Negra is a hectic, easy-to-read novel about the eventful life of a young Afro-Cuban woman. Her story reveals the difficulties of well-educated and young black women in surviving the stigma associated with their gender, social class and race in 21st-century Cuba. Nina, who declares her status as a cimarrón (a runaway slave), involves herself in endless entanglements, during which she tries to subvert the Cuban disciplinary system, transgress sexual norms, resist the racism in two countries and engage with her spirituality away from African regulations, among others.
Despite the good things in the novel, Guerra embarked on an ambitious plan with this novel and failed to execute it completely. Manichaeism on some fronts prevents the production of a realistic account of Nina’s suffering due to racial discrimination. Negra also highlights the interpersonal and institutional racism in supposedly more advanced countries, such as France. In this way, Guerra minimises the situation in Cuba, to which Nina decides to return later in the novel.
Nina suffers violent attacks from Jorge and finally becomes a victim of femicide. Rather than criticising the criminal act and the perpetrator, the narration of her killing focuses on Nina’s profound sense of freedom, which culminates in her melting with her mother. Only death can free Nina the cimarrón (escaped slave). Let us remember Guerra’s words about the Cuban Revolution at the beginning of the chapter: ‘un hecho’ (‘a fact’) from which ‘es difícil escapar’ (‘it is difficult to escape’). For many of Guerra’s generation, only death can liberate the stigmatised from the political violence that manifests in Cuba in, as I have said before, ideological control, censorship, prison and forced exile. To Guerra, leaving the island is therefore another form of prison.