Introduction

Our poetry, from Heredia to date, has been alert to politics. The completeness of human beings was given to us in the figure of José Martí, the unifying incarnation of words and action, of history and poetry, of immanence and significance. Since his fall in Dos Ríos, older or younger, we all Cubans are or should be his sons and daughters.

When it seemed that poetic words were sealing themselves off to the point of a total separation from politics, José Lezama Lima wrote in Orígenes in January 1953, “Secularidad de José Martí” [Secularity of José Martí], which reads, “In his first secularity, the living fertility of his force as a historical impulse capable of leaping over the rough insufficiencies of the immediate to advise us of the cupolas of the new nascent actions is surprising.”

In the development of these acts that constitute the living history of our Revolution, Cuban poetry has constantly given testimony of the profoundest political events. One example of that is in many of the poems by Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, but also in younger poets such as Reinaldo García Blanco, seemingly the ironic and playful inventor of the most unheard realities that one day will be understood as political testimonies.

The core – if not necessarily the theme of our poetry – is politics. Guillermo has openly demonstrated that, and now he is giving us a treatise on the history of Cuba that could only be written in the wake of the years of Revolution through which we have lived.

At this time it is not about putting poetry on one side and prose on the other, as if they were genres invented by the Academy for its delight. It is about accepting everything that we have experienced from all languages; it is about putting language at the service of reality – only that reality does not end with newspapers, which in their turn have their own poetry. At the end of the day, it is about
writing as one lives and in that Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera is simply a maestro, more conversational than magisterial, master of his verse and his prose, both of which he uses as he likes. For a start, this time he has written what is a profound meditation on the events that constitute us as a nation and as a homeland, two things that, in my judgment, are not the same. The nation is a fact. The homeland is a mystery. But we are not going to make a theology of the homeland. Nothing is further from that than the acute and perceptive author of this book, which, it seems to me, should have been called “Nosotros, los cubanos” [We, the Cubans], and which should be read by those who want to know who we are and how we are, although of course, we will never all agree on such points. Because really being Cubans consists, among other things, in not agreeing.

However, all of us will agree on the lucidity, directness and courage of this extremely short essay of an intellective foundation, if such a genre exists. For example, Guillermo tells us that when the United States stops pestering us, we shall have to reexamine ourselves internally. Among many others, that observation is what we could call a poetic historiography; that is, without lyricism. In this case, the poet reserves his lyricism for his infinite love of trova, of which he and his brother Alipio are Quixotes and bayardos.

My thanks to Iroel Sánchez for inviting me to this launch and congratulations on promoting a mass reedition of Por el camino de la mar; Los cubanos; or Nosotros, los
cubanos, a book that we will all enjoy and that we all need.

Cintio Vitier

Words read out at the launch of the first edition of this book, October 15, 2005.

Many years ago now I wrote a poem that I entitled “Cubano” [Cuban]. In the barely two pages that it covers, I tried to approach certain ways of being of people in my country.

In some way, these 100-plus pages are the consequence of those two pages; or rather, those and these are the fruit of an inquiry in order to discover how we are (in other words, who we are), which regresses from time to time into our history, I suppose to the point when it becomes very clear. Doubtless, it will then no longer concern enough to make us write on this subject.

Or perhaps not, because I do not believe in a national spirit laid down for once and for all, and maybe we have to return to the subject periodically.

Although I have frequently written them, I did not want to convert this meditation into an academic essay, with a copious bibliography and clusters of notes at the bottom of the page. I preferred to let my discourse flow freely, perhaps referring – except from all the necessary distances, which are many – to the founder of the genre, Michel de Montaigne. And it is strange, but that freedom was linked to that of the “post-modern essay,” also a return to the origins.

In addition to the authors quoted in the text, I have to mention a couple of books read a long time ago, and to which these pages are owed: Raíces psicológicas del cubano [Psychological Roots of Cubans] by José Ángel Bustamante, and
El carácter cubano [The Cuban Character] by Calixto Masó. And to evoke another to whose family this essay would wish to belong: El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] by Octavio Paz. Finally, I dedicate a salute in the distance and a mischievous wink at my wise and joyful professor of History of America, The Guatemalan Don Manuel Galich.

As I advanced in the writing, these pages were politicizing me, because neither do I believe in the existence of a “national soul” on the margins of history. Politics are nothing more than confused history: that maremagnum of events, and ideas that have to proceed to occupy their place, clarifying themselves with the implacable march of time. Cubans’ lives have been so immersed in the political witches’ Sabbaths of their nation that it is impossible to talk of one without concerning oneself with the
others. Thus, when history and politics loudly reclaimed their presence, I let them flower and tell what they had to tell.

All in all, this is not an essay that wishes to assume an essentially political point of view. Moreover, in order to inquire into how we are and who we are, it has become inevitable to also try to elucidate why we are that way.

We have lived so much plagued by the urgencies of the exhausting way of life that we have almost always had, that it is worth stopping for a moment to look at ourselves in the mirror. I would like it to be how Antonio Machado asked, “not to shave or dye your hair.” Hopefully, we will achieve it, you, the readers and I.

g. r. r.

Note for the
Second Edition

I have to confess that I was surprised (I would be lying if I did not say pleasantly) by the welcome given to the first edition of this essay. Many readers have praised it, and my vanity has obliged me to include in this second edition the generous words with which Cintio Vitier introduced the first one.

It was he who suggested the change to the book’s title. He told me that the essay should be called “Nosotros, los cubanos” and it was not at all difficult for me to welcome one of those alternative titles dreamed up by Renaissance or Romantic figures like Othello or the Moor of Venice, or Don Alvaro or The Force of Destiny. It is, above all, a minimal demonstration of my admiration for the maestro Vitier.

Some good friends suggested that I should update the book politically. It did not seem appropriate to me to
change anything in the first offering, but to add as an appendix the consideration of an issue particularly in use in our times: the so-called “globalization.” To a certain extent, it is a problem that besets the Cuban destiny.

It only remains for me to thank the readers of Nosotros, los cubanos. Hopefully, those of Nosotros, los cubanos, will be as many and as good as they were.

g. r. r.