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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2002
Afro-Cuban 'Heart'Raices de mi Corazon ("Roots of My Heart"), a film directed by Gloria Rolando, Imagines del Caribe. This independently produced Afro-Cuban film is both artful and deeply rooted in history. Gloria Rolando based some of the story upon her family. It begins with a Black Cuban journalist, Mercedes, hearing from her white boss that "now isn't the time" to research a particular historic episode which she is interested in because of her family's forgotten history. Her search for this past leads her to the Cuban uprising of 1912, in which up to 6,000 Blacks were killed, most of them members of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC). The PIC, the first Black political party outside of Haiti, was founded by Evaristo Estenoz in 1908 to fight for the rights Blacks had been denied in Cuba despite the fact that they made up the vast majority of fighters in the Army of Liberation against Spain. The U.S. military occupation reinforced the intense racism that had been inherited from slavery and Spanish colonial rule. The repression in Cuba had always been especially intense for fear of a Haitian-style slave uprising. Interestingly, the film shows how the memory of 1912 was kept alive by songs in Haitian Creole that the ruling class didn't understand well enough to ban. By 1910 the PIC had more than 10,000 members and the white ruling class was worried enough to begin demonizing them with false stories of rape and pillage. They roused fears of a "race war" which became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the U.S.-backed military moved to massacre the Black population. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rolando was asked how the history of the PIC was treated in Cuba today. She stated that it was still not spoken of in schools, and probably wouldn't be in the near future, although the time would come. At the end of "Raices de mi Corazon," Mercedes is telling her children the story, but much remains unspoken. This is no longer the silence of an unspoken past, but the more profound silence of an unwritten future. It makes this celebration of Black identity an education for anyone. —Gerard Emmett |
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