern European markets – 
Cuba’s Special Period can also be consid-
ered a “defining category of experience” 
that “brings up memories of deprivation 
and hopelessness; of hunger and heat; of 
wheeling and dealing, of dreams of a life 
HOVHZKHUH´���,Q�QDUUDWLYH��VXFK�WHVWLPR-
nies/depictions have also revealed “zones 
of silence” in which Cuban reporters had 
been kept away by the State controlled 
press. Such zones refer to specific neigh-
bourhoods – with ground zero, Centro 
Habana – largely populated by the poor, 
marginalized and mainly black Cubans 
who seemingly have been left unaffected 
by the Revolution’s socialist agenda and 
it’s “social homogenizing forces”. 

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   Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Interview by Catia Dignard. Personal interview. Havana, 12 December 2019. Translation to English 
        mine.
  Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 111. 
  These conclusions are based on the analyses by María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles. “Cuba: la dimension raciale dans le 
       processus de reproduction de la pauvreté.” Alternatives Sud 17, no. 2 (2010): 135-156, and by Alejandro de la Fuente.  
      “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s ‘Special Period.’” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (2001): 
      65–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300108428278.
  Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 113. 
  Christina Civantos. “Race/Class/Language: ‘El Negro’ Speaks Cuban Whiteness in the ‘Teatro Bufo.’” Latin American 
      Theatre Review 39, no.1 (2005): 49. According to Civantos, the figure of the negro/negrito bozal refers to a “recently-
      arrived African who speaks a pidgin form of Spanish known as macúa or bozal…literally a muzzle” and thus, “the term 
      negro bozal reflects the perception of the recently arrived slave as incapable of speech, or at least muzzled by his/her 
      inability to speak Spanish.” (50)

        

 

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During a conversation/interview I had 
with him in December of 2019, seated in 
the lobby-bar of Hotel Sevilla, in close 
proximity to the emblematical neighbour-
hood of his novels, writer Pedro Juan 
Gutiérrez, still a journalist at the time 
while writing “a bit in secret” his Trilogía 
and El Rey de La Habana, commented a 
tad more on what he termed “zonas de 
silencio” (zones of silence). In his words, 
these referred to “zones of society in 
which reporters did not enter normally. No 
news story would take place here, in a 
solar, in Centro Habana. No mention was 
made of poverty in Havana; no mention 
was made of the centro-habaneros’ religi-
osity…Poor people did not exist. It was as 
if journalism made-up this fantastic 
world…in which we were all heroes. 
Then, my books started to appear in which 
I talked about the anti-heroes, those who 
have been left behind, those who have no 
voice. So, I do it deliberately because I 
lived there, right there.” 

Because Gutiérrez’s depictions dealt with 
marginality as well as the lived experienc-
es of criminality, incarceration and 
violence all intertwined with ethnicity, 
poet and critic Victor Fowler Calzada 
considered El Rey de La Habana “one of 
the few works to give the margins a space 
in contemporary Cuban literature,” while 
writer Ena Lucía Portela insisted on 

Gutiérrez’s “proximity” and “skill in 
remaining faithful to the details”.  In other 
words, he wasn’t “faking it”. Moreover, 
such “details” also concurred with 
academics from inside and outside of 
Cuba who documented the plight of the 
mainly black segment of the population 
who would become further disadvantaged 
by Cuba’s opening to tourism and foreign 
capital’s discriminatory policies (official 
tourism industry) and thus, since 1989, the 
“reappearance” of social re-stratification 
according to racial background.  However, 
it is noteworthy that if Portela also signals 
the “truthfulness” of Gutiérrez’s dialogues 
in El Rey de La Habana (1999), for their 
“authentic rhythm and colouring, their 
faithfulness to the details of the Havana 
slang” , what has not been addressed are 
the many other levels of significance 
associated to this literary strategy.

While the works of Carlos Uxó and Jorge 
Hernández examine the literary construc-
tion of linguistic otherness as a way to 
signify subalternity of the black subject in 
the Cuban context, they focus mainly on 
colonial texts. This is a period in which 
mainly white writers would caricaturize 
the spoken language of their black charac-
ters, stressing in their texts the "imperfect" 
pronunciation of Spanish. This narrative 
strategy finds its precedence in the teatro 
bufo, a Cuban version of “blackface  

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   Christina Civantos, 50.
   According to E. Rodríguez Herrera (1953), in his prologue to this pre-Revolution edition of Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde’s 
effort in integrating different types of speeches, particularly those of his black characters, and in spite of its shortcomings, was 
to be “celebrated”, given the novels’ realist genre: “Hay que estudiar detenidamente este lenguaje tan variado en la Cecilia 
Valdés de Villaverde, porque es uno de los méritos de la novela, por más que a veces falla al poner en boca de algunos esclavos 
palabras como Cruz, dispué, y otras en vez de Cru y dipué o dimpué, como se advierte en algunos pasajes.” Cirilo Villaverde, a
nd Esteban Rodríguez Herrera. Cecilia Valdés; o, La Loma del Ángel, novela de costumbres cubanas publicada en New York 
en 1882. (Habana: Editorial Lex,1953), xliv. Emphasis in original. 
   These oeuvres from the first decades of the so-called Republican (or pre-revolutionary) era will be the object of analysis in 
a forthcoming chapter of my doctoral dissertation.
���7KLV�WRSLF�LV�H[WHQVLYHO\�DQDO\VHG�LQ�WKH�ZRUN�E\�(O]ELHWD�6NORGRZVND��(VSHFWURV�\�HVSHMLVPRVௗ��+DLWt�HQ�HO�LPDJLQDULR�
cubano. (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009).
  The long standing recurrent “fear” which stems from the events in the neighbouring island and that have served to “stir 
ZKLWH�IHDUV´�LQ�RUGHU�WR�SRVWSRQH�&XED¶V�LQGHSHQGHQFH�IURP�6SDLQ��LV�GLVFXVVHG�LQ�$OHMDQGUR�'H�OD�)XHQWH��$�1DWLRQ�IRU�$OOௗ��
Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 27-28.
   Alejandro De la Fuente, 49.
   Rafael Rojas. Essays in Cuban Intellectual History 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 98.       

 

13

comedy akin to U.S. minstrel shows” and 
sub-genre, negro catedrático (“black 
professor”) plays, by which blacks or are 
ridiculed “for not being able to speak 
properly” – such is the case of the 
negro/negrito bozal figure – or, rejected 
for speaking too “properly,” that is, with a 
high degree of over-correctness, in the 
case of the negro catedrático.  In this line 
of thought, Civantos signals the important 
role the plays, namely those by Bartolomé 
José Crespo y Borbón who “first estab-
lished the figure of the bozal,” have had 
on constructing this “white vision of black 
speech.”  In narrative, these linguistic 
representations have being sustained, 
notably, by the foundational Cecilia Valdés 
(New York City, 1882 definite and extend-
ed version), in which Cirilo Villaverde 
offered a panorama of the linguistic 
varieties of his coloured characters, which 
in turn has served as an example for other 
realist genre oeuvres.  This cataloguing or 
imitating of black voices persists well into 
the first two decades of the twentieth 
century, for example, in the realist novels 
by Miguel de Carrión (1875-1929), such 
as Las honradas (1917) and Las impuras 
(1919). Another noteworthy example is the 
vignette “El negro viejo” in Estampas de 
San Cristóbal (1926) by Jorge Mañach 
(1898-1961).   

This research being part of a larger 
project, my main objective is to analyze 
the significance of this literary device and 
which translates itself by the ‘voicing out’ 
of historical anxieties related to race, such 
as the return to the primitive, Africanness, 
the trope of Haiti as Cuba’s radical Other
and the perils of the (re) creation of a 
“Black Republic”. In other words, by 
establishing the link between perceived 
“blackness of language” and “decadence,” 
I wish to demonstrate that the use of such 
a literary device was a way to emphasise 
the Island’s socioeconomic and cultural 
“involution” during the Special Period. 
This is part of a broader discourse that 
since the nineteenth century has associated 
these tendencies to the “African” or 
“black” part of the Island’s population.  If 
José Antonio Saco (1797-1879), who 
considered “the progressive blackening of 
Cuba [fuelled by the Plantation economy] 
would lead to its ‘slow decadence, its 
certain intellectual ruin’,”  Rojas signals 
the re-emergence, at the beginning of the 
Special Period, of discourses tainted, 
namely, by the ‘Haitian peril’ and overall 
rejection of Cuba’s “Caribbean” character.
By extension, we could add to this, the 
stigmatization of linguistic traits associat-
ed with Caribbean Spanish - traditionally 

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   For an interesting discussion on the topic of linguistic experimentations, which presence marks a shift in Cuban fiction since 
WKH�����V��FRQVXOW�+XHUWDV��%HJRxD��(QVD\R�GH�XQ�FDPELRௗ��OD�QDUUDWLYD�FXEDQD�GH�ORV�¶�����/D�+DEDQD��&XED��&DVD�GH�ODV�
Américas, 1993). 
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   El Rey de la Habana, 48.
   El Rey de la Habana, 48.
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Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1998), 75.

       

 

20

attributed to the lower classes, dominated 
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the lexicon connected to certain sectors of 
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strategy of integrating "black speech" 
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QRWRULRXV�+DYDQD�VODQJ���SHUFHLYHG�DV�D�
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construct otherness, in contemporary 
Cuban fiction of the 1990s has not been 
studied and has persisted, to a certain 
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that reflect, namely, on the Special Period, 
I will first consider briefly Pedro Juan 
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LQ�(O�5H\�GH�/D�+DEDQD��������IRU�KLV�
“setting the stage”. Second, I will be 
turning to younger narrators, more 
connected to the Caribbean side of the 
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cally with the racial question and integrat�
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some preliminary conclusions with regards 
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been termed “linguistic experimentations,”
and the factors that may explain, after a 
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readings of these.

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drawing attention to the topic of language 

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ters). At this point, I will argue that apart 
from ascribing to the main protagonist, 
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ty” and offer an account of language 
change on the Island, such a literary 
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ing to “primal times,” namely with the 
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represents the figure of the refined mulata, 
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is said to be “pasando un muerto”), her 
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en español enredado y en congo, casi 
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most unintelligible Spanish).  For exam�
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102

   This part of my analysis is based first on Carlos Paz Pérez’s 1988 study that explains the “impoverishment” of Cuban 
Spanish as a result of the particular slang spoken by “antisocial elements,” many of them clearly identified as members of the 
Abakuá secret society, an AfroCuban fraternity with “marked features of decadence.” De lo popular y lo vulgar en el habla 
cubana. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1988), 19, translation mine. Second, for pointing to the explicit 
racialization of the debate, I refer to Luis A. Ortiz López. Huellas etno-sociolingüísticas bozales y afrocubanas. (Frankfurt an 
Main: Vervuert, 1998), 156. Finally, for it’s transnational and very politically charged dimension, I refer particularly to studies 
based on perceptual dialectology, which investigate “nonlinguists’ beliefs about their own [language] and other varieties.” 
Gabriela G. Alfaraz “Dialect perceptions in real time: A restudy of Miami-Cuban perceptions.” Journal of Linguistic 
Geography, 2.2 (2014): 74). The studies conducted by Alfaraz (2002; 2014) and by Andrew Lynch (2009a, 2009b) point to the 
fact that negative perceptions of Cuban Spanish spoken on the Island from the Miami side have been linked to beliefs about 
race and poverty.
   Anke Birkenmaier. “Más allá del realismo sucio: ‘El Rey de La Habana’ de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.” Cuban studies 32 (2001): 
  Anke Birkenmaier, 46.
  Esther Katheryn Whitfield, 100-101.

       

 

25

arrastre grande, que viene de atrá [deletion 
of final /s/] pero te cayó a ti. No é [instead 
of ‘es’] un sorbo. Es un arrastre de cadena 
pesa, pa’toa [para toda] la vida”.  To 
summarize, this passage is both reminis-
cent of colonial literature’s tendency to 
imitate black voices, and of the Island’s 
first lexicographers, namely Dominican E. 
Pichardo with his Diccionario provincial 
casi razonado de voces y frases cubanas 
(1849), to characterize “black speech” – at 
the time, of the so-called “Negros Bozales 
o naturales de África”- as “disfigured 
Castilian” (“castellano desfigurado”). 

Secondly, Rey’s speech acts, that is, his 
limited and “ruinous language”, both 
recall the claustrophobic and ruinous 
space of Centro Habana in which he 
wanders and conditions his “limited vision 
of the world”. If Sandra alludes to the 
“language issue”, that is, Rey and many 
others’ systematic use of the informal 
register by the term “malhablados,” and 
which has given rise to certain anxieties 
concerning the perceived linguistic 
“impoverishment” on the Island, a debate 
that has also been racialized on both sides 
of the Florida strait,  she/he is also aware 
of Rey’s lack of “linguistic capacities” as 
noted by Anke Birkenmaier. For example, 
when Rey asks “¿Qué es fascinado (capti-
vated)?” Sandra responds by a “No, 
nada…¿quieres comer algo?” (“No, 

nothing, do you want to eat something?”).  
Additionally, if the critic contends that the 
novel “needs a narrator to fill in the gaps 
in Rey’s language” and that Rey’s actions, 
namely to kill hunger, are what is import-
ant in the novel, “not his speech”,  I posit 
that, au contraire, Rey’s language and its 
deficiencies are important in several 
respects. First of all, his language serves 
as a marker of the island’s social and 
cultural decadence. Secondly, it partici-
pates in the aesthetics of the ruins that 
permeates the novel. In other words, we 
may establish an analogy between the 
“gaps” in Rey’s language (e.e. elision, 
contractions) and the ruins that surround 
him as an allegory of a crumbling social 
project. Thus, if when representing 
Havana’s landscape “architectural ruins 
stand as readable figures for the decay of 
Cuba’s socialist dream”,  so do Rey’s 
linguistic limitations.

Since the second decade of the new 
millennium, other voices, namely from the 
Caribbean and Central part of the Island, 
have emerged and imposed themselves in 
fiction, leading me to explore the other 
levels of significance of this narrative 
strategy. In fact, such “exploration” was 
contingent in receiving books written by 
authors residing outside of Havana, given 
the scarce attention to the topic of race in 
narrative written from the capital, in 

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103

   I am greatly indebted to Havana-based Generación Cero writer Raúl Flores Iriarte for receiving these books, for my Fiction 
of the New Millennium corpus of study, and for facilitating my interview with one of it’s author, Nelton Pérez. For a thorough 
discussion on these two younger generations of authors and their tendency to steer away from “Special Period” topics, 
including the topic of race, consult the works of Uxó (2010; 2015) for the Novísimos and the introduction to the dossier on the 
Generación Cero by Monica Simal and Walfrido Dorta. “Literatura cubana contemporánea: lecturas sobre la Generación Cero 
(introducción).” Letral: revista electrónica de Estudios Transatlánticos 18 (2017): 1-8. 
   Bill Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 
  Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 72.
  Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 3.

       

 

29

particular by the Novísimos and then, 
Generación Cero authors.  

Hence, in order to compare the “Special 
Period” linguistic characterizations to 
those of newer generations of Cuban 
authors, I analyzed Cuban fiction of the 
second decade of the “new millennium,” 
namely “Virgen en la pradera” in El 
crimen de san Jorge (2012) by Michel 
Encinosa Fú (La Habana, 1974), short 
stories “25” and “32” in Apuntes de Josué 
1994 (2015) by Nelton Pérez Martínez 
(Manatí, Las Tunas, Oriente, 1970) and La 
catedral de los negros (2015) by Marcial 
Gala (Havana 1965). These authors are, 
amongst the newer generations of narra-
tors, those who, from the Island, have 
dealt more directly with the racial theme 
and its socio-historical basis, and also 
because of their use of vernacular 
language or other “linguistic experimenta-
tions” that to varying degrees revisit the 
narrative strategies of their predecessors. I 
also have included works by Nelton Pérez 
and Marcial Gala, whose voices are more 
connected to the Caribbean and Central 
part of the Island along with its specifici-
ties and literary traditions; “spaces” that 
are seemingly more inclined to experiment 
with language, may it be for aesthetic 
reasons or for the sake of realism, such as 
the remarkable example of Guillermo 
Cabrera Infante (Gibara, 1929 - London, 
2005), as well as two writers that have 
pursued in this tradition: José Soler Puig 
(Santiago de Cuba, 1916-1996) and 
Guillermo Vidal (Las Tunas, 1952-2004).

Before presenting my preliminary findings 
with regards to the different levels of this 
narrative strategy, what emerges from 
these three texts is that they not only 
integrate vernacular language (to stress the 
orality of their black characters) for the 
sake of “realism” – how people really 
speak in certain regions or sectors of 
Cuban society (including their lexicon) -, 
but their characters themselves allude to 
the “language issue” or this tendency to 
use manner of speech as a marker of origin 
(geographical-cultural) or of group identi-
ty (youth, marginality).  If Ashcroft 
reminds us that voice differences, which 
include language, dialect or accent, along 
with body differences, are the “most 
common and superficial features by which 
the subject is the most directly and imme-
diately othered,”  these “voice differenc-
es,” I will argue in a more positive way, 
point to the coexistence of diverse cultural 
identities and how these are negotiated on 
an individual and collective basis in the 
Caribbean, conceived as a multi-linguistic 
space. 

Furthermore, I contend that the way 
language is inscribed in these works both 
reinforce and flow from Cuba’s “Multicu-
banidad,” that is, its “redefinition” since 
the 1990s as an “ethnic and cultural 
community”  This viewpoint not only 
contrasts with the prior stress on “homoge-
neity of experience” within the Revolu-
tion’s socialist cosmology/agenda,  but 
also permits counter narratives to 
discourses such as Ortiz’s Cubanidad, 

30
31
32

29

30

31

32

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122815-1b_CaribbeanQuilt_Vol6_rev.pdf  .103



104

   Rogelio Martínez Furé is an Afro-Cuban writer, scholar of folklore and religion and founder of the National Folkloric Ballet 
of Cuba (Conjunto Folklórico Nacional). Consistent with his stress on Cuba’s multicultural nature, State sponsored EcuRed 
mentions Martínez Furé’s “rich and diverse ancestry” that includes: “mandingas, franceses, lucumíes, españoles, chinos y, 
muy probable, de algún indio en lontananza”. Very recently, on Feb. 8, 2021, the documentary film on his life: “Rogelio 
Martínez Furé: A Cuban Griot” (Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, 2014), was presented at the University of Missouri, College of 
Arts and Science- Black Studies in which he is portrayed as “a contemporary griot, a repository of oral tradition who recovers 
and guards Afro-Cuban and Caribbean silenced memories and true identity (blackstudies.missouri.edu).
   Ariana Hernández-Reguant, 83-84. Emphasis mine.
��%HQtWH]�5RMR��$QWRQLR��/D�LVOD�TXH�VH�UHSLWHௗ��HO�&DULEH�\�OD�SHUVSHFWLYD�SRVPRGHUQD���+DQRYHU��1+��(GLFLRQHV�GHO�1RUWH������
  Rafael Rojas explains the persistence of Cuba’s uneasiness (read “rejection”) when facing its Caribbean identity and this, in 
spite of revolutionary rhetoric on racial equality and African cultural legacy, by the fact that according to the imaginary of the 
Revolution and of the left in general, Cuba was considered a “leading country in the Third World,” but also “not so very Third 
:RUOG��XQGHUGHYHORSHG�RU�/DWLQ�$PHULFDQ��GXH�WR�LWV�EHORQJLQJ�WR�WKH�6RYLHW�EORF�DQG�LWV�VRFLDO�DGYDQFHV´�������*LYHQ�VXFK�
discourse, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico came to represent “negative archetypes” for the nationalistic rhetoric, 
JLYHQ�WKHLU�³FRPPRQ�HOHPHQW�RI�+LVSDQLF�$IULFDQ�PHVWL]DMH´��HPSKDVLV�LQ�RULJLQDO��³(VVD\V�LQ�&XEDQ´�������

       

 

34

based on the ajiaco metaphor (melt-
ing-pot/mestizo nation), by celebrating 
black’s “otherness” and cultural differenc-
es even within Afro-Cubans. In other 
words, a position that claims “not the 
essential integration of African elements 
into national culture, but the impossibility 
of such an occurrence” and which implic-
itly link culture and its varied manifesta-
tions with race, also emerges within this 
space of debate.  Rogelio Martínez Furé 
�0DWDQ]DV����������WKH�OHDGLQJ�SURSRQHQW�
of this viewpoint, illustrated it in this way, 
alluding also to diversity versus homoge-
neity in manner of speech (extract): 
A mulatto Cuban from Baracoa, the 
descendant of Haitian émigrés in a 
coffee-growing area, is not the same as a 
black Cuban descendant of Arará from the 
province of Matanzas, a sugar-growing 
area, or a fair-skinned Cuban from Pinar 
del Rio, a tobacco-growing area, the 
descendant of Canary islanders. They are 
all Cuban, but there are differences in 
food, speech, psychology, religious beliefs, 
and phenotypes. I believe it is important to 
accept plurality and free ourselves from 
the monomania, according to which we 
are all the same. 

These works of fiction also enter in 
dialogue with other “Caribbean-centric” 
texts, whether intertextually, by referring 
to foundational oeuvres that vindicated 

35
36
37

34

35

Afro-Cuban culture and Caribbeaness. If 
these texts vindicate in many ways their 
“Caribbeaness” and, by extension, what 
Benítez Rojo would qualify of “la 
afirmación de su propia Otredad, su 
asimetría periférica con respecto a Occi-
dente,”  nonetheless the specter of Haiti 
persists as the uncanny neighbour that stirs 
up anxieties about this place where we 
don’t want to go back to or become.  This 
is particularly relevant in Apuntes de Josué 
�����E\�3pUH]�DQG�/D�FDWHGUDO�GH�ORV�
negros by Gala, in which the re-emerging 
tropes of radical alterity, “Haiti” and 
“Oriente,” are also bound up with the 
linguistic factor.

Thus, to make sense of all that precedes I 
have summarized the significance of this 
narrative strategy of integrating black 
speech in three instances: 1) As a signifier 
of socioeconomic, cultural, moral decay; 
2) As a marker of group identity, codes of 
conducts in poor and marginal neighbour-
hoods, and Cubanness; 3) As a pretex-
t/way to revisit the nation’s history (colo-
nial transaction and the society it fostered, 
migrations, national symbols, archetypes 
and stereotypes).

36

37

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105

   Marcial Gala. La catedral de los negros 2ª ed.. (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2015), 17.
   Cited in Frígoli, Leandro. “La catedral de los Negros: una mirada sobre la obra del poeta, narrador y ensayista, Marcial Gala.
” Marcha. marcha.org.ar. 14 de junio de 2017. www.marcha.org.ar/la-catedral-de-los-negros/
  Jorge A. Hernández,. Hablar entre cubanos. (Santa Clara, Cuba: Editorial Capiro, 2013), 103.
  Jorge Mañach. Indagación del choteo (1928). Tercera edición revisada. (La Habana: Editorial Libro Cubano, 1955), 60.
    

       

 

38

First, and as presented in my analysis of 
Gutiérrez’s El Rey de La Habana, the 
linguistic characterization of the black 
subject is used mostly as a signifier of 
socio-economic, cultural and moral decay 
by which the protagonist’s speech acts 
mirrors the ruinous city of Havana, which 
in turn stands as an allegory of a crum-
bling social project. In addition to the use 
of narrative strategies reminiscent of 
colonial literature, namely the example of 
the “negra Tomasa”, which I have argued 
served to emphasize the Island’s historical 
involution, the incursion of lexicon 
derived from Afro-Cuban popular religios-
ity also adds another layer of “otherness”, 
by relegating spatially the black protago-
nist to Africa rather than Cuba, a narrative 
strategy also reminiscent of colonial 
literature.

In “Virgen en la pradera” by Encinosa Fú, 
apart from restaging an “African space” 
there is a commentary on the degradation 
of education, culture and morality in this 
microcosm of Cuban society; the animal-
ization and hyper-virility of the black 
subject, the incursion of a disabled charac-
ter when touching upon the children’s 
depravity, referred to as “the tribe”, and 
the linguistic codes/manner of speech that 
emphasizes this barrio’s marginal status. 
In Gala’s La catedral, the idea of the 
ruinous city of Havana is displaced to the 
fictitious mostly black and marginal 
neighbourhood of Punta Gotica, Cien-
fuegos, and by which the most stigmatized 
linguistic traits and swearing are ascribed 
to the mothers of certain characters, all 
part-time prostitutes (as was the case of 

39

40
41

Rey’s mother), giving way to their son’s 
comments such as Barbarito’s “my mother 
spoke that way”.

Relative to the second instance of this 
narrative strategy, given that both “Virgen 
en la pradera” and La catedral de los 
negros are set in poor and marginal 
neighbourhoods, the informal register is 
stressed, namely with the many incursions 
of the colloquial and street talk/lexicon 
proper to marginal sectors, including those 
derived from Afro-Cuban popular religios-
ity, integrally part of the cultural setting. 
However, not only manner of speech 
serves as a marker of group identity and 
codes of conduct proper to these spaces, 
but also of cultural identity and Cuban-
ness. What Gala termed “ese especial 
modo que tenemos los cubanos de hablar,” 
(“this special way we Cubans speak”),  
includes the use by the people of particular 
narrative strategies. Set in the Special 
Period, Gala’s novel also includes expres-
sions and the lexicon that emerged at that 
time. According to Jorge Hernández, these 
years of crisis gave way to an “abundante 
repertorio de frases y vocablos, marcados 
en su mayoría, por la interpretación 
irónica, paródica o poética,” a repertoire 
not yet collated, but nonetheless, dispersed 
in chronicles, articles and works of 
authors.  One of these “literary strategies” 
used by Cubans in reaction to their daily 
hardships and State censorship, demon-
strating both creativity and resilience, has 
been to engage in a great deal of ‘meta-
phorizing’. Consequently, to allude to the 
mothers’ dealings in prostitution, they are 
said to be “en la lucha,” (instead of 

38

39

40

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106

   The Balsero crisis refers to the massive migrations of Cubans on rafts of fortune during the summer of 1994, at the height of 
the Special Period of the 1990s. However, this type of migration had already started since 1991. According to Ackerman, 
already between 1991 and 1994, “a total of 45,575 Cuban balseros (rafters) were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. Of those, 
16,778 entered the United States immediately. The remainder were sent to "safe haven" camps located at U.S. military bases in 
Guantánamo, Cuba, or Panama” (169). In Holly Ackerman. “The Balsero Phenomenon, 1991–1994.” Cuban Studies (1996): 
169-200.
  Sklodowska also discusses the Haitian’s already “linguistic otherness” for his “uso preferido del créole” and for being 
associated with the French heritage of this part of the Island, at a time when Cuba’s Republic of Letters voice their 
“preocupación por el «afrancesamiento» de la lengua española”. Worthy of note is to what extent White creole anxieties 
towards racial mixing are transposed at the linguistic level when considering this concern for maintaining the purity of the 
6SDQLVK�ODQJXDJH��IUHH�RI�IRUHLJQ�FRQWDPLQDQWV��)UHQFK�DQG�&UpROH���,Q�(O]ELHWD�6NORGRZVND��(VSHFWURV�\�HVSHMLVPRVௗ��+DLWt�
en el imaginario cubano. (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009), 68; 69 note 6.
   La catedral de los negros, 169.

    

       

 

42

“prostituirse”). Gala also exploits culinary 
metaphors, which go back to Jorge 
Mañach’s seminal text Indagación del 
choteo who “serves us” an example of this 
Cuban tendency to equate bodies to meat,  
with the serial killer El Gringo’s mastering 
of this type of choteo, and which varia-
tions go beyond the realm of metaphor, 
which in turn leads us to the objectifica-
tion of the white body. Interestingly, this 
particular use of language or wordplay 
(choteo) also becomes a way to subvert 
the traditional power dynamics between 
Blacks and Whites.

In a third instance, manner of speech or 
the “language issue” serves to anchor 
other discussions or becomes a pretext to 
revisit Cuba’s particular history, Afro-Ca-
ribbean legacy, and social dynamics, 
which in turn inform current conflicts that 
the economic crisis of the 1990s permitted 
to unleash. The use of this narrative 
strategy is particularly emphasized in 
Apuntes de Josué 1994 by Nelton Pérez, in 
which the nation and the re-emergence of 
specific social conflicts during the Special 
Period are also reflected upon and worked 
out at sea in the balsas/rafts in the context 
of the Balsero crisis.   In fact, it is in his 
vignettes or apuntes “25” and “32” in 
which the Cuban “holy trinity” of nation, 
identity and race figure, that Perez’s 
linguistic experimentations are more 
clearly racialized, racial stereotypes are 
voiced out, and in which the specter of the 

43

Haitian as Cuba’s radical other invites 
itself. For example, the incursion of Yorqi 
Dubois Lescay, a black character which 
surname clearly denotes his Haitian 
ancestry, not only permits to allude to 
Cuba’s neo-colonial context by which 
Haitian and Jamaican braceros migrated to 
work on US owned sugar plants at the 
beginning of the twentieth century, but 
discuss the “language issue,” by which the 
protagonist’s manner of speech with 
supposedly “French creole influences” 
confers him radical alterity.

Nonetheless, it is important to specify that 
if black characters are singled out by their 
speech acts in these two vignettes by a 
mainly “white” crew, the incursion of the 
“Haitian” character is also met with 
suspicion by it’s black Cuban counterpart, 
which adds layers and nuances when 
touching upon discrimination and other-
ness in the Caribbean region. In La 
catedral de los negros, El Gringo mistak-
enly takes a certain “Pierre Giscard” for an 
Haitian, and this, mostly for his “linguis-
tic” features, namely, for his voice “carga-
da de erres” (“full of R’s”) that he “did not 
like from the very beginning” (“que no me 
gustó desde el principio”).  This last 
example underlines once more the 
Haitian’s “radical alterity” in the Cuban 
imaginary at large. 

41

42

44

43

44

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107

   This additional insight draws on long enduring discourses by which Blacks in Cuba have historically been associated with 
“crumbling” political regimes. See Alejandro de la Fuente. “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s ‘Special 
Period.’” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (2001): 65–91, p. 90..

    

       

 

45

Furthermore, these linguistic portrayals of 
black characters in narrative are condi-
tioned by three main factors. First, by their 
temporal proximity with the Revolution’s 
cosmology and its social modernizing and 
homogenizing effect when writing on the 
Special Period. Second, the shift brought 
by the discourse of “multi-cubanidad” – 
i.e. “we are all Cuban, but we are not the 
same” – that opened narrative to multiple 
voices and regional linguistic differences. 
Finally, the particular literary traditions of 
the Caribbean and Central region of the 
Island, more open to linguistic experimen-
tations and reflections on the topics of race 
relations within the Caribbean region.

A tale about continuity and subver-
sion…
Given that the backdrop of these three 
texts is Cuba’s Special Period, or have 
been written partly during that time 
(Pérez’s Apuntes de Josué 1994), they do 
retake, to varying degrees, the more 
sociological angle of documenting the 
plight of Blacks who had been hardest hit 
by the rise of inequalities, and the narra-
tive strategies established in fiction of the 
1990s to add “authenticity”, including at 
the linguistic level, and thus, the integra-
tion of the notorious Havana slang. 
Corollary to the realization that if “we are 
all Cubans, we are not all equal,” is the 
re-emergence of integrating discriminating 
linguistic features pointing to race. In 
addition, the sense of “end of the world-
ness” expressed by certain authors, namely 
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, also accounts for the 
trope of the ruin and by which the black 
body becomes a metaphor for a crumbling 
social project.   

In “Virgen en la pradera”, Encinosa Fú 
picks up many of the topics, archetypes 
and stylistic codes proper to Pedro Juan 
Gutiérrez’s realismo sucio. However, if 
language still serves as a signifier of 
socioeconomic, cultural, moral decay, 
there is a shift in perspective insofar as the 
author-narrator leaves a certain space for 
other voices to emerge and point to the 
perils that lie within this black community 
for those who do not conform to its 
particular codes of conduct. In other terms, 
whites are “other” and acting “like 
whites”/”wearing white masks” is stigma-
tized in these mainly Afro-Cuban spaces. 
Gala pushes this even farther in La 
catedral de los negros by eliminating 
completely the omniscient narrator and by 
giving voice to those who live in the 
margins of the city. Given this change of 
perspective, the rich whites from the 
upscale Punta Gorda (Cienfuegos) and the 
white guajiros from neighbouring provinc-
es become the “other”. As mentioned 
previously, language does not serve 
explicitly to stigmatise the black subject in 
these settings, but rather to point to the 
people’s resilience and the degree in which 
language use can serve to subvert tradi-
tional power dynamics, if we refer, for 
example, to El Gringo’s special brand of 
“metaphorizing”.

Ultimately, what we may perceive as an 
“evolution” in the way language is used to 
reflect Cuba’s Afro-Caribbean legacy, that 
is, from a narrative strategy serving to 
construct otherness, to one conveying 
Cuba’s multicultural/regional and socio-
economic realities, neither is it a process 
devoid of tensions, nor is it generalized in 
more recent works of fiction. My main 

45

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122815-1b_CaribbeanQuilt_Vol6_rev.pdf  .107



108

 
objective in this part of my current 
research was to dismantle this “last 
frontier” in which the topics of race, 
language and the Island’s Caribbeaness are 
intertwined and discussed, and this, taking 
into account these “spaces” and literary 
traditions that permit such linguistic 
experimentations/reflections. 

(January 20, 2022 / 08:53:12)

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109

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