I am under the impression that return journeys are at a disadvantage compared to expansion journeys. People tend to write less about them, and they do not elicit from the reader the same degree of empathy. Generally, the return journey is a lonely one. I suppose it has to do with the fascination that entering the unknown produces in most people, the rush of adrenaline of trying to make the new ours and integrate it into what was already there, like a small-scale demiurge.
Sometimes, this division does not circumscribe to the conventional versions of these processes, we have witnessed return journeys that instead of consisting of a travel from one point to another, have been incredibly prolonged and have ended up as journeys of expansion and growth. This is the case of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, for example, and also of Martinique’s Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Country. We could not rush here an analysis of texts that in themselves are a universe, perhaps only to say that a text that explores the relationship between return and extended time would be very useful, in order to imagine a border different from a line; in the end, a border as voices that respond to each other and form a space of the present. A space where neither the past nor the future exerts excessive violence on the indomitable, though apparently minor, geography of an island or a black body. As Césaire says: “Presences it is not on your back that I will make peace with the world.”
We always talk about travels as processes of movement, of coming and going, of displacements that are chained together. We think of travel with the minds of explorers, of conquerors even, and what happens with the conqueror is that, even if he never returns, he converts everything he touches into the stuff of an old, previous world. And that is the greatest violence that can be exercised, because it denies the possibilities of the future, both in reality and in itself.
Unfortunately, I believe that many of the voyages of conquest only meant expansion in a formal way, more lands were gained, and the victor’s map was enlarged, but one might ask whether the promised reinvention of the known world finally took place or only a reinforcement of an already existing, already imagined worldview. In any case, we are witnessing the creation of the modern world, where the spirit of the conqueror triumphed over the spirit of the explorer.
The history of literature, and later the cinema with its spectacular road movies, has quite often recounted these journeys of expansion, and has even delved into the internal journey that takes place in the minds of those who undertake it, individuals usually in crisis, who align their process of movement with the journey itself and who, in the end, are purified, transformed. I remember, for example, the protagonist of The Magic Mountain, Hans Castor, a tormented body and soul who, just a few hours after starting his journey to the International Sanatorium, and unaware of the transcendence that such a journey would have for his life and for his time, could already experience concrete changes in his spirit, which are revealing if we want to understand the kind of influence that space and movement can exert on events and human agency:
Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
However, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed another kind of journey, that of Central West Africans kidnapped and forcibly transported not only to a distant and unknown land but to a scheme of large-scale exploitation where they would occupy the last step, slave labor. How can we forget that the modern imaginary, based on the Caribbean seas flooded with fantastic monsters, on its brief and marvelous islands that timidly announced the abundance of an unexplored world, vast lands where dumb dogs coexisted with never before seen amounts of gold, did not find a more intelligent and humble way to deal with the original inhabitants found in its path than to doubt their human condition and strip them of their riches, while at the same developing an absurd debate around this doubt that seems more a pretext than an authentic inquiry?
The acknowledgment of the humanity of the natives brought as a consequence the introduction of the Africans into the equation of the New World, the scapegoats that the Old World extracted from its margins, mysterious Africa, the enormous continent that Europeans had circumvented and probed with trading posts and small settlements, but that, with few exceptions, they had never explored, nor plundered, in depth. Africa remained inaccessible, until the slave ships began to sail with long lines of people, one on top of the other, to America.
The first question to be asked is whether this horror can even be called a voyage. One would have to ask the Africans who were once hunted, enslaved, and transported against their will to the “New World” how they experienced a voyage of no return. For some reason, all the language substitutes I can think of are related to medical or paranormal processes, such as transplants, change of life, change of blood, or even reincarnation. But not travel.
For many years, centuries even, Africans did not abandon the idea of returning home, to their families, to their cultures. Time passed and that desire became a dream, and the dream became utopia and utopia became taboo. Everything close to them, their own, became strange and unattainable, the source of all legitimizations, but also all fantasies and all generalizations. Each city, kingdom, or tribe lost its specificity and everything became Africa again, a great block, just as Europe or America were produced as something monolithic in the new world order.
The processes of learning and unlearning always occur in unison, sometimes even depending on each other because it is a process of production rather than reception or fortuitous substitution. The process of “discovery of the New World” ended up hiding more than it revealed. Only that, at the same time, each individual, each body that arrived in every corner of America, became a vessel and cultural receptacle that survived, adapted, mixed, forgot, remembered, changed, learned, and taught. Each fragment ceased to be a fragment, and the new relationships established generated new limits and new alliances until one day stop existing the land from which I came and the land in which I am. Everything was the same land where the dead were buried.
Does violence guarantee oppression forever? No. Violence, like hatred, fear, and other similar emotions that are erected as policies towards others, should not be fetishized, and should not be equated with an identity. They are not even in some body or object or the social, understood abstractly as a thing; they circulate in relationships and go about creating the very realities and actors that then seem to contain them. That is the real journey, the one emotions, imaginaries, prejudices, and human practices made, creating the world we inhabit and the rules we obey. The true journey of the Africans began when there was no return.
Rescue as a Process
The rescue dynamic is one of the most frequent in the realm of emotional communities. It is very common to speak of rescue and think of war scenarios, spectacular military maneuvers in the style of Saving Private Ryan, or more local versions such as the rescue of Manuel Sanguily. There is also a gulf between this reckless notion of rescue and the usually bucolic way in which return journeys are presented, all imitations of that original journey to the seed, which seldom involves anyone other than the one who lives it. I am interested in talking about a different type of rescue and a different type of return. Of what precedes and accompanies rescue as an action, its logic of solidarity but also its logic of cultural and identity regeneration, which implies in the long term a journey in reverse, a return journey. I am also interested in shedding light on the not necessarily passive role of the rescued, to put on the table for reflection the rescues from within, rescues that create scenarios of regeneration of collective affinities and social and even emotional practices, damaged or made invisible.
In most cases, the protagonists of a rescue are not even aware that it is more than an act of bravery or solidarity dictated by the urgency of the event; when it is necessary to rescue someone or something, it is because it is in danger. It is seldom perceived as a generator of possibilities, its appearance is saturated with contingency and bad omens, and the desire for the future that it provokes is the elimination of everything that brought its need about. No one wants to remain in danger. The proximity of danger and rescue (I would almost say consecutivity, or dependence), makes this duo a device that, by its repetition and significance, is installed in the center of numerous cultural dynamics in which we are involved daily, without reflecting too much on it. To this duo we should add fear, which acts as a kind of symptom, but also as a catalyst and even as a producer of its own imaginary. Its presentation appears to be the most real thing in the world, but it often creates a fictitious order. Fear invents its reasons and its masquerade, which would merit a detailed analysis that we will do on another occasion.
The first time I felt rescued was at the Central Park Rumba in New York, a little over a year ago. For that, it was necessary to be outside Cuba. I live in the United States as an exile, due to the express prohibition of the Cuban State to enter my country, which became explicit on February 16 and 27, 2021.
The rumba in Central Park is also located in a specific place, although strange for those who do not know its history. There are conflicting versions of how and when it was started, but all agree that the landing in the United States of the Marielitos (as they call the Cubans who entered by sea from the port of Mariel in 1980, approximately 125 thousand people) renewed and maintained it until today. Arriving there, on a bend of the road in front of one of the lagoons of the park, very close to the Bridge of Sighs, is like arriving in a part of Cuba. And at the same time, it is like attending a Cuba already lost. It is not only about the number and diversity of Cubans who gather there—and also foreigners, especially Puerto Ricans and from several important points of the Caribbean—, but also about the atmosphere of remembrance that is breathed there.
All those who go, many regulars, remain anchored to a Cuba that, for the moment, and perhaps forever, only exists in the minds of each one of them and in that kind of collective idea that is regenerated there. Emotions, and a lot of pain among them, have reconstructed the physical place from which they left, and to which many have never returned. And they have called that place Cuba, and have filled it with all the small spaces in their memories: rooms, corridors, parks, rivers, jails, the family home in the countryside, the sea they had to cross to escape. They have built a bridge to their own emotions, to the emotions produced by the memory of their home. And, at the same time, they have been discarding all traces of differences or divisions within that nostalgia. On the other side, you only see Cuba and the inexplicable and unnamable force that took them out of it and keeps them away.
Sometimes, when I am there, I have come to feel that it is a ritual, the ritual of the rumba, which like all rituals is articulated on the pretense of bringing to the present some sacred reality, of developing the performance of the sacralization of a space and a time already past. The question persists: How does one experience a journey of no return? And how does one return? The ritual of the rumba is the answer to both.
If I resort to and expand on the rumba event it is, first, because I want to highlight the coincidence that they are also migrant subjects, many of them descendants of those who arrived by force to the “New World” several centuries ago and only brought a cultural legacy, literally, in their bodies. And second: rumba is a creative rescue, it did not exist before, neither in Africa nor in Spain, nor anywhere else, but many of the elements that make it up did exist, elements that were present in other contexts, senses, orders. The rescue of rumba as a musical or cultural phenomenon, in a broader sense, has come about after the rescue of the rumba social agent’s capacity for creation and sociability, their capacity to bring to their memory what they saw or what they were told, and to articulate it, together with what they saw or was told to others, in a new scenario of meaning in their present.
At the Central Park rumba, I witnessed not a rescue, and certainly not at all the rescue of African or Spanish traditions that were mixed, etc., etc. I witnessed many accumulated rescues, and one of its last incarnated subjects is this new migrant subject, who fled, who creates their scenarios of meaning which they call temporary, and who dreams of returning to a place that no longer exists. In reality, these rescues are about emotional communities that have saved themselves by wanting to save something else, by wanting to save the Homeland or the nation.
The Journey of the Nkisi
“I want to reflect on the story of this nkisi. To do something maybe… like a kind of diary of what we have experienced together. I think about the idea of the journey. The eventful journey that brought about our meeting; and the journey we’ve been on since we’ve been together. I hope that one day its place of origin will be its final destination. To take it to its homeland. Will it want to? Will they be waiting for it? Where does it really want to go? I will follow its will. For now, I think writing about these journeys is a good start. Start writing about it, Ana.”
“I’m very excited that you’re asking me that, but shouldn’t you ask first? I don’t know if it’s an excess of prudence, but I don’t want to do anything if it doesn’t authorize it. After all, it exists and it can decide.”
“Prudence is important here and almost always is. It is not overdoing it at all. I already asked, Ana.”
The above dialogue and what follows is a fairly accurate transcription of a story entrusted to me by my friend Amed Aroche. A story of Amed’s encounter with an African object, of Bantu origin, with no further specificities of culture or place where it was made. Amed found it in Montreal and, after a year of living together, he took it to Cuba, to the house where he was born, to the house of his ritual family, and left it there for about two years. Today the nkisi is back in Canada, with Amed.
“It was one store among many of those of antique dealers and rare objects, in Montreal. One more that decided to close and put all its items on clearance. I was walking around and I thought I’d go in. There is always an attractive mystery in these places of old things. As I entered, I saw that most of the items belonged to different African and Asian cultures. The owner, seeing me calmly looking at the things, suggested that the best was in the back, where there were real ritual objects, according to him. The place was big and a bit dark. It smelled of humidity and also like a space that had been closed for a long time and suddenly the air entered and everything started to breathe again, wood, fabrics, rust, papers.
“It was full of dust, in a corner. Twisted, because its base was damaged, as if eaten by some insect. I felt an instant connection. I experienced the current that one feels in front of an old garment. The fluid, as my dear Tata Pipo used to tell me… I was certain that it was real, authentic. Its details were impressive despite the low light of the place: the mirror on the belly, the glassy eyes, the teeth, the ears, the feet. It was not the aesthetics of craftsmanship, beyond the beauty or ugliness that could be interpreted in the object. Here it was about something else. The veracity that emanated from its ritual use, once daily, could also be perceived by the two loads it carried, the one on its head that was like mud and a kind of backpack on its back, with vegetable elements. Also, by the stains of dried blood that covered it and a very old patina. I felt very sorry for it, even if it had been ‘retired,’ as they say when a ritual object is discontinued from its religious use. I wondered but had no way of knowing and no way of buying it. These objects are expensive. The store owner gave me several discounts, but I still couldn’t afford it. I had just arrived and it cost practically all my money for the month. I went out worried, with a lot of guilt for leaving it there, it seemed that its spirit had stuck to me, it had gone with me.
“After several hours tormented with stomach cramps I so well know and numb arms, I went back and bought it. I spent $96 on it. A lot for me, several times too much, but some things just have to happen that way, that we can’t apply normal logic or certain notions of convenience. Without fully understanding what I was doing and why, at that point, my only purpose was to get it out of that warehouse. I had spent $96 without even knowing if it wanted to continue with me, but I took a chance. Still, my decisions were not coming from my rational self. They were coming from the place of instinct, the whisper, the ecstasy of encountering something pure. They were also coming from fear. My destiny has entangled with it, but more than anything, its destiny has entangled with mine.
“To move it I wrapped it in a cloth. Not in a bag directly, not in a nylon or paper, but something soft and warm, where it could be comfortable. On the way I started to feel fear, fear that I was taking a risk that I couldn’t sustain. I want to write it down because fear can be a symptom of a situation of domination, even anticipated domination, or injustice, or punishment, but it can also be a symptom of loss of control, of entering an unknown terrain, fear of the dissolution of that part of the self that we recognize and from which it is so difficult for us to leave. It is necessary to adopt fear, just as we adopt the feeling of a spirit that we run into and stays with us, would it be that fear is also that, the expression of a new spirit passing close to us?
“The long story of the nkisi with me, Ana, I won’t tell it to you. It’s a fairly normal story, with its ordinariness and the natural ritual that comes with living with magic as a possibility. Besides, I like to be cautious about these things. If there is one thing I shy away from, it is excessive spiritual vanity. I find the practice of spirituality and extreme vanity contradictory. But well, that’s another subject. I will tell you how I discovered that the nkisi was alive.
“When we arrived at the house that day, I left it at the door, outside. I went in, and I asked my familiar spirit if it was okay to bring it into the house. I was trying to establish a hierarchy and have my familiar be the one to guide the spiritual process of what would happen with it and with us, that kind of recognition. He said yes and once inside I did a spiritual work to receive it attend it and welcome it. At that moment I asked if it was alive, active. I think I asked it for a sign. All this was in the living room of the house, which had a double-glazed window. I was performing the plante with my back to the window. Minutes later the window collapsed and made a huge bang. I had to stop everything and run downstairs, pick up what was left of the window, and make sure that nothing and no one had been damaged. At the time I didn’t put the things together. When I returned and sat back down on the stool, I looked at it and knew that was its signal. Fast and violent, perhaps like its own life.”
The story of the nkisi frightened me. I knew immediately that telling it was essential, just as Amed thought, but that we could not release it by itself, without at least trying to find the resonance that a story like that had for our life and the recent life of Cubans.
It is incredible how things have come to us from the worlds that make up Africa, and how so much of what we are is due to that which got to us in pieces, and which helped us to produce new things, to produce ourselves together with them as something unrepeatable. And even more curious: many of the fragments were dematerialized fragments: ideas, memories, proverbs, songs, prayers, incantations, rhythms. Even when some of those blacks, torn from their communities, managed to take something physical with them, it was literally attached to or inside their bodies, like some amulet tied up, or those nquinis that a famous babalawo swallowed and transported in his intestine until he arrived in Cuba and expelled them from his body, his only and greatest treasure. It was an especially long and complex process to in-form that legacy and adapt it to a different place, nature, and dynamics and, above all, to a role of resistance and secrecy in accordance with the new situation of being dominated by their owners.
It is logical to think that many of the things that later began to arrive from that world left behind, which went from being their world to being the other, helped perform a rescue. And I am not only talking about religious practices and knowledge, I am talking about culture, because one of the main functions of culture is to regenerate the apparently severed tissues of society. Culture joins the dots again. And, at the same time, nothing is ever the same again. The act of rescuing is creative because it finds a new relationship, a new beginning with new roles, and above all with a conquered future.
The Impossible Community
“Amed, can you tell me what year the nkisi went to Cuba and how long it stayed there?”
“I found the nkisi in 2018. I took it to Cuba in 2019 and there it stayed until the end of 2020.”
“That’s what I had imagined, its visit coincided with the confinement.”
Here I dwell briefly on the Confinement of San Isidro, a relevant social and political episode that took place in November 2020 in Cuba and resulted in an authentic political crisis, with numerous cultural irradiations that still have not ended. The temporal coincidence of this episode with the nkisi’s stay in Cuba, its poetic connotation, as well as the participation in the confinement of the writer of this text, could be sufficient reason to mention it. However, there is a more powerful reason for this: the confinement, as a scenario of converging strategic and improvised imaginaries, gave way to political and cultural forms maybe not new in a sense of originality but new in a performative sense and of disruptive resistance.
A totalitarian power, such as that of the Cuban dictatorship, is not resisted only by the formation of a broad, frontal, and continuous front that positions itself before the omnipotent order, but from skirmishes and unexpected appearances that try to change the rules of the game of war conventionally expressed in central power vs. opposition. Those resistances, random and irregular, found their theater of operations, their journey of comings and goings; of incursions, retreats, trenches, and returns to a not so well mapped area of the Homeland. These disruptive resistances were already born with the mark of the marginal, of the frontier, and will die before becoming something else. They are, in good measure, impossible spaces, which is why we are interested in them. We are also interested in the impossibility of narration, that non-coincidence, but the closeness of the story told and the story lived.
The impossibility in the confinement was entwined by the tension between confinement and freedom, which we experienced inside that house, and that thousands of people experienced with us through social networks. It is the same tension between unresolved past, uncertain future, and delirious present, out of its usual channels, overflowing with unexpected meanings and signifiers, and also uncertainties. What was contained in that present we are still processing, ruminating, like a bovine that does not know where it is going but knows where it cannot return to. The impossible place to which we aspire, and of which we are already a part in some way, is more than a non-place because it comes with an irradiating and to some extent indefinable positive charge. The impossible place is our humanity that mutates as time goes by.
It is almost impossible to tell the story of those days during the San Isidro’s confinement, to explain to others what happened there, to encompass the flood of events and meanings that surfaced there; and also, of non-meanings, of just living. As I am an eyewitness narrator, it would seem that the question is easier for me, but I don’t think anyone would have it easy. It would always be narrated from an angle, a partial point of view, a slant that would privilege certain facts over others and that we would use to prove this or that thesis. What I would really prefer is to tell what happened without it having to serve any purpose, without it having to fit any discourse or any agenda. I would like to narrate those days as the agenda, as the only possible agenda, the only agenda we had, and the only one we were capable of wanting. An agenda that still challenges us today, and even immobilizes us a little. So, if anything, I would like to narrate those days as a petitioner, to narrate them to leave them behind, so that they die to some extent and allow us to continue doing, and to continue living.
First, I tried to tell just the facts themselves. That innocent doctrine we were taught as children about impartiality and objectivity. I made a list. I put the dates on it. I exhaustively checked that nothing of what happened one day was placed in another. I even corrected the chronologies made before mine. All for nothing. I had forgotten that even the days and nights had become confused for us, locked up in that house, some without sleep, in a continuous and mysterious vigil.
Then I tried to narrate from those live videos that many of us during the confinement made almost compulsively to inform those who were not there. We were possessed by a communicative drive, which kept us not only entertained but also making use of the only defense we had, to such an extent that almost no one inside the house wanted to delegate to others what they could say by themselves. There was not a central voice, a central page, a central discourse, but many voices that overlapped, and thanks to that today we find in the networks the same event recorded from several angles, and with different background voices. I wanted to make a kind of annotated diary of the live videos, to choose fragments, to quote the literal words of some of us, and to put them in context. I was more satisfied, but this summary was not able to replace the original material, it seemed to me a poor copy.
A third form of storytelling I tried was to tell the story taking Them as the point of reference. To tell the story of the repression, the siege, those who were not allowed to enter, and those who did. To narrate the violence of the State, to explain as much as possible its methods and procedures, and our actions in response. But even understanding the pedagogical value of the story, the result was too alien, the reality of the mirror, and the absence of the one who looks in it.
That last idea made me think that the best thing was to focus on us, on the dynamics achieved inside, on that small-scale country essay, on the anecdotes, on the small things that happened while the story of the struggle of the Opposition to the Dictatorship wrote itself and was trapped in its capital letters. I wrote a kind of diary from this personal angle. Confessional. Pure nostalgia and pure nerve. And when I read it, I found it beautiful but too far from the improvisation of those days. It seemed to me that it betrayed the most precious and the most volatile thing we had: knowing how to slip away from the expectations that others had of us, not fitting in, being anti-heroes even while seeming to be heroes.
I was immersed in my musings until I found almost by chance a text by Gilles Deleuze, part of the book Dialogues, written with Claire Parnet. It was like a jolt. Like a leap into my understanding of the subject and my memories.
As a teacher I should like to be able to give a course as Dylan organizes a song, as an astonishing producer rather than author. And that it should begin as he does, suddenly, with his clown’s mask, with a technique of contriving, and yet improvising each detail. The opposite of a plagiarist, but also the opposite of a master or a model. A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor recipes. Nuptials without couples or conjugality. Having a bag into which I put everything I encounter, provided that I am also put in a bag. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1980)
Narrating these dates has to be above all an act of joy. And an act of self-possession. To narrate them like telling whatever, like telling a friend something that happened to you in the street. This is the conclusion I draw after having tried several times the chronology of the confinement. To say something like: we were a group of friends who got tired of having to look for each other in the police stations, we got tired of being detained for nothing, and the fact that some were detained more than others for being black or for having less education. One day one of those friends did not return from one of those detentions, and the doubt about what had become of him led us first to go out into the street and then not to go out into the street, to lock ourselves in a house and try to tell from inside what the fuck is going on in Cuba. From inside a house, but also from inside a prison. And the other Cubans inside Cuba and outside Cuba began to look at us and to recognize in our history their own and to join the dots that no book or speech had been able to join. And those Cubans began to ask the world to also look. The world looked. And that’s it. The world and everyone continued to watch as they took us out of that house by force, to take us to our own houses, which we did not recognize when we were brought there. What no one saw or could have known was that we would never have any other house or country than that one. And that afterwards we would only have dispersion and absence.
So, the best thing to do is to tell the story from the distance of the present and from the presence of the past. To tell it from the street we were on, from the neighborhood we were in. And also, from the location where each one of us is today, in a different corner of the world. To tell it in the insoluble tension of that super location of 955 Damas Street, San Isidro neighborhood, Old Havana, Havana vs the displacement or the current deterritorialization of each one of us. A house and the world. A one-way trip. And the return as the only restoring and impossible reality.
Already in 1980, Deleuze told Parnet that while we bestow questions particular importance, the becomings acted in silence. “We think too much in terms of history, whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits.” Let us think from geography, which are also bodies, bodies that move. Let us choose any image of those ten days of confinement and let us go through it as if it were a passage in time. To go through it is to escape from it. And at the same time not to forget it. To go through it is to realize the nkisi was also there as we were there. But, above all, to cross it means to understand that perhaps there is no return to what was known. And that the only return that is worthwhile is to joy.
The Last House
This long text spoke at the beginning of explorers and conquerors and ended up addressing, from the impossibility, political episodes that occurred centuries later on a Caribbean island and, more specifically, in a house in a marginal neighborhood of Cuba. The hyper-localization of the event contrasts shockingly with all the elements summoned for its comprehension: Africans turned into slaves overnight, rumberos in New York’s Central Park, a nkisi who appears in an antique store in Montreal and continues its centennial journey. It also contrasts with the diasporic nature of the Cuban nation, in permanent exodus for decades, with figures of up to 500,000 Cubans fleeing the island in the last two years. It contrasts with the dislocation of who is writing, with no fixed address and no country since I left that house in San Isidro in late 2020.
If we look for some element that unites all these seemingly disconnected stories, we immediately think of violence, for we tend to turn political actions into essences. For me, however, the guiding thread of the present narrative is borders and their political uses, as well as their emotional uses. Is it possible to mobilize our need for affirmation and projection in the other in a way different from the colonial practices of knowing and doing? Will Cubans, for our future good, be able to mobilize the resounding evidence that the nation has mutated with the spread of a considerable part of its population around the world? Will we know how to return?
I do not use the appellation colonial rashly. It is extremely revealing that most of the historical analogies referring to border control, in the Cuban case, come from the colonial past. I cite a few: Weyler’s reconcentration, at the end of the 19th century, as a model of confinement of peasants in the cities, after they were displaced from their lands to prevent them from supporting the mambises who were fighting for independence from Spain; banishment as punishment for conspiring against Spain, mainly in the 19th century, and applied to poets such as José María Heredia or José Martí; the famous “trochas,” military posts that divided the island from north to south, also during the independence struggles of the 19th century, as a way of containing the advance of the insurgents from the regions at war to the regions at peace.
All these repressive practices, established to safeguard colonial power, were aided by the mapping and control of space and borders. It has not been different in the neocolonial regimes or logics, in dictatorships in Latin America or Africa and it is no different in the Cuban dictatorship. Repressive methods, at first sight different, that Cuban activists and artists have had to suffer in their own flesh, have as a common denominator the diagramming of a space from violence and segregation.
Let us review some of these repressive forms: house arrest (they do not let you leave your house), regulations (they do not let you leave the country), arbitrary detentions (they stop you in the street without an arrest warrant and take you to some police station or other unknown place), kidnappings and forced disappearances (political police agents in civilian clothes kidnap you in a car with private license plates and take you to protocol houses where they keep you incommunicado until they decide), forced exiles (a wide spectrum that ranges from giving you a deadline to leave the country as the only solution to an imminent criminal process to taking you handcuffed from the prison to the airport and putting you on a flight and denying your right to return; exile as the only solution to unjust imprisonment), banishments (they do not allow you to return to your country). It is genuine apartheid that is not configured from the division of fixed spaces for some and others, but from a logic of political filter that is applied at discretion, the same to bodies as to places; repressive routes in the cities; partial closures of streets, neighborhoods or even entire provinces; the use of sanitary measures of control, such as the curfew during COVID that was extremely convenient to political control; as well as the decision of who leaves and who returns to the Homeland and when which entails an even more perverse logic: who betrays it or gloriously represents it by leaving it.
The practices of specific resistance and subversion against the arbitrary control of space and borders, as a mechanism of political segregation, are based on the organization of support networks, new and future uprisings, and clandestine actions at various levels. Rescue, as a way of reversing specific dangers and avoiding the loss of more lives or resources, whether material or spiritual, occupies a special place in this correlation of forces. Cultural rescue, however, if we may call it that, and which includes emotional rescue, involves processes that are more delayed and at the same time more surreptitious and difficult to predict.
It is not the first time that the rescued person later rescues the one who rescued him. That is, in fact, the usual dynamic of cultural processes. They tend to the almost automatic regeneration of the identity of the parties and, at the same time, to their constant destabilization and crisis. That is why the dimension, let us say, geographical, or of location, of bodies, transfers, discoveries, exiles, escapes, banishments, etc., is not reducible to the physical limits where the events occurred, but is an important part of how those events occurred and of the results of the processes. The geographical map is the formal expression of a map of relationships that are suffered, but also produced, by the protagonists of human cultural processes.
What I find most impressive about such processes, as in art, is that they are long-term processes. Their logic, or temporal sense, overflows the life of any individual, even the life of entire generations, and they do not respond to determinisms of any kind or superior phases of any ideology. The only thing that survives so much accumulated time is man himself, and his desire.
The journey of the nkisi marks a route that in itself overflows the predictions of any historiographic model. At this point, it does not matter so much whether his arrival in Montreal was due to the violent movement of those black bodies of slavery or to the more plausible and less mysterious movement of some tourist fascinated by black magic. The parable of return and rescue is still intact and its mechanism is set in motion every time an object like this falls into the hands of someone willing to question its origin and destiny. After all, a nkisi can always fall into your hands and put you in front of yourself.
