Introduction
In 1967, Esteban Montejo remembered: ‘escaping the rigor, because the rigor of slavery was too much, and I thought that all persons should be free, that slavery should not exist. And that’s why I went to la manigua, resolved to [confront] whatever presented itself to me.’Footnote 1 Montejo is considered to have been ‘the last publicly known survivor of New World slavery, the last witness to a human tragedy of unfathomable proportions’.Footnote 2 He reported living ‘a good life’ in la manigua, a term the Spanish once applied as a pejorative to describe the woods/jungle/mountains, an ‘uncivilised’ sector of colonial Cuba.Footnote 3 Montejo crafted and sometimes mimicked the history of modern slavery, racism and liberation. He also looked toward his afterlife, aware of a lurking presence: ‘As old as I am, I think in the future’, he said. ‘You will see what that future is, what does this old man think? You don’t know: the grim shadows, the grim shadows that surround us. That’s what I think about.’Footnote 4
Cuban writer Miguel Barnet had just published Biografía de un cimarrón (1966),Footnote 5 a novelistic transcription of Montejo’s memories as a formerly enslaved cane-worker, runaway and mambí: an ‘africanoid’ term embraced by anticolonial Cuban insurgents.Footnote 6 Through the filter of Barnet’s transcription, Montejo became a legendary cimarrón, a maroon, often debated in the literary realm.Footnote 7 In 1997, historian Michael Zeuske uncovered a ‘second part’ of Montejo’s life: his involvement in the 1912 ‘War of the Races’, a state-sponsored massacre of Black activists with whom Montejo aligned. Zeuske accused Barnet of ‘erasing’ Montejo’s Black politics and skewing his oral history ‘towards the ideology of the Cuban Revolution’. Zeuske also challenged Barnet to release the ‘tapes’ of his interviews.Footnote 8 In response, Barnet admitted he ‘wiped out’ Montejo’s 1912 memories ‘deliberately’ and threatened: ‘If anyone dares to write the life of Esteban Montejo, the second part, I’ll kill him … I’ll grab a machete and chop off the head of whoever writes the second part of that book because it destroys the spirit and example that Esteban Montejo gave to the world.’ But after all his threats, Barnet was left wondering: ‘Where is the real Esteban Montejo?’Footnote 9
This article highlights Montejo’s participation in documentary film projects produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, ICAIC). Such documentary records provide various archival backdoors into Montejo’s ‘selective remembrances’: the way he shaped, gave meaning to and drew legitimacy from devastating sociopolitical experiences, specifically from histories of subjection and insurgency.Footnote 10 The article contributes to a historiography that has highlighted how social actors have engaged in memory work to shape the structures of Cuban history;Footnote 11 however, it takes its cue from scholars who have uncovered how Black Caribbean subjects engaged with the means of historical production.Footnote 12 I argue that Montejo, along with other actors, co-created an audiovisual archive of radical anti-slavery, cane-worker memory, African-inspired death, and ambivalence toward modern revolutionary nationalism. Indeed, Montejo’s selective remembrances reveal his will to historicise his experiences with the archival tools of the revolutionary state but beyond a politics of national liberation.Footnote 13
Historian Lillian Guerra uncovered the cultural production of a ‘negrista’ artistic movement, including by Black film-makers, whose ‘efforts to radicalize and expand the reach of the Revolution failed because of traps laid by the discourse and strategies of top leaders that together constituted the Revolution’s grand narrative’.Footnote 14 But Guerra overlooked a wider spectrum of Black political heterogeneity, including the history of Black engagement within Afrocubanismo,Footnote 15 a pre-existing cross-racial movement which I will show expanded, with force, into revolutionary cinema. Drawing from historian Alejandro de la Fuente, I explore how Black artists reinvigorated African-diasporic cultural forms into a ‘radical national identity’ under state sponsorship to a lesser or greater extent,Footnote 16 with particular attention to film.
The documentary records also provide archival backdoors into an (audiovisual) ‘ethnographic interface’: the historic language games between ‘informants’ and the anthropological nation state across various twentieth-century regimes. The ‘audiovisual interface’ is defined here as a discursive network of intellectual reciprocity between ethnographic subjects and cinematographers. This interface consisted of a series of mutual co-optations and discursive imbrications between Cuban ‘modernity’ and African-diasporic ‘tradition’,Footnote 17 or rather ‘African inspirations’, in the archive of Cuban cinema. The terms ‘African inspirations’ and ‘African-inspired’ engage the past, present and future, magnifying contingent cultural formations in the context of modern Caribbean statecraft.Footnote 18
Scholars have focused on film directors as the main creators of audiovisual historical production by analysing the ‘final cut’ of films (technically, a later stage of post-production).Footnote 19 But scholarship has barely tapped the multi-layered archives of film production. I examine magnetic tapes from the Archivo Sonido (Sound Archive) of the ICAIC, which contain extended interviews with historical actors that producers cut into discursive soundbites, attached to (a)synchronous visuals, but which were mostly discarded as film projects underwent post-production. They contain what the late Cuban sound archivist José Galiño called ‘the archive of the word’,Footnote 20 a labyrinth of archival backdoors which captured the ‘subterranean convergence’ of African inspirations and la Revolución: two discordant, antagonistic, but co-existent, imbricated, and mutually enforcing systems.Footnote 21
I begin this article by analysing a screenplay written by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1944. I then examine how Ortiz instructed a pair of Black film-makers – Rogelio Martínez Furé and Sara Gómez – in 1965.Footnote 22 I proceed to explore how Montejo recalibrated Ortiz’s audiovisual programme through his participation in two documentaries, Cimarrón (Sergio Giral, 1967) and Hombres de Mal Tiempo (Alejandro Saderman, 1968), highlighting how Montejo ‘reelectured’ Ortiz’s pupils. I conclude by exploring Montejo’s legacy in Black film-maker Sergio Giral’s El otro Francisco (1975), which mainstreamed the history of an 1812 anti-slavery movement inspired by the Haitian Revolution.
Fernando Ortiz in the Realm of Cuban Cinema
In 1944, Ortiz wrote a screenplay entitled ‘Una fiesta de Santería’ about the cultural forms ‘brought to Cuba by the Yoruba slaves or Lucumís’.Footnote 23 He sketched an audiovisual projection of Afrocubanismo, a movement that inscribed ‘black motifs’ into Cuban national culture through art and social science.Footnote 24 Afrocubanismo was ideologically diverse and cross-racial. Its ranks included Ortiz, a white anti-ideological proto-postmodernist, and Black artists with socialist leanings like Nicolás Guillén.Footnote 25 The screenplay detailed Ortiz’s didactic goal: the ‘orientation of national culture’, promoting ‘Afro-Cuban folklore’ and the ‘secular influx of the ancestral cultures of Africa’. Ortiz planned to recruit artists from ‘the Santería environment’, including Black singer Merceditas Valdés.Footnote 26
According to historian Melina Pappademos, Cuban elites, including ‘black modernist’ leaders, associated African inspirations with backwardness during the republican era (1902–59).Footnote 27 In addition, Ortiz may have been responding to the legacy of Hollywood-sponsored ‘zombie’ films in the aftermath of the US occupation of Haiti (1915–34).Footnote 28 Ortiz noted Hollywood’s ‘vulgar’ depiction of African inspirations; he wanted to salvage them: ‘Above all to collect them in their purest forms … which are getting lost more than just because of the pressures from foreigners, but [also] due to the disparaging attitude of those who deny what is ours and are ashamed of what is Cuban.’ He wanted ‘vulgar spectators’ to associate the Orishas (African deities or ‘sovereigns’) with Catholic saints, a process he described as ‘syncretism’. For instance, Ortiz described the sovereign Chángo as a ‘terrorist saint. But also androgynous. As a woman Chángo is translated into Saint Barbara.’Footnote 29 As such, the screenplay celebrated African inspirations in the context of local Cuban elitism. Ortiz appropriated and integrated Atlantic sovereigns like the Orishas into a nationalist audiovisual programme, at least in one screening,Footnote 30 as he collaborated with Black artists who participated in its making.
Ortiz’s fellow intellectual, José Luciano Franco, expressed concern that ‘Afro-Cuban’ folklore was ‘about to disappear’ as early or late as 1959.Footnote 31 The revolutionary state created the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional in 1962, established by ethnographer Rogelio Martínez Furé, dancer Nieves Fresneda and Mexican choreographer Rodolfo Reyes Cortés.Footnote 32 In 1963, Martínez Furé authored a pamphlet, declaring that the purpose of the Conjunto was to ‘collect danced and musical manifestations of national character and integrate them in definitive form into the new socialist culture … the revalorisation and dissemination of this cultural heritage is one of the purposes of the revolutionary process’.Footnote 33 As anthropologist Stephan Palmié has noted, the revolutionary state co-opted elements of Afrocubanismo,Footnote 34 although Afrocubanistas like Franco facilitated this process.
As the revolutionary state accelerated the imposition of socialism, it sponsored and censored film production. The ICAIC had been founded in 1959 with the task of raising historical consciousness.Footnote 35 In June 1961, the ICAIC confiscated the documentary PM, a film that depicted Black and working-class nightlife; this incited controversy amongst intellectuals over censorship in the cultural sphere, prompting Fidel Castro to deliver his famous ‘Words to the Intellectuals’ speech. This speech forced artists to produce their art ‘within the Revolution’, which had been officially declared ‘socialist’ weeks prior. In the aftermath, many Cuban film-makers became critical, ambivalent supporters of the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 36 Those who produced ‘counter-narratives’, intentionally or unintentionally, risked the possibility of experiencing state-sponsored ostracism, electroshock therapy, and/or exile.Footnote 37
The revolutionary state also promoted a ‘nonconfrontational’ brand of ‘raceless nationalism’,Footnote 38 an ideological regime which emerged during the independence struggles that Montejo had participated in. According to scholars, raceless nationalism operates as a double-edged blade: historically, it has been appropriated by popular sectors to push for anti-racist policies, but it has also been weaponised by ‘conservative’ sectors to repress intra-racial Black activism.Footnote 39 According to de la Fuente, the revolutionary state followed the latter course. Fidel Castro defined racism mainly around the issue of jobs, leading a campaign to challenge racial discrimination in the workplace. In 1962, the state declared the problem of racial inequality ‘solved’ even though Black activists like Juan René Betancourt and Walterio Carbonell had questioned the revolutionary state’s brand of raceless nationalism. Betancourt was forced into exile in 1961 after advocating for intra-racial Black activism, while Carbonell wrote an essay the same year calling for the Revolution to officially embrace the progressive role of African-inspired religions; Carbonell was met with state-sponsored ostracism for his views. The revolutionary state initially embraced African-inspired religions but by the mid to late 1960s had characterised them as impediments to socialist modernity, in some cases prohibiting ceremonies and invoking African-inspired religions as a cause of criminal behaviour.Footnote 40 As Martínez Furé’s pamphlet illustrated, African inspirations were officially approved of as folkloric ‘heritage’.Footnote 41
Around 1965, Rogelio Martínez Furé and Sara Gómez visited Fernando Ortiz at his home. They were helping film director Alejandro Saderman adapt Ortiz’s now classic book, Contrapunteo Cubano (1940),Footnote 42 into a documentary: Oro de Cuba (1965). Ortiz expressed a dose of his proto-postmodernist impulses when he told Martínez Furé and Saderman: ‘I live in anarchy, my library was disrupted during the Revolution.’Footnote 43 Martínez Furé asked Ortiz about the ‘paleros Congos’ (Palo practitioners). Ortiz gave him a short lecture on Palo, an African-inspired religion. Ortiz characterised ‘paleros Congos’ as ‘very death-driven’, unlike ‘the Yoruba who does not deal with the dead’. He theorised on Palo power objects, including ngangas or cauldrons. According to Ortiz, ‘the palero, the brujero [wizard], looks for a skull, that has a special name, it’s a powerful spirit, but for it [the nganga with the skull] to work, he needs to merge the forces’. He then succinctly elaborated on his theory of ‘transculturation’ for the film crew. For example, he stated that the palero adds to his craft ‘seven things that, according to the Congos [paleros], were discovered by the whites, which is the secret power of white religion, that isn’t found in the paleros’ [religion] but [is found] when they apply the religion of the whites merged into their own’. He emphasised that paleros establish ‘friendly relations’ with the sacristans of local Catholic churches, who provide the incense that empowers the nganga.Footnote 44
Gómez asked Ortiz about the Abakuá, a fraternity whose members are known as ñáñigos. Ortiz described the founding of the Abakuá as a defensive community against Black human traffickers. ‘Blacks are as much slavers as the whites’, he expounded; ‘there were Blacks who collaborated with the whites on the coast. They went into the Cameroon to enslave people and sell them to the British. And the British smuggled them here.’ According to Ortiz, ‘Those tribes [the people who would become ñáñigos] had a social need because there was no king, they were “backward people” as they say today, it’s what forced them to form secret societies so as to not get trampled on, and the ñáñigos came from there.’ When they switched back to discussing the Yoruba, Martínez Furé brought up an ‘older’ batá drummer. Ortiz lamented: ‘Yes, because this is getting lost!’ Before the crew ended the interview, Ortiz insisted: ‘Come as many times as you want.’Footnote 45 As the socialist state absorbed Ortiz, he tutored a crew of its film-makers, willingly inserting his cultural praxis into an expanding audiovisual interface.
The ‘Reel’ Cimarrón
In 1967, a Black film crew interviewed Esteban Montejo in his Veterans’ retirement home (‘Hogar del Veterano’) to produce the documentary Cimarrón (1967).Footnote 46 The crew consisted of Martínez Furé, Gómez and Sergio Giral, the film’s director. ‘Was there another way to rebel against slavery at that time?’ inquired Giral. ‘Another way?’ replied Montejo, ‘No, only by killing the owners. And who would submit themselves to killing the owners when the same Blacks were on top of you? Because there were apapipios [snitches], Black apapipios, with the rigor of escoria there were Black apapipios, just as there are today. That has always existed in Cuba.’Footnote 47 The revolutionary state weaponised the term escoria (‘scum’) in the early to mid 1960s against ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and homosexuals, though the term gained wider currency during/after the Mariel exodus of 1980.Footnote 48 In this memory, Montejo was outlining historical changelessness by suggesting that apapipios (and escoria) still existed in the revolutionary present. He passionately remembered that Black reactionaries were the main impediment to radical anti-slavery.
Giral asked another open-ended question: ‘Why did you escape?’ Montejo replied: ‘From where?’ Giral clarified: ‘From the sugar-mill, to become a cimarrón.’ Montejo responded: ‘Ah, because of the abuses, the tramplings, and before that they gave me 25 lashes’. Martínez Furé interjected, asking, ‘They hadn’t hit you [before]?’ Taken aback, Montejo replied: ‘No, they hadn’t hit me before. Do you know what 25 lashes are? Fuck that.’ Giral then asked Montejo: ‘Is it hard working there in the fields?’ Montejo replied, drawing on a lingering remembrance: ‘Is it hard? Yes, it’s hard, you have the mayoral [overseer], the contramayoral [deputy overseer], and sometimes in some places the contramayorales are Black, and they force you beyond what is necessary, to complete the work. That’s what the machetes were for back then …’ Montejo remembered the presence of Black contramayorales, labour-enforcers, a history he repeatedly emphasised. For instance, Giral asked yet another open-ended question: ‘How many hours did you work in the cane during that time?’ Montejo responded:
In the cane? … At 4 in the morning, the Ave Maria was played … [We would] drink a little sambumbia, and off to the line, no, not to the line, to the spinning. We didn’t say ‘line’, the Blacks, well, the masters, would spin you there, to the spinning.Footnote 49 The mayoral goes in front and the contramayoral goes at the back, to make sure a Black doesn’t escape the work. At 11, lunch, shall we count up the hours? Let’s see. At 11 lunch, and at 12:30 they sound the bell, for work, until 6 in the afternoon, more than 12 hours.Footnote 50
According to Ortiz, the word sambumbia, a drink made from sugar-cane, may have emerged from ‘sambo: “mulato” or “half dark”’.Footnote 51 In this instance, Montejo was again remembering Black labour-enforcers, equating them with ‘masters’ who ‘spun’ enslaved cane-workers. He selectively remembered, quite forcefully, Black complicity with the plantation regime.
During production, Montejo remembered slavery during and after the period of its legal abolition by Spain. According to historian Rebecca Scott, the distinction between ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ was blurry for many Black subjects, as the realities of colonial slavery persisted in the post-emancipation period.Footnote 52 In the 1880s, the colonial state pursued a policy of ‘gradual’ abolition, which meant little to Montejo as he narrated a struggle to escape the rigors of working in the sugar-cane fields.Footnote 53 Gómez asked a question that was incompletely archived: ‘… between the two?’ Montejo replied: ‘Well, the differences were many, but I didn’t become a slave after that to live in a barracón [slave barracks], you’re wrong on that point of view, I enslaved myself to live in a barracón after slavery ended.’ Montejo somewhat blamed himself for ending up back in slavery. ‘There were still Blacks who continued living in barracones?’ inquired Gómez. ‘The day after [the abolition of slavery], yes’, replied Montejo. He went on to describe how barracones still existed in the present in the Cienfuegos–Las Villas area. Montejo again started describing a changeless history of Cuba, but Giral ‘cut’ as Montejo stated that the barracones ‘… have only been modified’.Footnote 54
‘Look, Esteban’, interjected Giral, ‘uh, in particular, what she is asking you is, what difference do you see between the work you did as a slave and the work that you did again after slavery was over and [you] returned once again to –’ Montejo re-interjected: ‘– After slavery was over?’ Giral insisted on a clear answer, ‘Yes, you went back to the fields to do the same work, did you notice any difference?’ Montejo replied: ‘After slavery ended, [we] had to do the same work –’ Giral called ‘¡Rueda! [Action!]’ as Montejo was in mid-sentence: ‘– [There was] no other work to do’, continued Montejo. ‘Huh?’ replied a puzzled Giral. Montejo then re-emphasised, ‘In the cane [fields], nothing other than the cane, son.’ Martínez Furé again reframed the question: ‘But what difference did you notice for example, you did the same work as a slave as you did when you were free?’ Montejo finally described a difference:
No, not the same work as a slave. Because I acted free and I was sort-of free, I worked the day that was convenient for me and the day that wasn’t convenient I didn’t work. You understand how the matter was now? The inconvenient day, no. Now I came, you were a colono, and I arrived and you liked a field, 20 pesos, 25 pesos, without the mayoral and the second one [the contramayoral] behind me. I did it myself.Footnote 55
Montejo delivered a ‘before-and-after’ slavery narrative in response to the precise, persistent questioning of the film crew. The transition to free labour offered Montejo an escape from the violence of the (contra)mayorales and the opportunity to earn a wage, an anti-climactic experience he described as ‘I was sort-of free.’ His statement to Giral – ‘Nothing other than the cane, son’ – emphasised the lack of employment opportunities and historical changelessness, while indicating endearment, chemistry and tutelage toward the younger Black cinematographer(s).
During the interview, Montejo also remembered biological organisms that cane-workers encountered. ‘Were there bugs in the barracón?’ Giral had inquired. ‘Bugs, mosquitos, niguas, fleas …,’ replied Montejo. His memory of niguas is worth quoting at length:
Look, the nigua is a small bug, very small, sort of like – have you seen that small tobacco seed, one of those small little seeds? Well, the niguas are that small. The nigua gets into your skin and you don’t know what it is. It becomes a cayaya. You know what a cayaya is? A nigua that grows to the size of a pea. And she [the cayaya] begins to produce eggs, each egg is a chincha, a nigua. And sometimes she produces them and they stay inside the nails, and she procreates inside the nails and when you look, all your fingers are filled with niguas.
Giral asked a follow-up: ‘It must be horrible to work in the fields with niguas?’ To which Montejo delivered a repetitious answer: ‘Así trabajaba, así trabajaban [That’s how I worked, they worked]'. Now there were those who took out the nigua, the cayaya, sometimes a cayaya, you did like this, and you took out the cayaya, the entire cayaya! The size of a pea.’Footnote 56 Montejo movingly turned a tobacco seed into a historical parasite of field labour. His slippery phrase ‘Así trabajaba, Así trabajaban’ illustrates how he documented his experiences like an ‘auto-ethnographer’.Footnote 57 But he had other agendas too, beyond remembering the struggles of the cane-workers.
During production, Giral repeatedly asked Montejo to contrast his past in ‘el monte’ (la manigua) with his present life in the Veterans’ Home. ‘You know my house suffers from damp’, Montejo explained, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t be here [in the Veterans’ Home]. I have [heard too many] promises, I don’t want more promises to come. Promises from here, promises from there and in the end nothing.’ Montejo aspired to repair his own home, bluntly stating: ‘Yo vivo de cuentos, yo vivo de cuentos [I live off/from stories], you think that, if I could have, if it wasn’t for the foot disease that I had and the old woman who broke her legs … I probably would have repaired it by now, and you see that materials are not available, I would have acquired materials.’Footnote 58 Montejo was describing his situation as a cultural worker who engages in narrative production to address personal matters (not unlike a professional historian or ethnographer). According to scholar Jennifer Lambe, the United States’ 1962 embargo on Cuba had created a new social reality in which ‘scarcity’ became the language of state patronage.Footnote 59 Like many Cubans struggling/hustling through scarcity, Montejo engaged in ethnographic sociolismo: bettering himself by harnessing state patronage networks.Footnote 60 He also noted the unfulfilled ‘promises’ tied to his economic predicament.
Montejo was no stranger to state patronage and failed promises, given his documented participation in the local politics of the Cuban Republic. Many former rebels struggled to find employment opportunities after the War of Independence (1895–8). According to Pappademos, patronage became one of the main mechanisms for social mobility and a dominant form of Black politics throughout the republican era.Footnote 61 After the war, former rebels established (financial) ties with a range of political bosses. Montejo initially aligned with Eduardo Guzmán y Macías, a veteran of the rebel army, local boss and landowner in the Cienfuegos–Villa Clara area. According to Zeuske, Guzmán facilitated several loans to Montejo in 1904, indicative of patron–client networks. Guzmán was tied to the Liberal block of José Miguel Gómez, another veteran, who became president between 1909 and 1913. Montejo eventually broke from his Liberal patrons and joined the 1912 uprisings organised by the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Colour, PIC).Footnote 62 According to de la Fuente, patronage politics was a key factor in the 1912 War of the Races.Footnote 63
Historian Ada Ferrer has described the 1912 conflict as a ‘fratricide’, a massacre of thousands of Black Cubans by their compatriots who had previously fought with them together against Spain. Black veterans had formed the PIC in 1908, organising along intra-racial lines, demanding racial justice and equal access to public jobs. In 1912, they orchestrated a nationwide protest against the 1910 Morúa Law, named after a Black Liberal, which barred race-based political parties. Cuban newspapers weaponised raceless nationalism against the PIC, accusing it of igniting a ‘race war’. The Cuban military shot Evaristo Estenoz, leader of the PIC and veteran insurgent, at point-blank range in front of 50 of his men. His corpse – naked, mutilated – was photographed with white officers standing over it, while a doctor pointed to the gunshot wound in his head. The photograph was published by newspapers across the island.Footnote 64 Montejo was jailed (twice) in 1912, and eventually released through an amnesty granted by the Liberals.Footnote 65 He would squeeze memories of this violent history into the parameters of the ethnographic questions that were put to him.
‘Esteban, were the ngangas from before the same as today’s?’ wondered Martínez Furé. Amused, Montejo proceeded to pick Martínez Furé’s curiosities apart, quizzing him: ‘Nkisi, you know what that is? … nkisi de nganga?’Footnote 66 According to palero anthropologist Todd Ochoa, ‘minkisi (nkisi, sing.) … are turns of the dead shaped into powerful substances that from the nineteenth century to today define Kongo notions of causality and property … synonymous with curing and affliction’.Footnote 67 Martínez Furé replied, ‘It [the nkisi] is a rock, isn’t it?’ Gómez replied more confidently: ‘The force.’ Montejo exuberantly declared: ‘No, nkisi is the majá!’Footnote 68 According to Ortiz, the majá is a ‘yellow snake … not venomous and lives in Cuba … The word is a Congo Africanism … there Mangá means “venom”.’Footnote 69 Martínez Furé replied: ‘Here they call it –’ but Montejo interrupted him: ‘Nkisi de nganga is the majá!’, he repeated sternly.Footnote 70 Martínez Furé sounded confused and disappointed by Montejo’s serpentine language games, which were only just beginning. After all, Ortiz had once taught Martínez Furé that ‘The Congo [man/people] adopted a psychology very similar to that of the Romans … the Romans and the Congos believed religion was like an industry, like a way of manufacturing firecrackers or the bombs manufactured today by civilised men …’Footnote 71
Gómez extracted a bit more memory out of Montejo. ‘You know that in [the town of] Rodrigo’, she said, ‘there are many loose nkisi of nganga of paleros that have died –’ Montejo interjected before she finished, ‘– Yes’, he replied, ‘that have chichiricú and walk in the street. I think you know something about that.’ They laughed together, repeatedly.Footnote 72 But again Montejo evaded the topic of Palo. Subsequently, in a partially recorded exchange, Gómez posed a question about a certain palero near the town of Cruces, who had lived on a sugar-mill owned by a Spaniard, a ‘slave-owner’, both of whom had the surname Goytizolo. Montejo responded: ‘Yes, Goytizolo, he must have been from, Goytizolo, from San Agustín –’ Gómez interjected, noting that ‘– Yes, there are still many Blacks there with the last name Goytizolo.’ Montejo continued: ‘That Goytizolo was a very strong ngangolero [palero] in Cienfuegos, even the priests went to visit him. He had a grand altar, in Cienfuegos. And in Palmira, [there was] one named Juan Hijaga.’ Gómez wanted confirmation, ‘He was a palero?’ To which Montejo replied: ‘Palero he was. How do you know he was a palero? Ha!’Footnote 73 Montejo, with Gómez, remembered the naming and cultural geography of the San Agustín plantation. According to Zeuske, ‘Goytizolo’ was a Catalan plantation owner; the surname was common in Lajas, Cienfuegos.Footnote 74 And according to Scott, the number of slaves increased slightly on Goytizolo’s plantation between 1875 and 1877, even as manumissions were accelerating across other parts of Cuba. The workforce on the San Agustín plantation was ‘predominantly African [born]’ into the mid 1870s.Footnote 75 In this exchange, Montejo inserted his own counterpoint of transculturation, remembering ‘priests’ who sought inspiration from a palero, a slightly inverted ethnographic take on relations between Palo and Catholicism compared to Ortiz’s instruction of Martínez Furé.
Gómez had recently completed a film about her Black middle-class family.Footnote 76 She continued exploring her ancestry, through Montejo. ‘Esteban, I wanted to ask you’, she said, ‘I, reading the book … I realised that you lived in the same zone as my abuelos [grandparents]. You mentioned that town on one occasion: Rodrigo [a town near Sagua La Grande]’. Montejo replied: ‘I know Rodrigo quite well’, at which point Gómez revealed that her ‘[“Chinese”] abuelo had worked at Santa Teresa’, a plantation which would reappear in the audiovisual interface. ‘I know Santa Teresa too’, replied Montejo.
Gómez attempted to guide Montejo’s response: ‘… During the era of slavery, I understand that there were some who were free, that is that the town [Rodrigo] was founded by Blacks who had their, their own conucos [small plots] and their lands –’. Montejo calmly interrupted: ‘No.’ Instead, Montejo recalled ‘a very curious case there’, narrating as follows:
… here el señor; and here, [I or the Negro] would buy a plot of land, [el señor] would give [the Negros] their papers, and here, and now, I would say, you would say, ‘Hey Negro! Bring me those papers over here because the other Negros can steal them from you.’ And the Negro, ‘Yes, yes, yes, give them’, and he would give them to you. That old man would die and the children wouldn’t take anything because the land belonged to el señor and that’s how they took everything and began throwing out the Negros …Footnote 77
Montejo then described, in the same response, the role of the Catholic Church: ‘In the town of Santa Clara, you know about the Church of Buen Viaje? Who gave the [Church its] lands? The Africans, [gave them] to the Church of Buen Viaje. Well, [they] started running out of Black slaves. What did the priests do? They threw out San Bernardito because he was a N–, a chicken thief, ha! there in Santa Clara.’Footnote 78 Gómez had expected a glowing narrative of ‘Blacks who held their own lands’, but Montejo remembered the dispossession and racial discrimination that Black and African communities experienced. He remembered an ‘afterlife of slavery’.Footnote 79
Montejo was warming up. He could take a film crew across regimes and times, but he needed a catalytic question to stimulate his memory. Giral ‘cut’, but the soundman kept the mic on. ‘Esteban’, Martínez Furé followed up, ‘I understand that the people of Santa Clara are racist too?’ Montejo replied immediately: ‘Sí, hombre, sí.’ The question allowed him to drive his memories deeper into the Cuban past, into 1912. Giral called ‘¡Rueda!’, and Montejo responded:
[You ask] if they are racist? During ‘the little war of the Blacks’ [1912], despite it being a racist town, the people there had no shame, because Clemente Vázquez, – Eliseo [so and so] is in front of the park – [in] Santa Clara – wanted to send troops there and a detachment of themselves, of students and such, to evict the Blacks from the park, it was Clemente Vázquez. Well, take a look, when Clemente Vázquez ran for representative, the town of Santa Clara applauded him. [Do you think] they were ashamed?Footnote 80
Montejo was highlighting the racial politics of public space, when local officials evicted Black people from places like the Parque Vidal in Santa Clara.Footnote 81 During the tensions of the 1912 ‘War of the Races’, white youths posted banners in the public park of nearby Sagua – where four Black people were murdered – which read ‘Blacks get out’ and ‘Down with the savages’.Footnote 82 Montejo raised his voice, slightly but clearly, when he stated ‘It was Clemente Vázquez [who ordered the evictions]’. Vázquez had been elected to the Cuban Congress in 1910 as representative for Santa Clara on the Liberal ticket along with Montejo’s former patron: Guzmán.Footnote 83 Montejo selectively remembered Vázquez, crafting a historical narrative of a local political boss, his base of supporters and the racist structure of an emerging Cuban Republic.
After this response of Montejo’s, the crew scrambled to think of a follow-up question. ‘The War of [19]12’, Gómez said to Giral. Montejo interrupted their mostly inaudible discussion. ‘Well, one thing, I’m going to tell you now, excuse me for a moment’, he said calmly, before firmly expounding: ‘They say “racist war”; in Cuba there has been no “racist war”.’ Giral called ‘¡Rueda!, please. Tell me, Esteban.’ Montejo then declared:
There has been no ‘racist war’, do you know why? Because the Blacks that rose up in the fields, did not kill a single white. And how many did the whites kill? Here in Cuba, tell me, who can make a story about that? And I rose up. I killed one. How many hundreds of Blacks did they kill in eastern Cuba? And here in Las Villas? And they have the nerve to call it [the] ‘war of the races’. Do they have no sense of civil conduct? As I told an administrator who was present, [who said] ‘the war of the races’, I told him, ‘Hey, you are mistaken. The Blacks did not kill a single white. And you people almost finished off the mother of the tomatoes [every last person]. That is not a “race war”.’ The Americans themselves said, in print, that the ‘war of Cuba’ [the 1912 ‘War of the Races’] was a government charamuca and effectively it was indeed a government charamuca.Footnote 84
Montejo remembered both the violence of 1912 and the weaponisation of the narrative. To smear the PIC, the Cuban press had circulated a plethora of headlines announcing a ‘racist’ uprising,Footnote 85 as well as stories about the ‘clawing scratch from Africa’,Footnote 86 including the tale of a Haitian brujo who was allegedly the leader of the insurrections.Footnote 87 The violence of 1912 occurred against the backdrop of systematic purges against African brujería, instigated in part by Fernando Ortiz, at the time an influential criminologist, who had declared in his work Los negros brujos (1906): ‘fetishism is in the mass of the blood of the black Africans’.Footnote 88 Ortiz told Martínez Furé around 1965, ‘I’ve been bad … I’ve been a prosecutor for the Havana Court … I’ve written a penal code, which has been my baseball game, as the Cubans say.’Footnote 89 Montejo’s statement calling for a ‘story’ illustrated his determination to intervene in the structure of Cuban History. He constructed a counterpoint to the narrative trope of the ‘war of the races’. Moreover, he laid the responsibility for the massacre on (Cuban) whites, provincialising the narrative of US involvement and emphasising Cuba’s internal politics of 1912.
But Montejo’s counterpoint was contaminated by the very narratives he attempted to dispel.Footnote 90 He shrewdly crafted his 1912 memory between ‘in Cuba, there has been no “racist war”’ and ‘that is not a “race war”’, adhering to the prophecy of Cuban nationalist José Martí. Martí had insisted that ‘there will never be a race war in Cuba’, consolidating a myth of trans-racial fraternity he famously expressed through his essay ‘Nuestra América’ (‘Our America’).Footnote 91 Montejo wrapped his memory up in Martí’s enduring catechism. On the other hand, Montejo killed a white person in 1912, or so he implied. ‘I killed one’, he slyly slipped into his story. But as scholars have noted, state-sponsored violence against the Black militants ‘preceded [the] actual rebellion’.Footnote 92 Historian Aline Helg also pointed out that the trope of Black violence against whites was ‘anti-black’ propaganda,Footnote 93 which Montejo selectively remembered or mischievously appropriated. His memory posited a Black radicalism beyond the accepted discourse of the revolutionary state, a memory so radical across time that it challenged the words of José Martí. Montejo constructed a narrative at both the intersections and margins of racial and raceless nationalism. As literary scholar Roberto González Echevarría put it: ‘Montejo escapes the constraints of hegemonic discourse by mimicking it and therefore absorbing it.’Footnote 94
Montejo’s memories may sound like a web of contradictions. But ‘One ever feels his twoness –’, wrote historian W. E. B. Du Bois when he formulated the concept of ‘double-consciousness’ in 1903: ‘an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’Footnote 95 According to scholars of the Caribbean, creoles – like Montejo – developed ‘plural personas [and] command of multiple communicative registers’ as they navigated through turbulent and heterogenous societies.Footnote 96 In many ways, Montejo displayed an ‘unsuspected, because it is so obvious, dimension of human behavior: transversality’, to borrow a related concept from Martinican poet Édouard Glissant. Montejo’s memory relieves the Caribbean ‘of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course’,Footnote 97 be that North Atlantic empire or the Cuban Revolutions. Montejo occupied multiple worlds and temporalities as a memory worker of the violent histories and myths he experienced. His memory documented historic subjection and illustrated the discursive craft that he exerted on an emerging vanguard of Afrocubanismo, including Sergio Giral.
The Death of ‘Sergio Montejo’
In his 1967 film Cimarrón, Sergio Giral portrayed a young Esteban Montejo magically igniting African-inspired firmas, or signatures, alone in la manigua. African-inspired authors write, or ‘throw’, signatures with chalk; they take different forms, including ‘overlappings of lines, arrows, cruciforms, circles, and other shapes’. They are ‘prone to unstable interpretation and effect’ and ‘help establish the will of the living over the dead’. As a palero once wrote: ‘one or many firmas can condense the surrounding dead into a generalized atmosphere of possibility and potential, which the author of the firma then appropriates … new versions of the dead can be manufactured or made to work by the living’.Footnote 98 Indeed, Giral appropriated Montejo’s signatures, his memories, to produce history, taking whatever possibilities and potential such historical forces had. Martínez Furé had labelled firmas ‘distinct saints’ in his 1963 pamphlet and, like an Ortizian folklorist, he omitted any explicit reference to ‘the dead’.Footnote 99
Martínez Furé’s equation of the Palo-inspired dead with ‘distinct saints’ stimulated a pre-existing ‘syncretic’ cultural programme, one which Ortiz himself had condoned in 1944 with his ‘santería’ screenplay and then again around 1965 when he lectured the younger socialist ethnographer about paleros-Congos who ‘establish friendly relations’ with Catholic sacristans. Ortiz also advised Martínez Furé that ‘the Congo[man] is the African who most openly and most easily welcomed the Portuguese settler, the first coloniser to travel to Africa and to gradually establish contacts with Black people’.Footnote 100 According to Palmié, Ortiz’s discourse of ‘syncretism’ provided the revolutionary state with an alluring myth of racial integration that acknowledged the centrality of the African-inspired past, while at the same time restricting the spread of Black ‘identity politics’.Footnote 101 But unlike Ortiz’s harmonious narrative of Luso-African relations, Giral’s Cimarrón synchronised visuals of Black veterans listening to the radio with a soundbite of international news: ‘Dar es Salaam: Despite the operations of the punitive Portuguese colonialist infantry, patriotic Angolans have delivered heavy losses to the enemy in northern Angola.’Footnote 102 There are no ‘saints’ in Giral’s Cimarrón, no ‘religion of the whites merged into [Palo]’, as Ortiz had instructed. Subtly, Giral and Montejo began to ‘de-syncretise’ Ortiz’s willed histories within the audiovisual interface.Footnote 103
In Cimarrón, Giral juxtaposed visual representations of an African-inspired past, including visuals of an nganga, with the institutionalised state of Montejo in the Veterans’ Home. According to anthropologist Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Cuban film-makers produced ‘modernist allegories’, crafting supportive, measured, but regulated criticisms of the revolutionary state, which had consolidated an environment of censorship.Footnote 104 Giral captured a fictional, naked Esteban in la manigua, while Montejo speaks asynchronously throughout the film. In one scene he narrates a memory of ‘bugs, mosquitoes, niguas and fleas’ over visuals of the ruins of barracones, narrating through an emerging sound of drumming as the film transitions into African-inspired singing and dancing. Montejo declares in the film: ‘Oppression is very bad’, a statement which was synchronised with footage of muted veterans gazing at the camera. Giral may have borrowed this aesthetic from fellow Black cineaste Nicolás Guillén Landrián, most of whose films were censored and whom the socialist state viciously repressed.Footnote 105 Montejo finished his statement: ‘There are times when a man wants to be free but he is a slave … I call freedom that which I had in those years [in the past].’Footnote 106 Like many ICAIC filmmakers, Giral projected a ‘primitive’ Other,Footnote 107 producing a subtle modernist critique of the revolutionary present by juxtaposing a naked, African-inspired and free cimarrón with Montejo in the Veterans’ Home.
Unsurprisingly, Montejo’s 1912 memories were omitted from Giral’s final cut. Giral later admitted: ‘I’ve always felt a sense of political and social responsibility and wanted what I do to serve the revolutionary process. You exercise a form of self-censorship in not wanting to destroy the cake by sticking your fingers in it too much.’Footnote 108 As historian Devyn Spence Benson has noted, Giral’s statement reflected his strategic career decision to produce films that explored nineteenth-century slavery rather than films that explored ‘contemporary affairs’,Footnote 109 such as Montejo’s fratricidal slaying of a (white) Cuban in 1912. Like Barnet, Giral most likely omitted Montejo’s 1912 memories, thus adhering to the raceless nationalism of the revolutionary state. After 1967, Giral became ‘the Father of Afro-Cuban Film’, a legacy he nourished in exile decades later;Footnote 110 meanwhile Montejo emerged as a legend who experienced ‘the real sense of freedom’ in la manigua, ‘cut off the heads of colonizing Spaniards’ in the Battle of Mal Tiempo,Footnote 111 and eventually became ‘the Maroon-in-Chief’.Footnote 112 But Montejo and Giral were still operating on each other, still becoming.
The archival record provides a social motion picture of what Ortiz called the ‘cooking’ of history or cubanidad. He stated: ‘Cubanidad inheres not only in the result but in its complex formative process, disintegrative and integrative, in the substantial elements that enter into its eventuation, in the environment within which it takes place, and in the vicissitudes of the way in which it unfolds.’Footnote 113 Ortiz applied this concept to emphasise the process of continuous cultural emergence in the making of humanity: a concept that centralises the ‘doing’ of culture rather than ‘being’,Footnote 114 a theoretical distinction that Montejo was aware of, at least in practice. After all, Montejo was a Black creole, a contingent rather than an inherent, inevitable Cuban. In 1967, he attempted to construct himself by ‘doing’ Cuban History, but he had to speak through Giral’s audiovisual signatures, or designs.
For example, Giral directed his collaborator: ‘I’d like you to tell me something about your stay over there in the asylum.’Footnote 115 Giral had previously explored psychiatric themes in his film La jaula (1964), which, he later recounted, was suppressed by the state for straying from ‘the line proposed by Cuban cinematography’ at the time.Footnote 116 Puzzled, Montejo replied: ‘Huh? In what asylum? … that’s the Veterans’ Home, they have it as an asylum, but that’s the Veterans’ Home –’ to which Giral sarcastically interjected, ‘– You know that today it is an asylum, ha.’ ‘And this is where we’ve arrived’, Montejo replied, agreeing with the director’s insinuation. Montejo subsequently made a rather explicit criticism of the revolutionary state (unsurprisingly omitted from the final cut): ‘This very government’, said Montejo, ‘is blind to what happens in many of these establishments … lots of informalidad (impropriety), and now it’s better, with that administrator there, that’s getting more organised … Osmal was a bandit … Osmal was a bandit … the only one who went there to regulate as an effective manager who was good was Primitivo, who had been in la sierra.’Footnote 117 (‘La sierra’ was the countryside wing of Cuban revolutionaries who fought against the forces of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s.Footnote 118) Historian Rosalie Schwartz uncovered how nineteenth-century insurgent banditry, which included kidnapping, theft and extortion in the name of ‘independence’, was reconfigured into local political corruption during the early Republic.Footnote 119
Montejo continued criticising the Veterans’ Home during the interview. ‘This right here is hell’, he said; ‘the worst escoria of La Habana is in here. Look, pardon my words, in here there are faggots, thieves, apapipios … they put them in here so they don’t beg for change, but they go out to beg for change in the street. And they give them food, clothes and shoes.’Footnote 120 His homophobia was blatant: ‘There’s drunks’, he told Giral, ‘cocksuckers, faggots, everything, my son.’Footnote 121 At the time of the interview, Giral was gay although not openly.Footnote 122 As historian Abel Sierra Madero has noted, the revolutionary state constructed its ideal ‘New Man’ programme by launching systematic repression against homosexuals, deemed ‘counterrevolutionaries’. But Montejo’s homophobia may have also channelled a longue durée history of sexual politics dating back to colonial Cuba.Footnote 123
Scholars may excavate Montejo’s elusive responses, splicing them and discovering ‘counter-histories’, but his words consistently reveal the intrusion of the colonial, republican and revolutionary state into his stories.Footnote 124 Montejo’s discourse reveals how he armed himself with the language and history of his socio-political environment to craft his audiovisual signatures, captured by and filtered through the ICAIC. In one of Giral’s selective splices, Montejo declares: ‘Some think old age is sad. I am old, and for me, it’s a joy to be old now. I do not fear death either; I seem to have lived a lot; death is not indifferent.’ Sergio Montejo acknowledged the presence of death, and he was not done ‘killing’. As a scholar of the dead once noted: ‘the most persistent mode of forgetting is memory imperfectly deferred’.Footnote 125
Esteban in Two Acts
‘Kill him’, said Esteban Montejo, starring as himself in Hombres de Mal Tiempo (1968), a film directed by Alejandro Saderman. The film celebrated Cuba’s ‘100 Years of Struggle’ (1868–1968).Footnote 126 Saderman filmed a ‘happening’: an improvisation through which a ‘theatrical spectacle’ (a war re-enactment in this case) incorporates the audience (i.e. the veterans of the 1895 War of Independence) in a deliberate attempt to provoke ‘spontaneous and unpredictable participation’.Footnote 127 According to Saderman, he filmed ‘men [film actors] dressed as mambises and Spaniards’ re-enacting the Battle of Mal Tiempo for the 1895 veterans ‘as a stimulus to revive their memories of the war’.Footnote 128 In the film, Black Chinese veteran Fabian Sotomayor directs a multi-racial cast of re-enactors in African-inspired chanting, dancing and drumming, thereby reciprocally animating his detachment of ‘mambises’.Footnote 129 They repeatedly chant ‘nkanga!,’ meaning ‘to bind’,Footnote 130 as the film celebrates the memory of nineteenth-century African-inspired historical actors, some of whom were purged by both the Spanish and the modernist revolutionary leadership and were then denigrated by subsequent chroniclers of Cuban History.Footnote 131 Montejo grins at Sotomayor’s cultural spectacle like an outside observer or ethnographer.
Montejo was more engaged in crafting death against ‘traitors’. All the veterans, including Montejo, related their memories of the Battle of Mal Tiempo in the film. Subsequently, veteran Cayetano Vásquez orders the execution by firing squad of a man who, according to a ‘mambí’, has ‘stained the flag’ with his ‘felonies’ and does not deserve the title ‘mambí’. According to Guerra, the binary opposition between ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’ intensified during the 1960s under the ideologically rigid policies of the Communist state, which included state-sponsored campaigns threatening Cubans with execution.Footnote 132 In the film, Montejo directs the re-enacted ambush of a man who deserted the ‘mambises’ and went over to the Spanish in exchange for money and rank. Montejo orders his ‘mambises’ to ‘take the man’s clothes, shoes, and everything, leave him naked, naked …’, he says; ‘Bandit, fuck, traitor’. To celebrate ‘100 Years of Struggle’, the state recruited historical insurgents, i.e. veterans like Montejo, who directed the slaying of a ‘traitor’, thereby legitimising the teleology of what Guerra calls a ‘grassroots dictatorship’ turned ‘total state’.Footnote 133 Across time, Esteban Montejo willingly became a man of many Revolutions.
But he was more than a historical mambí; he was the only veteran in the ’68 film categorised by the narrator as ‘the cimarrón’. ‘Why did you incorporate yourself into the ranks of the mambises?’, Sergio Giral had previously asked him, regarding the ’95 war. ‘Because I liked freedom’, replied Montejo. ‘Nothing else was said besides ¡Cuba Libre! ¡Cuba Libre! ¡Cuba Libre! And I liked that word.’ He mimicked ‘Cuba Libre’, repeatedly, then elaborated:
But I didn’t know what Cuba Libre was, and none of us knew what Cuba Libre was. Because it turns out that General [Antonio] Maceo had told General Máximo Gómez that the new youth had to be taken advantage of. And in effect, he was not wrong: savages, young and full of life, who believed that the enemy’s bullet wouldn’t wound them. They went in for ‘the charge of the machete’; those who didn’t have a weapon would go in with a trozo de palo [piece of stick]. But if civilisation comes, this isn’t going anywhere, in that form, this isn’t going anywhere, no.Footnote 134
Montejo described Cuba Libre as a seductive and shallow slogan, a ‘word’, that he and other mambises naively followed. Slyly, he also remembered a cultural tension between rebel leaders and their ‘savages’ during the war of ’95. While scholars have noted Montejo’s scepticism towards technology, specifically toward the sugar-mill and weaponry,Footnote 135 he also expressed some ambivalence about Cuba Libre.
Indeed, Montejo described a historical past that haunted the Cuban nation. Giral asked Montejo: ‘What do you think of that world that you’ve lived through?’ Montejo described a society of betrayal, responding: ‘There are things you can talk about and things you can’t talk about, ha. The world is a phenomenon, son. Not the world, the inhabitants, the inhabitants of the world. There are times while they eat with you, they’re stabbing you with a knife in the back. Not the world, the world is always fine …’ Montejo continued along his tangent, quizzing the film crew on Cuban history: ‘Who are the parents of the Cubans? Let’s see if you-all know.’ Giral and Martínez Furé guessed together: ‘The Spanish?’ Martínez Furé quickly followed up with: ‘The Africans’.
‘Those are the parents of the Spanish’, Montejo replied, ‘I mean, the Spanish are the parents of the Cubans. Well, the Spaniard is ambitious for money. The children turned out the same …’ He repeated himself: ‘Look here, Cuba’s ambition, the millions stolen, because who taught the Cubans to steal? The Spanish. That was the school that Spain left here … The Cuban turned out more brazen than the Spanish, ha!’Footnote 136 Montejo described the thieving, colonial foundations of the nation, characterisations which were shaped by how he experienced the plantation, revolution and the ‘knife in the back’, including a 1912 Cuban ‘fratricide’ against Black subjects. The ‘Maroon-in-Chief’ was an abundant source of revolutionary nationalism, especially at the movies, but Esteban Montejo exerted a seething pragmatic reticence.Footnote 137
Montejo appears confidently attached to the nation, given the visuals of him wearing an honorary medal in both Cimarrón and Hombres de Mal Tiempo. But his politics extended beyond the parameters of Cuban nationalism. Giral had previously asked Montejo: ‘You think all Man that doesn’t have freedom should struggle to obtain it? … in the world?’ Montejo sounded supportive and catechistic at first, following an anti-imperialist line: ‘Yes, they should fight to obtain it because there is no other path. If they don’t struggle to obtain it, they’ll put the yoke back on them again …’ But Montejo shifted the conversation toward a more local – and personal – predicament: ‘This right here’, he continued, ‘here we must play it, despite everything they say. There’s lots of ambition, el interés [‘interest’; plural intereses] in this here.’Footnote 138 According to Palmié, interés refers to ‘forms of ruthless self-interest invasive of relationships conventionally cast in terms of trust and mutuality’.Footnote 139 Montejo repeated ‘here’, which carried both ideological connotations (‘this’ Revolution) and geographic connotations (i.e. local politics, as local as his and the film crew’s relationship on the set of ‘this’ documentary project). For reasons of his own, Montejo tamed Giral and his crew with histories of slavery, racialised violence, marronage, Black uprising, and the many selective remembrances he crafted, not to mention his tales of ‘faggots, thieves, [and] apapipios’.
‘Our situation is dangerous … very dangerous’, Montejo continued. ‘Dangerous in the sense that, sooner or later, we’ll have to echarla [cast/throw it out].’Footnote 140 He may have been expressing some intra-racial fraternity when he said ‘our situation’ [i.e. as Black subjects]. But he may have also been alluding to the film crew’s situation as Cubans (engaged in Revolution), as Black Cubans, or all the above, given Montejo’s transversality: his simultaneous engagement across multiple cultural worlds and temporalities. He had also stated: ‘there’s lots of ambition here’, which likely refers to the rapaciousness of the Revolution, but simultaneously alludes to the ‘ambition’ of the film crew in relation to his interés or, rather, their entangled intereses. Ultimately, he called for them to echarla, which implies to ‘cast out’ or ‘throw out’ the ‘dangerous situation’. Montejo recognised revolutionary nationalism as a productive peril, as a generative, usable and disposable weapon. Miguel Barnet later remembered: ‘I cannot say that, when Esteban Montejo joined the mambí troops he had a sense of the Cuban nation: what he wanted was liberty.’Footnote 141 In 1967, Montejo may have channelled the liberatory future of PIC leader Evaristo Estenoz, who once threatened to ‘ruin Cuba’.Footnote 142
Indeed, Montejo also ‘fled’ from nineteenth-century mambises, retroactively. Giral had asked him, ‘Was there another way for a man like you right, eh, in that era, that was not going to el monte or joining the mambí line, to fight against slavery?’ Giral’s question implied the first War of Independence (1868–78). ‘Was there a way?’ Montejo replied, ‘Yes, [for] the ones that were mambises, but I was not a mambí. I fled from the mambises and I fled from the owners and I fled from the Civil Guard. In the place I was at, I never saw a mambí, because I hid from them too, I didn’t know what the issue of that war was about.’Footnote 143 Most, if not all, insurgent activity was confined to the eastern provinces during ‘that war’,Footnote 144 making it doubtful that Montejo historically fled from the 1868–78 mambises given that he roamed in ‘western’ Cuba. Literary scholar Jerry Hoeg astutely described Montejo’s nineteenth-century yearning for freedom in la manigua, specifically his ‘Palaeolithic or hunter-gatherer lifestyle’, as a fable of Cuban socialist modernity. According to Hoeg, Barnet’s transcription reduced Montejo to a tabula rasa, a ‘blank slate’, on a teleological path toward modern revolutionary nationalism.Footnote 145 But through Giral’s insinuating question, Montejo confabulated elements of his maroon past, as his memory clustered together the mambises along with the owners and the Civil Guard. Put differently, he borrowed the memories of subjects who ‘chose life in the manigua … over participation in an anticolonial war effort’,Footnote 146 thereby crafting a history of himself. Esteban Montejo drifted, with discursive emphasis and swagger, away from a myth of the Cuban past: 1868, the historic call for national independence. He ran toward the myth of ‘the’ Cimarrón.
‘I was blind to the struggle of the other slaves’, Montejo had told Giral, ‘and I was sort-of blind to that; life mattered little to me. I considered myself free: libre o muerto [free or dead], one of those two things. That was my system of life.’Footnote 147 His phrase ‘libre o muerto’ may display a modest rebuke toward the revolutionary state’s official ‘Patria o Muerte’ (‘Homeland or Death’) slogan,Footnote 148 though Montejo erased the word patria itself and replaced it with libre, turning nation (and ‘the other slaves’) into the antithesis of freedom. Montejo was consistently wary of historic ‘struggles’, including Fidel Castro’s Revolution to some extent. After all, Montejo remembered ‘nothing other than the cane’ after various modern liberation projects ended anti-climactically. Montejo channelled his reticence towards modern revolutionary nationalism by flexing his cimarrón past to an emerging vanguard of Afrocubanismo.
In his famous lecture at the University of Havana in 1939 ‘the’ architect of Afrocubanismo, Fernando Ortiz, argued that ‘creole Blacks never thought of being anything but Cuban’.Footnote 149 In essence, Ortiz consolidated a nationalist teleology that retrospectively bonded exiled Black and African-diasporic communities to Cuban ‘nationhood, freedom, and democracy’.Footnote 150 He patriotically overlooked the strategic ‘loyalty’ that many Black creoles showed toward Spanish colonial rule, the spread of Black internationalism throughout the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century, and ‘those who returned to Africa’.Footnote 151 But one of Montejo’s colleagues disrupts Ortiz’s teleology even further.
In 1970, Sara Gómez interviewed a former plantation worker named Felipe Ribalta, born in 1878. The two co-produced an audiovisual testimonio for her film De bateyes (1971), which was suspiciously ‘not exhibited’, likely censored.Footnote 152 According to Zeuske, who bases his analysis on an 1869 baptismal register, Montejo may have been born the son of a ‘Dionisia Conga’ at the Santa Teresa plantation in 1868 and christened Esteban ‘Ribalta’.Footnote 153 Felipe was born in Rodrigo, a town attached to the Santa Teresa plantation, to an African-born mother who ‘freed herself’. He was raised in the town’s ‘Congo’ community.Footnote 154 While Esteban had told Gómez ‘my abuelo is Lucumí, was Lucumí’, he also reported to Giral ‘my godmother was African, Conga, and my godfather was also Congo, one was named Gin and the other Susana’. He was informed of his birthdate by his African godparents ‘after the War of Independence’.Footnote 155 Put simply, Esteban and Felipe experienced overlapping times, plantation regimes and Congo-inspired communities.
But Felipe fondly remembered a plantation owner: Doña Carmen Ribalta. ‘Everyone was already free’, Felipe recalled, ‘but she ordered everyone to gather together in Santa Teresa … So that she could provide rations to everyone so they wouldn’t die of hunger because there was a war going on in Cuba. And you couldn’t get things, because the ing– [ingenio, i.e. sugar-mill complex], the pueblos were burning, and houses were burning …’ He described the material benefits offered by Doña Carmen: ‘The truth is she took the best care of us. She gave us food, clothes and everything. And when the harvest began, everyone started working. She paid a wage to everyone, it was a small wage but based on what was available you could live. And no one lacked anything. That was in Santa Teresa, during the War of ’95.’Footnote 156 Felipe was one of many creoles ‘uninvolved in the pursuit of nation’, committed to getting by.Footnote 157 ‘Those who were slaves’, he reported, ‘[said] that it was the same … she was a good woman’.
Felipe’s historical life was filled with profound social and cultural change, as he remembered: ‘The Congos came and went … Diego, Pablo, Ricardo … my carabela Dionisia … and that’s how these barrios were created, which were all African.’Footnote 158 The term ‘carabela’ [sailing boat/ship] circulated amongst slave traders, referring to the enslaved who shared ‘the same vessel’. According to a different theory, ‘carabela’ is Congo-inspired, from ‘kala’ meaning ‘to live’ and ‘bela’ meaning ‘group of house dwellings’.Footnote 159 Whatever its origins, the term gained currency within Black creole communities and still resonated with Ribalta in 1970. Gómez subsequently asked him: ‘And those drums, Felipe?’ He softly tapped his drums. ‘This one?’ he replied, ‘it’s 78 years old, it’s retired … it belonged to the Casino Africano: this here, was the home of the Africans … all of this had its society, its king, its procurador who was the one who addressed any issue that happened to an African in the sugar-mill.’ Felipe also told Gómez, ‘If I could have gone to Africa before, I would have gone to the place where my mother was from …’Footnote 160 Felipe fondly remembered Doña Carmen, African societies and Africa, while Esteban selectively remembered the productive perils of Cuba Libre. Both drifted away from Ortiz’s nationalist teleology, with their memories, into the depths of the audiovisual interface: a labyrinth of selective remembrance.
The ICAIC’s archival record suggests that Esteban Montejo pragmatically operated on Cuban nationalism as a cimarrón and mambí (see Figure 1). He inscribed his experiences with the archival tools of the modern nation state but historicised himself beyond Cuba Libre. Montejo ‘proved savvy at dodging, manipulating, [and] strategically engaging cultural and political sponsorship offered in institutional form’.Footnote 161 The Cuban Revolution promoted a pre-modern cimarrón with a ‘palaeolithic lifestyle’ to construct its socialist modernity. But Esteban Montejo was an ‘otherwise modern’ cultural worker,Footnote 162 a Black creole with a knack for crafting contingent historical memories. Montejo was willing to ‘do’ more than 100 years of Cuban Revolutions. Given – and carving out – more creative space, he started igniting the flames of an African-inspired revolutionary cinema, consolidating his ‘resurrection’.Footnote 163 Through the ICAIC, Montejo escaped back to the future, into the audiovisual afterlives of slavery and uprising. In 1967 he told his film crew, ‘I believe a man makes a people, as is being witnessed here …’Footnote 164
Figure 1. Esteban Montejo in the Audiovisual Interface
Looting History
Literary critic José María Conget called Sergio Giral’s Cimarrón ‘the prologue’ to his slave-rebellion trilogy, which started with El otro Francisco (1975).Footnote 165 The latter film was produced and screened before Cuba’s military intervention in Angola, which began in November 1975. In December of 1975, Fidel Castro would famously declare Cuba ‘un país latinoafricano’, thereby co-opting Fernando Ortiz’s life’s work.Footnote 166 But as cultural theorist Christabelle Peters has noted, ‘while the positional descendants of slave owners maintain an important political investment in [the redescription of violence], the descendants of slaves’ – and Esteban Montejo, if I may add – also retained a ‘vital cultural commitment to the mourning of enslaved ancestors’.Footnote 167
Giral’s El otro Francisco portrayed multiple ‘scenes of subjection’.Footnote 168 For example, the plotline involved a white planter, Ricardo, who sexually violates a mixed-race enslaved Black woman: Dorotea, ‘la mulata’. In March of 1975, Giral promoted his film as an ‘operation’ on Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s novel Francisco (written in 1839; published in 1880),Footnote 169 an abolitionist text that Giral considered ‘melodramatic’ and in line with the work of ‘bourgeois historians’.Footnote 170 Historically, ‘the real conditions of love in slavery were something else’, argued the film’s narrator, as his voice was synchronised with visuals of a white man raping a Black woman; ‘the few slave women of the plantation were used for the pleasure of white peons’. In the same sequence, Giral filmed a Black child who had been carrying cane being trampled by a cart-wheel, while a pregnant Black woman wept as she was whipped over the child’s corpse. The narrator declared that ‘All form of human sentiment was denied to the Black in the conditions of slavery.’ Giral effectively ‘mimed’ the colonial archive of ‘social death’,Footnote 171 especially in the first half of the film.
Giral’s scenes of subjection incorporated a Black contramayoral, who whipped enslaved labourers, such as Francisco, throughout the film. Giral had probably encountered Black contramayorales in Cuban Marxist historiography.Footnote 172 But the audiovisual of a Black contramayoral was also a series of memories that Esteban Montejo forcefully stimulated into the audiovisual interface. A man ‘had many enemies’, remembered Montejo, ‘he had the owners, he had the Civil Guard, and he had the Blacks themselves, the comrades themselves too’.Footnote 173 When Cubans went to the movies in the summer of 1975, they experienced the shadows of Montejo’s audiovisual signatures: condensations of memory which imploded as history into their eyes and ears. Montejo haunted Giral’s past, once again possessing the means of historical production.
Upon release, Cuban film critic Enrique Valdés Pérez described the film as a criticism of the myth of the ‘docile’ slave who ‘does not use his machete’ and commits suicide ‘out of cowardice’.Footnote 174 Valdés was alluding to the opening scene, which showed Francisco hanging from a tree, as well as Francisco’s fictional (or historical from the narrator’s point of view) second death from 26 lashes delivered by the mayoral and the Black contramayoral. Valdés was thereby promoting the ‘moral prohibition’ on suicide since 1959, which had failed to reduce Cuba’s continuously high suicide rates since the colonial nineteenth century.Footnote 175 He also praised the ‘great performances’ of the actors, including Alden Knight, who portrayed a ‘Lucumí slave’,Footnote 176 the character André Lucumí.
Indeed, the Lucumís play a central role in the film. In March of 1975, while promoting his upcoming film, Giral said: ‘They don’t tell us about la conspiración de Aponte, 1812’, alluding to the research of ethnohistorian José Luciano Franco.Footnote 177 In 1963, Franco had written La conspiración de Aponte about the 1812 anti-slavery plot, declaring its leader, José Antonio Aponte, to be a Lucumí priest inspired by Chángo.Footnote 178 Franco made this claim without any ‘documentary evidence’, according to Palmié.Footnote 179 Nonetheless, Chángo infiltrated the screenplay written by Giral and the ICAIC. In the film, a white plantation owner warns his associates: ‘You could hear the noise of drums reaching the coasts of eastern Cuba, you know what those drums were talking about? About muerte. Death and destruction of the white man … that republic of blacks, they now call Haiti.’ But André Lucumí preaches: ‘There’s a land that the Blacks call Haiti, where we are free! … The same machetes that cut cane are the same machetes that cut off heads! The Blacks and the whites are at war!’ In the screenplay, a ‘conspirator’ declares: ‘Let the fire of Chángo destroy the land of the master!’Footnote 180 But during (post-)production, Chángo was outshone by Ogun, sovereign of metals and the countryside.Footnote 181 Ogun captured the camera’s gaze in the final cut, possessing André Lucumí, through what Giral and the ICAIC described as ‘oraciones de los negros [prayers of the Blacks]’.Footnote 182
Ogun inspired ‘Sequence 96’, titled in the screenplay ‘Documentary: Uprising’. The screenplay proclaims that such ‘uprisings were supported by cimarrón communities that for centuries maintained the flame of Liberation in our Island. Names like ___ form part of the heroic tradition of the people of Cuba.’Footnote 183 The ICAIC promoted a teleology: African-inspired Black rebellions formed the genesis of Cuban liberation. In the film, André Lucumí slashes the Black contramayoral with his machete in el monte, subsequently strangling the mayoral in the sugar-mill with the backing of fellow rebels. As the rebels sabotage the plantation, the narrator remembers: ‘1812, uprisings in the sugar-mills … captained by the free Black: José Antonio Aponte.’ Plantation officials re-establish some level of control through what is described in the screenplay as ‘exemplary punishment … [severed] head of … Black rebel’.Footnote 184 Giral’s film was possessed by Montejo’s memories of violence as well as Franco’s ‘archive spirit’ as they co-created an African-inspired ‘freedom’s mirror’, inserting the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery into Cuban cinemas.Footnote 185 In these scenes, Giral (re)stimulated the Orishas into the audiovisual national past, but this was a teleological illusion of the revolutionary state.
Historically, the Orishas exerted their power within the audiovisual interface, not just as history but also as themselves, even during ‘the five grey years’ or ‘the bitter decade’, a period of re-intensified censorship on the island.Footnote 186 In a diary entry for May of 1971, Sara Gómez wrote about an upcoming ‘fiesta’ for Ochún, the sovereign of fertility: ‘she will come … We will gather and dance with her laughter and with her dance … the close relationship with [Black artist] Manolo Mendive and his Orishas has revitalised and stimulated me.’ She praised the fiesta as ‘legitimate and beautiful’, but noted that ‘I say it because, fuck, sometimes there’s too many beautiful and pleasant things to renounce in the name of so much shit … the most beautiful and profound part of this revolution has been assaulted, taken, and I would say betrayed by the thinking of the white petite-bourgeoise.’Footnote 187 Gómez experienced a regime of cultural looting and the imposition of state orthodoxy as well as what Ortiz described as the ‘generally “totalitarian”, excuse the word, modalities and structures of African dance, especially of the blacks’.Footnote 188 Gómez’s diary entry captured how two antagonistic but imbricated systems of the time, the Cuban Revolution and the Orishas, forcefully produced a seething African-inspired socialist citizen. This was a violent experience for Gómez, who exerted a Marxist consciousness that Ochún was well equipped to continuously penetrate. As de la Fuente once noted: ‘governments come and go, but the orishas stay forever’.Footnote 189
Giral’s ‘Documentary: Uprising’ captured soundman Germinal Hernández: a member of the Abakuá, he was Gómez’s widower (she had died in 1974).Footnote 190 He can be seen in Figure 1 capturing Esteban Montejo’s memories with his microphone. In the final cut of El otro Francisco, Hernández loots the plantation (see Figure 2).Footnote 191 The archival record suggests that, during production, Esteban Montejo inspired the artisans of history, expanding the audiovisual interface of ‘mortuary politics’ through which film producers and collaborators re-created cultural worlds by ‘reelappropriating’ slavery and African-inspired uprising. Montejo gardened a vociferous archive of death: his future or political afterlife.Footnote 192 Across time, he and Giral unconsciously operated on Ortiz’s ‘Una fiesta de Santería’, reconfiguring Afrocubanismo, ever so slightly, toward what C. L. R. James called a ‘West Indian’ revolution: a wider, historical continuum of Caribbean cultural and political revitalisation.Footnote 193 As the African-inspired proverb suggests, ‘Iku lobi Ocha’: ‘The dead give birth to the sovereigns.’Footnote 194
Figure 2. Germinal Hernández in the Audiovisual Interface
‘Esteban, I ask myself’, once wondered Giral, ‘you who were a slave, a cimarrón, then in the war, then afterwards in the War of [19]12, who has lived through almost the entire history of Cuba it can be said, how do you feel after all those experiences?’ Montejo calmly replied: ‘Today I feel satisfied.’ He then spoke rather sternly. ‘Because all of that has been dissolved. All the crooks have dissolved … but there’s still some crooks.’ Montejo continued describing the historic change, and changelessness, he was witnessing. ‘However’, Montejo cautioned with his usual reticence, conjuring that lurking force: ‘There’s an underlying evil, there’s an underlying evil.’ He paused for a moment, then instructed: ‘You must steal it for us!’ Giral ‘cut’ as Montejo laughed, charmingly or mischievously.Footnote 195 And this was the spirit and example that Esteban Montejo willed to the artisans of Caribbean histories.
Conclusion
Édouard Glissant wrote that ‘the depths’ of Caribbean histories ‘are not only the abyss of neurosis but primarily the site of multiple converging paths’.Footnote 196 Fernando Ortiz and Esteban Montejo may have never crossed paths in a physical sense, but they occupied each other’s cultural projects and social worlds. Ortiz structured African inspirations into a national programme of cultural integration, a programme the ICAIC systematically co-opted. Through that process, the socialist state opened a platform through which Esteban Montejo recalibrated Ortiz’s audiovisual blueprints. As a cultural worker, Montejo expanded the audiovisual interface through which artists and powerful forces, such as the dead and the Orishas, captured the means of historical production and permeated the Communist state, reconfiguring it toward a catechism of African-inspired revolutionary nationalism, at least at the movies in the summer of 1975.
The audiovisual interface forced certain scripts upon Montejo, who willed and archived his social histories through two distinct but imbricated acts: as a cimarrón and mambí of modern revolutionary nationalism. He crafted himself through the imaginaries of the nation state which co-opted his Black creole consciousness, ultimately capturing el cimarrón and turning him into a legendary mambí. The revolutionary state thereby advanced the longue durée Cuban nationalist programme of silencing Black memories of 1912. Within the unequal structures of Cuban History, Montejo pragmatically exerted a liberatory politics in a reticent and reciprocal relationship with the nation state. Notably, he remembered the experience of racialised subjection, quite vividly, while his memories of Cuba Libre continuously drifted toward ambivalence, towards la manigua. Esteban Montejo lived in neither 1975 nor 1812, but his memories possessed pasts and futures far beyond his historical life and Cuba.
Acknowledgements
Este artículo no habría sido posible sin el apoyo de tantos cubanos dentro y fuera de la isla. Quiero agradecer especialmente a mi querido amigo Luwin Lahera, quien me presentó a Lilian Morales. Les doy gracias a Lily y a Benigno Iglesias por su profundo apoyo y especialmente al gran poeta cubano Hubert Gil, ya entre los muertos, por facilitar mi acceso a los archivos del ICAIC. Desde la Cinemateca de Cuba y el ICAIC, también deseo agradecer a Daymar Valdés, Dayron Miranda y Juan Grillo por su amplia experiencia en el cine así como a Luciano Castillo, Lola Calviño, Sara Vega, Mario Naito, Clara Eduardo, Yanet Dieppa, Tony Mazón, José Cangas, Margarita Márquez, Sergio Muñoz, Nilo Prats, Abel Machado, Olivia Cordovés, Anyi Llera Casido, Marlen Quiñones y Marla Almaguer Quiñones. Desde el Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística en La Habana, les doy gracias a Rosa Marina González y a Grisel González Albernal. I would like to give a special thanks to my advisors Pablo Gómez and Patrick Iber for their continuous guidance as well as to Brenda Gayle Plummer and Víctor Goldgel Carballo, who also guided the earliest stages of this work. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo and the rest of my colleagues at UW’s Workshop on Latin American History have likewise enriched this article. I am also grateful to Steve Stern for introducing me to the concept of an ‘archival backdoor’, as well as to Stephan Palmié, who introduced me to the ‘cooking of history’. All three of JLAS’s referees as well as the editors provided me with insightful comments which helped me to sharpen this ‘final’ draft.
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