Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Grassroots Africans: Havana's “Lagosians”
- 2 Returning to Lagos: Making the Oja Home
- 3 “Second Diasporas”: Reception in the Bight of Benin
- 4 Situating Lagosian, Caribbean, and Latin American Diasporas
- 5 Creating Afrocubanos: Public Cultures in a Circum-Atlantic Perspective
- Conclusion: Flow, Community, and Diaspora
- Appendix Case Studies of Returnees to Lagos from Havana, Cuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
5 - Creating Afrocubanos: Public Cultures in a Circum-Atlantic Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Grassroots Africans: Havana's “Lagosians”
- 2 Returning to Lagos: Making the Oja Home
- 3 “Second Diasporas”: Reception in the Bight of Benin
- 4 Situating Lagosian, Caribbean, and Latin American Diasporas
- 5 Creating Afrocubanos: Public Cultures in a Circum-Atlantic Perspective
- Conclusion: Flow, Community, and Diaspora
- Appendix Case Studies of Returnees to Lagos from Havana, Cuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Summary
El rayo surca, sangriento,
El lóbrego nubarrón:
Echa el barco, ciento a ciento,
Los negros por el portón.
El viento, fiero, quebraba
Los almácigos copudos;
Andaba la hilera, andaba,
De los esclavos desnudos.
El temporal sacudía
Los barracones henchidos:
Una madre con su cría
Pasaba, dando alaridos.
Rojo, como en el desierto,
Salió el sol al horizonte:
Y alumbraró un esclavo muerto,
Colgado a un seibo del monte.
Un niño lo vio: tembló
De pasión por los que gimen:
¡Y, al pie del muerto, juró
And, at the dead man's feet,
Blood-red lightning cleaves
The murky overcast:
A ship disgorges, by the hundreds,
Blacks through the hatches.
The raging winds laid low
The copious mastic trees;
And rows of naked slaves
Walked onward, onward.
The tempest shook
The swollen barracks;
A mother with her babe
Passed by, screaming.
Red as a desert sun,
The sun rose on the horizon:
And shone upon a dead slave,
Hanging on a mountain ceiba.
A small boy witnessed it:
He trembled for the groaning men;
vowed
To cleanse that crime with his life!
José Martí, “Versos Sencillos XXX”In this poem, Cuban poet José Martí depicts the arrival of African slaves in Cuba in a tragic manner. His characterization surrounds the violence done to Africans with metaphors of nature's ferocity.
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- Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World , pp. 111 - 139Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010