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Racism and gender violence in Wendy Guerra’s Negra
María E. López
‘Fidel is infused in the structures. The Cuban Revolution is a fact and it is difficult to escape’.
1 Spanish original: ‘Fidel está inoculado en las estructuras. La revolución cubana es un hecho y es difícil escapar’; Aristegui Noticias, ‘Uno se parece a su país y entre más lo niegas, más te pareces’, 21 May 2017; https://aristeguinoticias.com/2105/kiosko/uno-se-parece-a-su-pais-y-entre-mas-lo-niegas-mas-te-pareces-wendy-guerra/ [accessed 6 November 2020]. With this powerful and provoking statement, the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra explains her views on how the revolution has permeated the lives of Cubans and their difficulties in escaping from it. She shows her detachment from a system that is sustained by ideological control; the prolonged threat of censorship, jail and exile due to ‘ideological diversionism’; and other forms of political violence against subordinated individuals, including women and black people, in present-day Cuba.
Guerra was born after Fidel Castro came to power. For her, as for others of her generation, the revolutionary ideal has crumbled, along with the hope of having a prosperous future on the island. This is perhaps because Guerra did not experience the heroic revolutionary excitement of the 1960s but, rather, everything that followed it:
The so-called Special Period, the crisis of the boatmen of 1993, the sinking of the tugboat on 13 March (1994) and the subsequent executions marked thousands of families, who lost their parents, children, grandparents and grandchildren in the middle of the sea. People you never knew about perhaps drowned, were eaten by sharks or were shot by the coast guard.
2 Spanish original: ‘El llamado Periodo Especial, la crisis de los balseros de 1993, el hundimiento del Remolcador 13 de Marzo (1994) y los fusilamientos posteriores marcaron a miles de familias que perdieron a sus padres, hijos, abuelos y nietos en medio del mar. Personas de las que jamás se supo y tal vez perecieron ahogados, comidos por un tiburón o derribados por la guardia costera’; Wendy Guerra, ‘Cuba, una historia de necrológicas’, La Vanguardia, 18 August 2019; https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20190818/464131332451/cuba-historia-necrologicas.html [accessed 6 November 2020].She thus revolts against the ideological directionism that is ‘inoculated’ into individuals in Cuba, using her own words. She claims: ‘I speak, I give myself away, I express myself and realise that I am nothing for which I was designed (or better), assembled’.
3 Spanish original: ‘Hablo, me delato, me expreso y caigo con la culpa de no ser nada para lo que fui diseñada (o mejor), ensamblada’; Wendy Guerra, Nunca fui primera dama (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2011), p. 17. Guerra is a white woman of Chinese and black ancestry who lives above average Cuban standards. For her, being Cuban involves a complex and rich dimension of Cubanness. She therefore dissents from what Odette Casamayor-Cisneros calls the ‘cosmology’ of the Cuban Revolution, understood as the ideology designed by the government that has brought logic to the world that Cubans have lived in since 1959 ‘and which sustains both the emotional and rational dimensions of their existence’.
4 Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, ‘Floating in the Void: Ethical Weightlessness in Post-Soviet Cuba Narrative’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 31.1 (March 2012), 38–57, p. 38. In response to this, Guerra gives a voice to those who feel they have become outsiders in Cuba, in particular individuals who were born after Fidel Castro came to power, women and individuals who are mixed race or black.
In his introduction to the anthology
Cuba y el día después, De la Nuez writes that those born after the 1960s in Cuba were educated to live in the utopian society constructed by their parents, only to find out, after the collapse of the socialist system, that they were ‘called upon to imagine and live in a world that was very different to the promised one, as if they were balancing on a tightrope between a lost and a possible future’.
5 Spanish original: ‘conminados a imaginar y vivir un mundo diferente al prometido, como si se balancearan en una cuerda floja entre el futuro perdido y el futuro posible’; Iván de la Nuez, Cuba y el día después: doce ensayistas nacidos con la revolución imaginan el futuro (Madrid: Grijalbo Mondadori, 2001), pp. 9–10. He states that these ‘sons of the revolution’ inhabit a future in which the revolution is ‘perceived as a border zone’.
6 Spanish original: ‘[h]ijos de la Revolución […] habitan en un futuro en el que […] la Revolución [es percibida] en una zona límite’; De la Nuez, Cuba y el día después, p. 99. They explore the boundary zones between what is allowed and accepted and what is not.
To fully understand Guerra’s approach to Cuban reality, it is necessary to highlight a crucial issue: censorship and ideological directionism in the construction of the official history of the island. Guerra explains: ‘Many things are known, others are presumed, but the details are a true mystery’.
7 Spanish original: ‘Muchas cosas se saben, otras se presumen, pero los detalles son un verdadero misterio’; Wendy Guerra, ‘Política doméstica Cubana’, El País, 25 August 2016; https://elpais.com/cultura/2016/08/25/actualidad/1472136361_392320.html [accessed 6 November 2020]. Revealing the mystery brings transparency to life on the island, including the dynamics of political violence against powerless citizens. In doing so, the author herself becomes a subversive individual on the island.
Negra (2013),
8 Wendy Guerra, Negra (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2013). the novel that this chapter centres on,
offers an account of how the racial discrimination in present-day Cuba harms individuals and reduces the possibility of personal development and self-determination. From the very title, which clearly vindicates the black racial identity, Guerra makes it clear that she does not intend to present a conciliatory portrait of the ways in which the Cuban government deals with racism in present times.
Negra tells the story (in first person) of the eventful life of a young Creole woman from Havana, Nirvana del Risco, called Nina by her family and friends. Nina is contradictory and unstable and acts on instinct. Nina primarily self-declares herself a
cimarrón (a runaway slave), vindicating her identity as an African woman in search of freedom in colonial times.
Nina lives in Old Havana with her grandmother, Cuca Gándara, a devotee to the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, or the Rule of Ocha, and a stereotype of a Cuban woman with moral standards to be respected by all. Nina has a relationship with Jorge, who despises her for being black. He acts as a representative of the white elite. His insults and authoritarianism jeopardise Nina’s integrity. She travels to France with Lu, her close friend, with whom she has an intermittent lesbian relationship. Nina begins a relationship with Philippe, a socialist in his 60s, who is disenchanted with the Latin American left-wing governments that he supported a while ago. After the tragic death of Philippe’s partner, Nina moves to the mountainous area of Escambray with her grandmother and Catalina, Jorge’s grandmother. In Escambray, outside of all legality and without permission, the three women start making recipes and potions with local natural products, aimed at caring for the beauty of black women. Philippe arrives one day and settles with them. His presence arouses the suspicion of the authorities, with whom the women had experienced trouble with registering their business. His use of marijuana causes the eviction of the residents: most of them must return to Havana, while Philippe must return to France.
Nina starts to work in an institutional body in Cuba and, after a reception at the Norwegian embassy, she spends the night with one of the guests, a young mixed-race resident of the US. Nina visits Jorge in jail and he threatens her again. She travels to Escambray to destroy everything that was left of her frustrating company. Jorge sets fire to the cabin where Nina is collecting the products and stabs her to death. Lu is in charge of Nina’s funeral and reveals that she is the writer of Nina’s story.
In
Negra, racial discrimination is presented as a form of political violence, in what is known as ‘institutional racism’. We shall see that in
Negra, State forces, through institutional racism, perpetuate such discrimination by objectifying and denying Nina’s autonomy. In addition to the lack of opportunities for black individuals, institutional racism manifests in the attempt to make them invisible. Sir William Macpherson defined institutional racism as the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.
9 William MacPherson, ‘Report of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry’, February 1999; https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/277111/4262.pdf [accessed 19 November 2020]. Institutional racism in
Negra is detected in discriminatory legal and political processes associated with ideologies inherited from colonial times, which restrict the possibility for personal development for non-whites on the island.
Beyond racial discrimination, Nina becomes a victim of gender-based violence in the patriarchal and disciplinary Cuban system. Her inability to survive, manifested at the end of the novel with her femicide, confirms the failure of the system to carry out its initial plans to achieve justice and social equality for all. In itself, telling her story constitutes an act of protest against the impunity over the violence against black women in present-day Cuba.
Notwithstanding the above, Negra does not succeed fully in presenting a credible approach to the claustrophobic environment on the island for a young Creole woman. To begin with, the story is full of clichés, and this reduces the credibility of the story and the characters. Nina herself is cartoonish: her grandmother is a Santera, her grandfather is a musician and her approach to reality, as a ‘good African’, is wild, changing and contradictory. Other characters are also stereotyped, such as Nina’s mother, apparently a woman with a strong personality who was proud of herself, was a lesbian and was integrated into the feminist environment in France. Yet, Nina involves herself in endless entanglements, during which she tries to subvert institutional norms, resist the racist attitudes in two countries, deal with her hypersexuality and bisexuality, and engage with her spirituality in connection with her African roots, among other things. However, while Nina reacts as a feminist on several occasions, she cannot be categorised as such and behaves instead driven by impulse and unclear logic.
These are also too many challenges for someone who acts on instinct. The novel has short chapters and is divided into four parts, dedicated to Nina’s life in Havana, her departure for Paris, her return to Cuba and her projects in Cuba. Nina’s adventures are mixed, with recipes from Santería, dictionary definitions, poems, song lyrics, scores of musical pieces, letters, and a long list of elements that refer to oral culture and music. Some parts are fast-paced and come across as superficial. Overall, Guerra fails to fully articulate the disciplinary factors in the lives of Afro-Cuban women or provide an effective account of their struggles to survive the political constraints in Cuba today. Nina complains that ‘the story has rarely been told by us blacks’,
10 Spanish original: ‘la historia muy pocas veces ha sido contada por nosotros los negros’; Negra, p. 283. and yet Guerra frames the novel in a masculine and European literary tradition.
I have divided this chapter into three parts. The first section briefly addresses the dynamics of racial discrimination and gender inequality in Cuba since Fulgencio Batista’s time, as a form of political violence that is perpetuated by institutions. I then look at the representation of racial discrimination and the violence against women in Negra.