Our America and the West - analepsis · Our America and the West ... Our America and its historical parameters leads to the search for ... Are the Gauls really the ancestors of those

Our America and the WestAuthor(s): Roberto Fernández RetamarReviewed work(s):Source: Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 1-25Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466488 .Accessed: 03/07/2012 19:12

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Our America and the West

ROBERTO FERNANDEZ RETAMAR

WHAT'S IN A NAME

As in other attempts to come to terms with names, the precise definition of Our America and its historical parameters leads to the search for a name that

represents it better, making us more conscious of what we are trying to understand. The almost endless succession of names coined for Our America reveal not

only indecision but also geographical and historical expansion of its compass. We

might even say that we're dealing here with an expanding concept.1 A first formulation can be found in Simon Bolivar's great plans for the newly independent Latin American republics. In December 1814 he convenes the Panama Congress, to be held two years hence, and reiterates his belief that "the American republics, for-

merly Spanish colonies, will have a firm base." When the name "Latin America"

emerges and spreads in the second half of the 19th century, it includes Brazil and Haiti as well as the "former Spanish colonies." In 1844 we come across an even more inclusive idea in Jose Marti: "When we say 'A People' rather than 'the

peoples' we mean that everything from the Rio Bravo [i.e., Grande] to Patagonia is one." On occasion, however, Marti preferred the name "Our America" over "La- tin America," thus averting etymological traps. "Latin America" (now understood as a synonym of "Our America," beyond its original delimitations), then, includes the English and Dutch Antilles (and, of course, large enclaves of indigenous peoples) as well as those countries more closely affiliated with Latinity. We shall

adopt the term in this more inclusive sense. The task of defining historical parameters of Latin America will undoubtedly

be made easier if we confront its reality with that of the so-called western world, to which we have been bound and which enjoys greater conceptual clarity. How this confrontation has been tackled by representative Latin American thinkers is the

topic of the pages that follow. We must, however, get over an initial hurdle: the

melange of writings on the West or the western world are generally unsatisfying and scandalously mystifying, contrary to what one might deduce from the fre-

quency with which the terms are used. "After World War II," writes Jose Luis Romero in 1953, "we tend to speak of

a western world rather than a western culture."2 We don't know with any cer-

tainty, however, when western culture, western world, or simply the West began to

1

Roberto Ferndndez Retamar

be used with their present acceptations. While it is true that the West refers to

geographical boundaries, political empires, and religious schisms in a European context, its contemporary sense is other. The term is only insinuated in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History,3 where the "heart of Europe," "European man," "European humanity," and even "the Germanic world" are preferred.4 By the middle of the 19th century, however, the Russians were speaking of westerners, that is, modernizers vis-a-vis feudal backwardness. In Our America, at about the same time, Andres Bello used the West with an almost contemporary meaning. In western Europe the name was widely used by the second half of the 19th century, but only with the triumph of the October Revolution in our century does it reach its apogee. Spengler published The Decline of the West (1918-22) in evident oppos- ition to the term, and Toynbee gives it wide currency in A Study of History (1934-54). The virulent reactionary roots of these works (Chamberlain in the

one,5 Gobineau in the other6) help us to understand their recent popularity in the

capitalist countries-as well as the use of western culture, western world, or the West (vis-a-vis the Orient)-as a favorite weapon in the ideological arsenal of the

bourgeoisie during the worst moments of the cold war.

Leopoldo Zea offers us a more serene and acceptable definition of the concept in 1955: "I use 'Western world' or 'the West' for that group of countries in Europe and America, particularly the United States of North America, which have attained the cultural and material ideals of Modernity discernible from the 16th

century on."7 From the 16th century on? Marx writes in the first volume of

Capital (1867) that "the first signs of the capitalist mode of production appear sporadically in some Mediterranean cities during the 14th and 15th centuries, although the capitalist era really begins in the 16th century."8 Zea will later equate the western world with capitalism.9

We are now on firmer terrain: those countries which came to know full

capitalist development-first in Europe (e.g., Holland, England, France, Ger-

many), and subsequently those zones populated by Europeans10 (or almost de-

populated of others)-constitute the western world. Marx gives an unforgettable description of the Botticellian emergence of this capitalist world:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the comme- cial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dream of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive ac- cumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.1'

Thus did the western world develop vertiginously, at the expense and indis-

2


pensable exploitation of the rest of the world. In Europe itself, the furthest western

regions (Spain and Portugal), which contributed most to capitalist development in other countries, would not know such development. Relegated to the margins of the West, which affected the destiny of their vast colonial empires, these backward countries might be called "paleowestern."

If metropolitan Spain and Portugal remained on the periphery of the West, it is not surprising that their American colonies should have had a similar fate. Yet, as Jose Luis Romero has pointed out, America is the "first territory to be wester- nized methodically." Not only because, from the 16th century on, sundry Euro-

pean cultures came to know a new life and mix with other cultures here, but also because Our America was yoked to the multiple and rapacious capitalist exploita- tions which still afflict us. Such thinkers as Spengler may exclude us from the West, which fits with our condition in the capitalist world as exploited rather than

exploiters. But for this very reason we are linked with western capitalism in a common history. Whether we accept it or not, whether we are oblivious of it, this link has been essential and permanent: it inheres in the reciprocal, dialectical constitution of what came to be the western world and Latin America from the 16th century on. It is absurd to trace the history of our countries without reference to the West. But, has it been equally clear that the West's history cannot be written without reference to our own? Such is what Eric Williams emphasizes in

Capitalism and Slavery (1944). This does not mean that there cannot be individual histories of western countries and of our own. Enrique Semo explains that

in each stage of the development of the socio-economic formations of Latin American countries, there is a metropolitan-colonial relation which becomes a constant of their history, but not in their history, as is preferred by those histo- rians and economists who deny or underestimate the importance of internal factors and reduce the complex unfolding of history to a simple dichotomy between metropolis and colony.

Latin Americans' ideas on the relationship between Our America and the western world must be seen within this dramatic historical framework.

THE FIRST VISIONS

Writers from the French Antilles like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon have denounced the absurdity of teaching Antillean children to repeat: "Our forefathers the Gauls...." This denunciation is certainly justified, but it is equally important to decry the violence implicit in making French children repeat the phrase. Are the Gauls really the ancestors of those who have different manner of speech, dress, belief, and "racial" (i.e., zoological) inheritance? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to teach those children to say: "Our forefathers the invaders (or,

3


even, discoverers) of Gaul"? This, of course, is not done, as far as we know. Even

today the young (and not so young too) read about the adventures of their hero, Asterix the Gaul. Although written in a Neo-Latin language they do not identify with the Roman troops but with the small, and imaginary, Gallic hero and his friends. Such violent deeds, whether tragic or triumphant, are the stuff of history and shape a country's tradition.

This notwithstanding, many still reject as scandalous Marti's anguished words of eighty years ago: "The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught thoroughly, even at the expense of dispensing with the Greek archons. Our own Greece is preferable, more necessary."12 There is, indeed, no serious way to assume our history other than to take its true roots as the point of

departure. And the true roots of what came to be called America are, of course, the men who discovered it, populated it, and erected on its soil cultures as extraor-

dinary as any others. But the smooth course of this history snags on an unfortu- nate term wittingly invented and propagated in self-interest. The encounter of two communities, and the subjection of one by the other,13 has been known throughout history by many names: invasion, migration or foundation. But the arrival of the paleowestern Europeans on these shores, an event which could have been variously designated (e.g., The Disaster), has been repeatedly referred to as a discovery, The Discovery.

Such a name, per se, is a complete falsification of history, a covering up of the true history. Thus are the people and cultures of these lands reified-ceasing to be subjects of history. Rather, they are "discovered," like landscape, flora and fauna, by Man. Moreover, the use of this name assumes the theoretical sanction of an even more lamentable practice. The frightful destruction of the indigenous populations of America at the hands of paleowesterners-who zealously and shamelessly took sole title as westerners-is, according to Celso Furtado, "a demographic hecatomb without parallel in the history of mankind." Laurette Sejourne does not hesitate to call it "a cataclysm against which the darkest catastrophes of history pale.'14 This is the methodical westernization to which Jose Luis Romero referred.

That hecatomb, that cataclysm, was the first image, in these lands, of what would come to be known as the western world. It is the vision transmitted by the survivors of those indigenous peoples, whom we might be tempted to call Paleo- Latin-American, if the term did not give off pachydermal impressions. The little that has survived of this indigenous vision can be found in the kindly and energetic writings of men like Bernardo de Sahagun, in compilations such as the admirable Visi6n de los vencidos (1959) by Miguel Le6n Portilla, or here and there in the archaeological materials of other American peoples. It is the image of dread and horror sown by those whom the besieged of Tenochtitlan called "popolocas," or barbarians in Father Garibay's translation.

4


Even more scandalous than Mart's reference to native Americans as our ear- liest ancestors is sure to be Alejandro Lipschutz's characterization of the African slaves brought to America as "imported 'natives'." In many regions of America

they replaced the dwindling Indian population, "taking the character of enslaved natives."15 These other Latin American ancestors had a similar vision of the western world as that of the vanquished American Indians, but one even more

poorly recorded in scant and scattered songs and prayers. It was not until the second third of the 19th century that a highly talented black Cuban slave, Juan Francisco Manzano, gave continuity to that painful vision in his autobiography.

Straddling a waning feudalism, temporarily fanned by new and putrid breezes, and an emergent capitalism seeking to gain ground, the European exploiters superimposed themselves on these indigenous communities of autochthonous Indians and black "imported 'natives"' brutally relegated to the base of the social

pyramid as slaves or detainees. Indians and black Africans knew from the start that they were not western and came to form the ranks of American otherness. The descendants of Europeans, on the other hand, took much longer to feel that they were different, if not from Europeans in general, then at least from their met-

ropolitan counterparts. Their distinguishing features, which emerged rather

quickly, were understood from the perspective of colonialism. The American-born was distinguished from the European-born by his criollo ("creole") identity. This

term, which appeared at the end of the 16th century,'6 was initially used in Brazilian Portuguese (whence its dissemination to other languages) to refer to American rather than African blacks. Later the name came to include American- born whites, and eventually acquired almost exclusive reference to them.

The Latin American bourgeoisie, whose first inklings date from this period, does not perceive fully the stifling structures of the parasitic Iberian empires until well into the 18th century. That's when those who had no doubts about being Spaniards or Portuguese living abroad begin to adopt with pride their distinction as criollos. Alexander von Humboldt writes at the beginning of the 19th century that the "criollos prefer to be called Americans. From the Treaty of Versailles, and

especially 1789 on, they can often be heard to say proudly: 'I am not a Spaniard: I am an American.'"17 To the dramatic otherness of the Indian and of the future- bound man who Marti characterized as "autochthonous mestizo," the criollos now add their relative otherness. It is just at this time, however, that the first concrete possibility of a break offers itself.

FROM FIRST INDEPENDENCE TO NEOCOLONIALISM

With this first possibility, realized in the wars of independence, there is a concomitant search for the essential being of Our America and its relation to the rest of the world, which at the time was more or less understood as western. This

5


search, moreover, often took the form of a polemic against the respective met-

ropolitan powers, Spain and Portugal, which-vast colonial holdings and all- were evidently lapsing into backwardness. Consequently, the struggle against them became a signifier of modernization. It was quite different with respect to the other

metropolitan powers (France, England, and Holland) which had small but highly profitable Caribbean possessions.

An anticolonialist and revolutionary war had just been fought against Eng- land in the other America, which resulted in independence for the thirteen colonies. There had been other bourgeois revolutions, in the 16th and 17th centuries in Holland and England respectively, but it was the war which gave birth to the United States that sounded the "rallying cry which brought the middle class of

Europe to its feet."18 No wonder, then, that it also should have repercussions among the most progressive sectors in Our America, which, however, had neither the traits nor the conditions that made the struggle possible in the thirteen colonies. Our America is more easily compared with the semifeudal slave states of the

South, warred on and defeated by the North in order to ensure full capitalist development. Thus did the inhabitants of the US earn the title of "American Westerners" conceded to them by Toynbee.19

Of much greater influence in Our America, however, were the ideological and

practical lessons of the French Revolution and its aftermath, as well as the political acumen of the British as regards the disorganized Iberian empires. Although a

tempting, even admirable model for the nascent Latin American bourgeoisies, the United States only began to exert direct and substantial influence in the destiny of Our America at the end of the 19th century when it already had swallowed up half of Mexican territory, consolidated its monopoly capitalism, and embarked on its first imperialist adventures. These are the major western realities that affect the vast, complex, and still unfolding process of independence and attendant ideas in Our America.

Our independence, which has yet to be studied in depth, can be understood in three stages, with three respective ways of relating to the western world: the Haitian Revolution, between the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries; the actual separation of the Iberian colonies beginning in 1810; and Cuba's War of independence at the end of the 19th century. The first two moments (Our America's first independence) include struggles against European powers and more or less traditional colonialism as well as the will to consolidate bourgeois nations in the subcontinent. The third moment, not solely the struggle against an old colonialism, but also against a nascent imperialism, is no longer guided by a bourgeois national project. Instead of seeing it, then, as the final chapter in this process, it is better understood as the first chapter in Our America's second and definitive independence.

6


The Haitian Revolution, often forgotten as the beginning of Our America's

independence, occurred under unique and extraordinary circumstances, which

recurred, mutatis mutandi, in other American regions and colonized areas of the world. Let us recall that it was a victorious slave revolution and that Toussaint L'Ouverture wielded the West's most advanced and generous ideas (i.e., the

egalitarianism, anticolonialism and antislavery of the French Revolution at its

height) against the oppressive troops of Napoleon (the representative and direct heir of the bourgeois revolution) who sought to reinstate colonialism and slavery. In Our America, then, the contradictions between the admirable ideals and the

deplorable practices of the West become evident. This will be the "assault on

reason," to use Lukacs's phrase, leading to an undisguised fascism about whose

origins Latin Americans and other colonized and semicolonized peoples can pain- fully bear witness.

The Haitian Revolution may have encouraged independence in the continental Iberoamerican colonies (e.g., Petion's aid to Bolivar) but its effect on countries with similar conditions, such as Saint Domingue, was otherwise. The example of Haiti-the culmination of a centuries-old spirit of rebelliousness-drove the criollo oligarchies of Caribbean plantation slave states to abandon an emancipat-

ory course for fear that the same might take place on their own lands. Instead, the ties with the metropolitan powers were strengthened, especially where a rampant latifundium and an endemic absenteeism had weakened and uprooted the future- less oligarchic class, as in the English colonies of the Caribbean, where the warn-

ing signs of 1776 fell on deaf ears. This explains why these colonies did not know

political independence until the seventh decade of this century and why the only Dutch colony in America to gain independence was Surinam in November of 1975.

In Iberian plantation colonies, to which the Haitian Revolution forced the transfer of prosperous markets, such counterrevolutionary repercussions were

mitigated by the relatively limited development of latifundium and absenteeism.

This, among other reasons, permitted the rise of a criollo ruling class at odds with

metropolitan Spain. Thus did the Cuban Jose Antonio Saco stand out among Latin American intellectuals as one of the most vigorous defenders of the specificity of a local American nationality (Cuban, in this case) vis-a-vis Spain. Although Saco's notion of nationality was deficient-he excluded blacks, whom he always referred to as "Africans" despite their constituting half of the population, thus likening himself to other (especially Southern Cone) Latin American thinkers who would "whiten" the race by encouraging European immigration-it was more than what the ruling classes of the English and Dutch colonies could conceive.

Antillean slaves, of course, had a different reaction to the Haitian Revolution, which brought into existence the first free black state in the modern world. Its influence knew no boundaries, spreading beyond Our America to the whole conti-

7


nent and even Africa. Furthermore, the abolition of slavery, the destruction of the

plantation system, and the political break with France brought about the reap- pearance in Haiti of economic and ideological formations more akin to Africa than the West. These formations (later studied with great passion by Haiti's most

penetrating intellectuals)20 were destroyed by the West, which, in the guise of US marines, imposed neocolonialism. Thus was the first independent Latin American state forced to follow, despite its originality, the same fate as the rest of Our America.

Napoleon also played an important role in the second stage of Our America's

independence. With the Iberian peninsula occupied by his troops (heroically fought off by a means-popular guerrilla warfare-which would become known

throughout the world), the Iberoamerican colonies began to break off, either

violently as in Spanish America or gradually as in Brazil. It would not be an

exaggeration to date from this period-when Our America attempted to constitute itself as a group of modern nations-our intellectuals' focus on relations with the (genuine, advanced) West as one of the most important Latin American issues.

This period of reorganization, however, is preceded by the political break, the

great wars of independence which inspired dazzling though utopian ideas in men like the Liberator Bolivar. He never realized his grand project of preserving the

unity which Spanish America had as a colony and which would have facilitated modernization and capitalist development. Instead, Our America, further frag- mented and thrown into commotion by archaic encumbrances, became easy prey for the West. Bolivar had understood that it was "necessary for our nation to resist

successfully the aggressive ambitions of Europe; the power necessary to oppose the

European colossus can only be attained by our own colossal union as Meridional America."21 Bolivar's project, based on unity and development, was also a call for American originality and autochthony, which did not ignore western values but refused to reproduce them. In 1815 Bolivar forcefully drew attention to our

peculiarities: "We are a small human species...neither Indian nor European, halfway between the legitimate owners of the country and the Spanish usurpers." And in 1819:

Let's keep in mind that our people are neither European nor North American, more a composite of Africa and America than an outgrowth of Europe, for even Spain ceases to be European by its African bloodline, its institutions, its character. It is impossible to determine properly what human family we belong to. Most Indians have been annihilated; the European has mixed with Indians and Afri- cans. Born in the same womb of foreign fathers differing by blood and origin, we also differ according to skin color. This difference has repercussions of transcen- dental proportions.

8


The ideas which accompanied Bolivar's great achievement have not perished. They acquire a new impetus in Marti and again in our own time. That's why throughout the 19th century they resonate in those radical thinkers who em-

phasized both the need for a Latin American union and the specificity of Our America.

Most of the representative intellectuals of the organizational stage of the Latin American republics, however, show a different face. The idea of a continental union had already been abandoned. Now there was a need to promote the more modest yet necessary project of encouraging the development of national

bourgeoisies in the republics spawned by the fragmentation of the colonial empire. The problem was: which bourgeoisies? These men give the Pirandellian impres- sion, at times, of being bourgeoisies in search of national bourgeoisies. The shat- tered metropolitan powers could not set an example in this regard for they themselves had not known bourgeois development. Hence the intense desire to make a clean break with the metropolitan powers and to seek other affiliations: they no

longer wanted to be overseas Spaniards or Portuguese because they pretended to be overseas westerners. Of course, the specific circumstances of each region weighed heavily in their formulation of the relationship of Our America with the West. The situation was not the same in countries with a strong Indian substratum and those, like the impoverished Southern Cone, without one and thus in need of a labor force for development. In the former it was rather difficult for intellectuals to see themselves as westerners tout court;22 in the latter, the temptation to do so was very strong.

One of the most telling examples of this may be found in Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Civilization or Barbarism in 1845. We need not rehearse the main points of this well known classic. Suffice it to say, however, that we can no

longer accept that it only implies the ideology of an ambitious bourgeoisie compel- led to reject the persistent feudal elements which hindered its then progressive development. The problem is that "civilization," coined by the West a century earlier to name itself,23 is used to refer to the West itself (and not only western

methods). "Barbarism," likewise, not only refers to residual precapitalist elements but also to the persistent and original realities of Our America. The contradictions are not concealed by Sarmiento, himself a contradictory though sincere figure. In

Conflicto y armonias de las razas en America (1883) he states that he wants "to

reiterate, correct, and better the theory of Civilization or Barbarism."

It may be unjust to exterminate savages, extinguish nascent civilizations, conquer peoples in possession of privileged lands; but thanks to this injustice America, instead of being abandoned to savages incapable of progress, is inhabited today by the caucasian race, the most perfect, the most intelligent, the most beautiful

9

Roberto Fernandez Retamar

and the most progressive of those that walk the earth. Thanks to these injustices Oceania is filled with civilized peoples, Africa sees reborn on its coasts the times of Carthage and the glorious days of Egypt. Thus are the populations of the earth subject to revolutions governed by immutable laws. The strong races exterminate the weak, the civilized peoples take possession of the earth from the savage.

These criteria were expounded with the same clarity by another liberal Argen- tine Statesman, Jauna Bautista Alberdi, in Bases y puntos de partida para la

organizaci6n de la Republica Argentina (1852). According to him, "The republics of South America are the product and living testimony of the actions of Europe in America. What we call an independent America is nothing other than a Europe established in America.... Everything in our soil which is civilized is Euro-

pean...." Further on, he adds that "we, who call ourselves Americans, are Euro-

peans born in America. Our skulls, blood, color, everything, comes from abroad." This, of course, is at odds with the writings and ideas of the liberators. Alberdi

recognizes the contradiction; however now, as a European born in America, he can only feel a characteristically western hatred and disdain toward indigenous Ameri- cans.

Somehow these South Americans with bourgeois pretensions were able to make theirs the bourgeois ideology of the developed capitalist countries, which inculcated such biases as racism and an attendant disdain for any nonwestern

peoples, our own in this case. The more or less voluntary collaboration of local intellectuals contaminated by these biases made it possible for the West to propa- gate them here.24 Those who were more consistent in embracing such aberrations

sought, when they had the power, to exterminate their peoples (Indians and

gauchos) and replace them with imported Europeans. Alberdi's classical maxim was: "In America to govern is to populate," that is, to depopulate indigenous peoples and repopulate with "Westerners."

Not all Latin American intellectuals after Independence subscribed to these ideas in evaluating our relationship to the West. Juarez, of Indian extraction, who defended Mexico against Maximilian's troops, certainly did not embrace Alberdi's recommendation that we should "readily make available to civilization the fruit of this soil" orhis belief that "since America is already conquered by Europeans and is European, it is unconquerable."

Even in the Southern Cone there were some who projected a less detrimental future for Our America. Consider the work of Francisco Bilbao. After the French invasion of Mexico, Bilbao publishes La America en peligro (1863), in which he maintains that "all will be lost if we do not make the Mexican cause the cause of all America." He rejects the "enormous hypocrisy of covering up all manner of crimes and abuses with the word civilization" and points out that the "civilized

10


man who calls for the extermination of Indians and gauchos... prostitutes the word that brings this fraud to its culmination." In The American Gospel (1864), he adds that if "The politicians cry out for colonization, immigration! Why don't

[they] colonize [their] lands with their own children, with their own brothers, with the present inhabitants, with the true owners?" Impugning the sophistry of so- called "civilization," Bilbao exclaims: "What a beautiful civilization that trans-

ports slaves by railroad, and what a shame!" And he elaborates, with dialectical acumen:

Isn't it obvious that all material progress is a dougle-edged sword, and that firearms equally serve the purposes of freedom or oppression?... Science, art, industry, commerce, and wealth can produce either good or evil; they belong to the scientific barbarism of duplicity if they do not have justice at their cent- er... The old world has proclaimed the civilization of wealth, of utility, of com- fort, of force, of success, of materialism. That's the civilization we reject.... these old nations that take the title of great powers, claim to civilize through conquest.... We shall see these great powers, who have shown themselves to be great prostitutes, dragged at the feet of the Revolution or the Barbarians, for their own barbarism and lies.... France, you whom we have loved so much, what have you done?... Conquer Algiers, sack China, betray and bomb Mexico.... And Eng- land, what is this nation of powdered wigs and rapacious lords doing in India?... Down with what is called European civilization. Europe can't even civilize itself and it would civilize us.

Bilbao condemns not only the "external enemy" but also the "ally within" who works "against the religion of free thought, universal sovereignty, the respect for justice for ourselves, the poor and the Indians." He censures "the colonization of the country by foreigners while our children go hungry, the denial of the rights of the free men called Indians, and the supreme injustice and cruelty of extermination practiced against them." After vituperating "monarchists, papists, jesuits, catholics, imperialists, aristocrats, and slaveholders" who speak of "liberty and

justice," this passionate and radical democrat calls for "another world, another

time, another life." It would surely be another time that would have done justice to Bilbao's

aspirations. Unfortunately, in his time it was feared "forefront of treason, to

conquer and frustrate the Republic" which prevailed, although not in the guise of a direct occupation. Intellectuals (who may have had great merit in other domains) helped make this possible by laying the ideological and, in some cases, practical foundations for the recolonization of Our America, this time not by backward countries (good riddance!) but by genuine western nations like England and the

11


United States, under the guise of a pro forma independence. This new form of colonialism initiated in Our America, like so many other things, was to be called neocolonialism.

ON THE ROAD TO OUR SECOND INDEPENDENCE

This process was already under way when Jose Marti, commenting in 1889 on the First Panamerican Congress in Washington, wrote: "Spanish America was able to shake off Spanish tyranny;... it must now be said, because it is true, that the time has arrived for Spanish America to declare its second independence." Marti had understood quite clearly the means by which "a nation of different interests, composition and awesome problems" tried to "wreak its system of colonization on free peoples." In contrast with continental Spanish American countries, Cuba and Puerto Rico, at that time, had yet to gain their independence, for which Marti was drawing the battle plans. Marti saw the oncoming war as the final stanza in the poem of 1810. But the circumstances under which such a war could be waged had

changed drastically from the time of Bolivar to that of Marti. Cuba was not only confronted by a paleowestern country like Spain, it also had to meet the threat of the newest and most enterprising nation in the West, that country which had once captured the imagination of Spanish American liberalism, which Andres Bello had called "our model for all occasions," and which Sarmiento in Argentina and Justo Sierra in Mexico took for their model of a United States of the South. This country had become, by the end of the 19th century, the most powerful embodiment of the West and the most formidable obstacle for Our America's becoming a substantial reality.

In good measure, to speak of Latin America from that period on, is to speak of our relationwhip with the United States. This nation, the first American nation to proclaim, in 1776, independence and to achieve a great anticolonial revolution, was, scarcely a century later, the new master of the other America. Having lived in the United States since 1880 and foreseen the imminent imperialist aggression, Marti wrote, in a letter to his friend Manual Mercado, on the eve (May 18, 1895) of his death in battle, that his mission had been and would always be

to prevent, with Cuba's independence, the expansion of the United States throughout the Antilles, swallowing up our American lands... to prevent the annexation of Our America, which we defend tooth and nail, to the ruthless and brutal North that disdains us.... I have lived in that monster and I am familiar with its entrails: but I've inherited David's slingshot.

This was the defiant project which crowned the thought (and practice) of

12


radical anticolonialist Marti, heir to the best nationalist legacies of such as Verela, Heredia, Luz y Cespedes in Cuba, and the democratic spirit of Juarez and distin-

guished Reformist intellectuals in Mexico. In 1877, in Guatemala, Marti theorizes for the first time his conception of

"Our America," which terms he coined. He explains that

The conquest interrupted the natural and majestic evolution of American civilization, and with the coming of the Spaniards a strange society came into being. It wasn't Spanish because the new blood rejected the old bodies; it wasn't Indian because of the superimposition of a devastating civilization, two words which, in antagonism, constitute a process. A new people, mestizo in form, was created.

Between 1889 and 1891 (when the First Panamerican Congress was taking place in

Washington) Marti publishes those pieces in which he gives major treatment to the

specificity of Our America: several texts from La Edad de Oro, the article "In Defense of Cuba," his chronicles on the Panamerican Congress, his speech "Mother America," and, most importantly, the article "Our America" (1891). In the latter, a veritable programmatic manifesto, he gives a tight summary of his criteria on the question of Our America, the most vital in his thought.

Although he had already done so before, in this piece he rejects Sarmiento's false dichotomy: "the autochthonous mestizo has defeated the exotic criollo. There is no contradiction between civilization and barbarism, but rather between

false erudition and nature." In 1848, Andres Bello had already warned Chilean

youth about the dangers of "an excessive servility vis-a-vis the science of European civilization," because "we are being dragged beyond reasonable limits by Euro-

pean influence, which-while taking advantage of its insights-we should imitate

only with the independence of our thought." This warning was reiterated even by contradictory thinkers like Sarmiento and Alberdi. Consequently, Marti sounds a familiar note in 1891 when he derides us for

wearing masks, with English trousers, Parisian waistcoats, North American jac- kets, Spanish riding cap.... Neither European nor Yankee books were able to make heads or tails of the enigma of Spanish America.... The youth of the world go out into the world with French or Yankee spectacles, aspiring to govern a people they do not know.

In contrast to the obsequious followers of so-called civilization, Marti em-

phasized the specificity of our reality and the need to study it from its own

perspective. This project could not, in Martf's opinion, be undertaken by those who rejected our peoples, labeled them inferior and, under the guise of civilizers, planted the Trojan Horse of a new colonialism. Martf clearly rejects any racialist

13


pretext for unity ("There is no racial hatred because there are no races"), declaring that it must derive from "common cause with the oppressed, so as to bolster the

system opposed to the interests and ruling practices of the oppressors." This new, radical, and still unsurpassed vision of Our America emanates from "the oppressed," "the poor of the land." These are no longer bourgeois aspirations; he is a radical revolutionary democrat who speaks for the popular classes and inaugu- rates a new stage in the history and thought of Our America. For this reason, Noel Salomon has seen him as "the first to draw, line by line, a consistent and coherent

theory of the Spanish American personality capable of standing on its own, free of the pull of external models." Furthermore, he is the starting point for the "coming to awareness of a whole historical movement (from the Mexican to the Cuban Revolution and to the new liberation movements of today), leading to the broad cultural and ideological currents of twentieth century"25 Latin America.

Marti's attitude was shared, partially, at least, by other Latin American re-

volutionary democrats. For example, Peruvian Manual Gonzalez Prada characterized ethnology as a "convenient invention.. .for the use of some," and said that "wherever you read human barbarians, translate as men without white skin."26

Marti's writings (like Gonzalez Martinez's, to a degree), were admired for their beauty, but went far beyond their time. It wasn't until marxism-leninism was

organically integrated into Latin American thought, several decades later, that his

project could be fully understood and continued. During the first quarter of the 20th century, it was a bourgeois nationalist ideologue, Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rod6, who drew the widest audience in Our America. In response to Yankee intervention in Cuba's independence war of 1898 (feared by Marti, and seen by Lenin as the beginning of modern imperialism), Rod6 published Ariel (1900), an

essay in which he opposed the supposed spirituality of our countries to the crudest

aspects of North American society. Wittingly or not, his was a censure of the

greater development of the western world (North American capitalism, in particular). He also recommended that Latin America cultivate cultural forms proper to the capitalist countries of western Europe, which seemed less aggressive to him. (This criterion, of course, could not be shared by other colonized or semicolonized

regions such as India, Indochina, the Arab world or black Africa.) Rod6's ideas appealed to a diversity of social sectors in Our America: from

true bourgeois nationalists with inevitable anti-imperialist sentiments, to those sectors which, momentarily subscribing to Rodoism, evolved toward socialism from an anti-imperialist position. It is worth comparing this new view of our relation with the West (Europe yes, United States no) to that held by the majority of liberal Latin American intellectuals throughout the 19th century: United States

yes (they are, after all, part of America); down with Europe, which implied metropolitan domination or the most aggressive capitalism, both actualized in re-

14


peated invasions of and threats to Our America. We should also compare it with Martf's astute, realistic appraisal of the situation: "until we are strong enough to defend ourselves, our only salvation and guarantee of independence is that rival

powers neutralize each other."27 This equilibrium ended shortly, as regards Our

America, with the Yankee invasion of Cuba in 1898; as regards the whole world, it ended with WWI.

When WWI breaks out, democratization is already evident in Our America. The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 with the eventually defeated re-

volutionary democratic struggles of the likes of Ricardo Flores Mag6n and Emiliano Zapata, did, nevertheless, consolidate a national bourgeoisie sympathe- tic, unlike the 19th century bourgeoisie, to the distinctive traits of the popular classes. Our relationship with the West again becomes the topic of heated

polemics. In his defiantly utopian writings, e.g., The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Iberoamerican Race (1925) and Indology: An Interpretation of Iberoamerican Culture (1927), Jose Vasconcelos privileges the fusion of races in Our America over the brutal racism of the "civilizers." Yet, while he has the merit of extending his ideas to the entire continent (which explains their wide reception at the time), he nevertheless translates class struggle into an ontological unity which became the foundation for modern bourgeois thought in Mexico. With the consolidation of this thought-this bourgeoisie-we get the more temperate Samuel Ramos, A

Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934), in whose wake Octavio Paz writes The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950).

The utopianism concomitant with those circumstances did not totally disap- pear and reemerges in the guise of an Ideal America temperately, again, in Alfonso

Reyes' Ultima Tule (1942) and Tentatives y orientaciones (1944) and, more

grounded in social reality, in Pedro Henriquez Urefia. In "The American Utopia" (1922) he impugns "capitalism disguised as liberalism," for "within our utopia, man will only become fully human" when he leaves "behind the obstacles of this absurd economic organization which keeps us prisoners." In Europe, "sundry spirits find unity only in the light of utopia, reduced, for the time being, to simple economic solutions, but utopia just the same, the only hope for peace in this social hell which we're all suffering." In "The Land of Justice" (1924) he adds:

If Our America is to be no more than an extension of Europe, if all we do is

provide a new stage for the exploitation of man by man (alas, our only reality to the present), if we do not turn this into the promised land for a humanity tired of

seeking it elsewhere, then we have no reason to be. Our plateaux and pampas would be better off deserted if they only increased human suffering... wrought on the weak and the hungry by greed and arrogance.

Outside the context of Mexico, which in 1938 could still inspire the genteel

15


nationalism of a Lazaro Cardenas, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, in his X-Ray of the

Pampa (1933), initiated a critique of Argentina-a country in which the likes of

Sarmiento, Mitre and sundry progressive intellectuals of the 20th century were considered representatives of "civilization" against "barbarism"-which dramat-

ically led to the idea that "the European in us acts only as an artificial fertilizer, only in our brains" (Differences and Similarities in Latin American Countries, 1962).

The idea that the true Latin Americans "are not European," that is, westerners, had already been maintained in this century by spokespersons for such

obviously nonwestern American communities as the descendants of Indians and Africans. The large indigenous enclaves of Our America ("national minorities" which in some countries are the real majority) did not need to argue this obvious

point. They survived what Marti called a "devastating civilization," to become

living proof of the barbaric intrusion of another civilization into theirs. African descendants had already achieved a free Haiti and in 1889 de-

monstrated, in the person of Anglo Antillean J.J. Thomas, author of Froudacity, their creative contributions to the civilization brought to America by Europeans. In the 20th century, however, black Americans would no longer argue for their

capacity to assimilate to western culture; they rejected it, on the contrary, as bearers of another culture, representatives of a different world. T. Albert Mar-

rishow, another Anglo Antillean, anticipated Spengler's idea of the "decline of the West" in Cycles of Civilization (1917), with the added prediction, however, that the next cycle would be dominantly African. The most profound and the first of these Antillean intellectuals to attain universal recognition, Jamaican Marcus

Garvey, rallied all blacks to return to Africa. These projects, like Marti's in its own context, could not be fully developed

nor implemented in Our America until marxism-leninism took root in the twen- ties. It is then that, taking up Gonzalez Prada's lead, Mariategui was able to

explain the "problem of the Indian" as a "socioeconomic problem," and that "the

assumption that [it] is an ethnic problem derives from the most antiquated reper- tory of imperialist ideas. The concept of racial inferiority served the white West to

expand and conquer."28 Alejandro Lipschutz further explained that a policy on nationalities similar to that of the Soviet Union would enable the incorporation of autochthonous communities into modern Latin America while preserving their cultural integrity.29

Despite the important contributions of the likes of Cuban Fernando Ortiz, Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, Venezuelan Miguel Acosta Saignes ("We've added our features to the face of America," says Nicolas Guillen in 1931), the persistent denials of the contributions of blacks by "civilized" oligarchies seeking approval as subsidiaries of Europe led, predominantly, to projects like those initiated by

16


Marrishow and Garvey. Frantz Fanon, from a revolutionary vantage point, puts these projects in proper perspective: "That there is an African people, yes, I believe

it; that there is an Antillean people, yes, I also believe it. But when I hear about a 'black people' I try to understand. Unfortunately, I understand it as a source of contradictions. So I try to destroy that source." Further on, he adds: "It seems ... that Antilleans, after the great white fallacy, are bent on living a great black

mirage."30 Blacks and Indians, far from extraneous nonwestern elements, are full fledged

members of Our America, more so than the Europeanizing, disaffectionate "civilizers." It is only natural that this should be pointed out and emphasized by marxists, for with the rise of marxist thought in mid 19th century western Europe and subsequent leninist elaborations, capitalism (i.e., the western world) could be

put in its proper place. This thought could only spring from the womb of that world whose development engendered its executioner, the proletariat and its attendant ideology. The latter, however, is no longer just a western but a postwestern ideology. It facilitates a full understanding and sublation of the West, and makes available to the nonwestern world an apt instrument for understanding and surpas- sing its own dramatic reality. Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui and the Cubans

Julio Antonio Mella and Ruben Martinez Villena make such advances with their

espousal and elaboration of marxism-leninism.

According to Mariategui:

the era of free capitalist competition has ended in every sphere and in every aspect. We're in the era of monopolies, of empires. Latin American countries enter capitalist competition with a handicap; the winners have already been chosen. Hence the fate of these countries as mere colonies within the capitalist system.

Furthermore, he felt that Our America "would not find its unity in a bourgeois order [for] this order necessarily divides us into petty nationalisms. It's North America's place to crown and bring capitalist civilization to an end. Socialism is Latin America's future." Since our only destiny within the western world is as "mere colonies," our only recourse, Mariategui implies, is to abandon it.

Some scholars have argued that Mariategui was a marxist but that he de-

veloped original analyses for Our America. It should be said, on the contrary, that he was a marxist precisely because he developed such analyses. Having enriched marxism in the era of imperialism and the triumph of the first socialist revolution

(experiences unknown to Marx and Engels), Lenin felt that the "living soul of marxism [was] concrete analysis of concrete situations." The first to produce such concrete analyses, situating Our America within a global perspective, were

17


Mariategui, Mella, and Martinez Villena. Since them, and Marti's important pre- cedence, the most productive inquiries regarding Latin America's place have not taken as a point of departure only the western world (once modern and now a part of the past) but also the whole world, in which the West is only one, though indispensable, chapter.

Consequently, the acceptance or rejection of marxism-leninism among Latin American intellectuals is not only one more stage in the history of acceptance or

rejection of western ideas. If (comparing peripheral areas of Europe), on the one hand, the "westerners" of 1840s Russia were modernizers vis-a-vis feudal backwardness, and, on the other, 1920s Spanish "westerners" turned out to be reac- tionaries vis-a-vis the new modernity of socialism, then Latin Amreican adherents of marxism-leninism in the wake of the October Revolution are the most genuine representatives of Our America. Those who reject it as a foreign doctrine unsuited to our reality, in effect, carry on the "civilizing" agenda of the 19th century, that is, our subjection by western imperialism.

This was realized for the first time, perhaps, in Mella's critique of the AP- RA's31 rejection of the applicability of marxism-leninism to Our America. Shortly after participating in the First Worldwide Anti-imperialist Congress in Brussels in

1928, Mella states:

To argue that marxism... is extraneous to America, one would have to prove that there is no proletariat here; that there is no imperialism as defined by marxists; that the forces of production in America are different from those in Asia, Europe, etc. America is not a continent belonging to Jupiter but to the Earth. Marxist principles are universal, as is clear to all marxists, precisely because imperialism is universal. This has been clear to American workers who, way before the appearance of the name "ARPA" [sic], had founded large (socialist, communist, laborist, etc.) proletarian parties based on the application of marxism to America.32

We have come up to the present and can now turn to our contemporaries. We can still find among them those who, when considering the relationship between Latin America and the West, behave as overseas Iberians or westerners, insisting on our identification with western Europe or the United States. Some even consider that Indians and blacks fall outside our common history. Such views, despite the apparent cogency of some, are but residues of a surpassed understanding. Only a

postwestern perspective which analyzes the problems of Latin America in a worldwide context can do justice to our reality.

Such a perspective has made it possible, even for those thinkers who assume it only partially, to discover our intellectual dependency, concomitant with other dependences, and the subsidiary character of many of our ideas (Sarmiento, with a

18


businessman's zeal, spoke of the "annex of modern civilization"). This brings out our family resemblances to other colonized and semicolonized regions.

We can see how such philosophers as Mexican Leopoldo Zea and Peruvian

Augusto Salazar Bondy arrive at these conclusions. Zea, deeply preoccupied by a

genuine Latin American thought and its place in the world, especially the western world (America as Conscience, 1953, American and European Consciousness, 1955; America in History, 1957; Latin America and the World, 1960) states, recently, in Dependency and Liberation of Latin American Culture,33 that "the

problem is knowing what type of openness and universalism we end up with. The one endemic to neocolonialism, or the one to which societies like ours aspire?" He continues:

They used to speak of freedom of the sea and freedom of commerce, just like they speak of freedom of investment nowadays, in order to defend some interests over others. This is freedom as an instrument of domination, as a justification of those in whose name such interests are imposed, amounting to a justification, in the name of freedom, of crimes committed in Asia, Africa, and Our America. This is liberalism, paradoxically, as an instrument of domination.

Long the exponent of traditional western philosophy, Salazar Bondy proposed in Does Our America Have A Philosophy?,34 that "in a relationship of dependency to Spain, England, and the United States, we have been, and continue to be, underdeveloped by these powers and cultures of domination." He continues:

the problem of our philosophy is inauthenticity, which takes root in our historical condition as underdeveloped and dominated countries.... [But our philosophy] can become authentic by participating in the sublation of our historical negativity, assuming it and making an effort to cut its roots.

Unfortunately, this promising intellectual, inspired by the Peruvian revolutionary movement in 1968, in which he participated, met an untimely death in 1974.35

The Brazilian Darcy Ribeiro, approaching the problematic not from the

standpoint of philosophy but anthropology in one of the most far reaching works of contemporary Latin America, has followed a similar evolution. According to

him, his "series of four studies on cultural anthropology is designed to rethink how the American peoples came to be what they are today and what developmental possibilities the future can bring." The first part of the second of these controv- ersial studies, The Americas and Civilization (1969), dedicated to "Western civilization and us," covers "theories of backwardness and progress," "European ex-

pansion," and "cultural transformation." Ribeiro establishes an "ethnico-national typology" which distinguishes "four

19


large historico-cultural configurations" in present day non European societies

('Pueblos'): Testimonial Societies, New Societies, Transplanted Societies, and

Emerging Societies. The first three are represented in Our America by those zones which had already been characterized as "Indo-America," "Afro-America," and "Euro-America," with Mexico and Peru as examples of the first; Brazil and Cuba the second; Argentina and Uruguay the third. In succeeding sections of the study, Ribeiro explores the character and manner of relationship of each of these "societies" (or zones) with the western world. In the fifth section, "Civilization and Development," dealing with "developmental models and patterns of back-

wardness," he claims that

technological revolution requires internal social revolution and decisive international confrontation on the part of underdeveloped countries. Only thus will these be able to wrench from the hands of the dominant classes and their foreign partners, equally beholden to a lucrative backwardness, the means to power and construction of the social order.

The impact of the Cuban Revolution, the most influential event in the history of Our America since independence, was decisive in the intellectual evolution and enrichment of these intellectuals, even in older generations represented by the likes of Martinez Estrada. This event is, indeed, the advent of the "second revolution"

predicted by Marti seventy years before 1959. It is significant that, as this new

revolutionary process was getting under way in 1953, Fidel Castro pointed to Jose Marti as its intellectual author. And just as in the first independence leaders of the armed struggle, like Bolivar, were the ablest spokesmen of its attendant ideology, such was the role played by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara at the start of the second independence. Their thought united (as Ho Chi Minh did in his own

country) an anticolonialist line and a national-revolutionary line (represented in our case by Marti) with a socialism deeply rooted in our reality, a socialism no

longer a "mere copy," but the "heroic creation" espoused by Mariategui.36 This "creation" infused an uninterrupted revolutionary process which took us from a bourgeois-democratic stage to a socialist stage.

This process had fundamental repercussions in our differential manner of

relating to the world. Before reaching its socialist stage but having taken radical steps toward liberation, revolutionary Cuba was already being criticized, as in a 1960 editorial in the most reactionary newspaper of the period, for "renouncing its place within Western culture."37 The Cuban people did not, of course, renounce "Western culture" (what there is in it of "culture," if critically received, is undeni- able), but four centuries' exploitation. Neither did we renounce it to integrate with a so-called East but to move into an ecumenical, postwestern society, predicted by Marx and Engels and actualized by the October Revolution, a worldwide socialist

20


society destined to stamp out the prehistory of humanity. Although many of the ideas accompanying Our America into the higher

history were set forth by individual Cuban revolutionary leaders and intellectuals, the most penetrating ones were the product of collective work ("genius," as Marti

proclaimed in 1882, "is passing from the individual to the collective"). Suffice it to mention, for example, the Second Declaration of Havana and the Central Report of the First Congress of the Community Party of Cuba, which Fidel Castro pre- sented to the public in 1962 and 1975 respectively.

The first of these documents offers Latin America a true view of its history. It also offers a battle plan for the attainment of its second independence, just after

dealing Yankee imperialism its first American defeat at Gir6n (the Bay of Pigs Invasion), and just after initiating the construction of socialism in this continent.

Taking as its point of departure Jose Marti's last letter, to Manuel Mercado, the Declaration asks:

What is the history of Cuba if not the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America if not the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples if not the history of the cruelest and most pitiless exploitation dealt by imperialism throughout the world?

After dealing with "the historical circumstances that made industrial de-

velopment possible in certain European countries and the United States, catapult- ing them to a position from which they could subjugate the world to their domination and exploitation," the document proclaims: "Cuba and Latin America are

part of the world. Our problems are part of the problems generated by the general crisis of imperialism and the struggle of subjugated peoples: the clash between

emergent and dying worlds." In this struggle, Our America, which freed itself en masse in the past century from colonialism but not from exploitation, is called to take on special tasks:

Great and heroic was the epic of Latin American independence, but the present generation of Latin Americans is called to an even greater and more decisive epic struggle in behalf of humanity. The previous struggle was waged for freedom from the waning colonial power of a decadent Spain, overrun at the time by Napoleon's troops. Today we must wage a struggle for freedom from the strongest imperial power in the world, we must confront the most important force in a worldwide imperial system in order to render humanity a service greater than that of our forefathers.

The document continues in the spirit of Bolivar, which was also that of Marti, in the brightest moments of our history:

21


This epic struggle before us will be written by hungry Indians, landless peasants, exploited workers, progressive masses; by the honest and outstanding intellectuals which abound in our ravaged countries.... And this wave of raging rancor, of demanded justice, of downtrodden rights, this wave that rises throughout Latin America will not be stopped. It will go on growing with each day that passes.... For this great humanity has said: "Enough!" and it has taken to its feet. And its titan march will not be stopped until it has conquered its true independence, for which many have died uselessly. At least now, those who die, will die for their only true, unrenounceable independence.

The Report, after giving a survey of Cuban history ("the last colony of Spain and today... the first socialist country in this hemisphere") makes an appraisal of the battles, victories, great accomplishments, and even errors-courageously risked-of the initial seventeen years of the first socialist revolution in America and then proceeds to posit the goals of the next five year plan. It weighs the world situation as follows:

It has been repeated that our era is the historical transition between capitalism and socialism, the era which sees the struggles for national liberation as part of the eradication of the vestiges of colonialism and the neocolonial presence which imperialism has spread over vast regions of the earth.

In the past few years, the most distinctive feature of this transition has been the so-called international distension. Without taking this factor into account it will not be possible to understand the changes that take place in our own continental region....

Our people can feel proud that they have contributed in some measure to the historical withdrawal of North American imperialism by showing that only ninety miles away a small country, with no force other than the moral resolve to resist even unto death itself and the solidarity of international revolution, was capable of confronting the imperialist attack of the greatest oppressor in the history of humanity.

Towards its end, this vast Report asserts that "What is taking place here [in Cuba], as once took place in the Czarist empire and in so many other countries, is a symbol of the world's future."

In documents such as these Our America conceives itself and conceives the world, for the first time, from a truly universal perspective.

The precocious Latin American, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, on asking himself in the 17th century "if the world is one or many," had correctly answered that "there is but one world."38 The West took it upon itself to prove this, seeking wealth in every corner of the world and integrating the most distant lands into the

22


same capitalist system that begins to be surpassed with the October Revolution of 1917. The West, then, is responsible for the first globalization of the world

(realized for its sole interest) described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

However, those who wanted to protect our original and true being, our particular contribution to humanity against the myriad forms of capitalism (i.e., against the

debilitating domination by the West), felt the need to emphasize our otherness: "We are a small human species," wrote Bolivar in 1815. But Jose Marti, the man whose thought best captured the difference of our reality, also wrote: "Native

country is also humanity." He observed that beyond his times "of transforma-

tion," "a new universe, prepared by workers, is coming upon us." With the Cuban Revolution, Our America has taken its first steps in this new universe where "West" and "East" will turn out to be the most ancient cardinal points in the

planetary (and now interplanetary) adventure of the total human subject.

NOTES

1. See Arturo Ardao's valuable contributions to the history of the concept: "La idea de

Latinoamerica," in Marcha (Nov. 1965); "La idea de la Magna Colombia, de Miranda a Hostos," Araisa, Anuario del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos "R6mulo Gallegos" (Caracas, 1975).

2. La cultura occidental (Buenos Aires, 1953), p.7. 3. trans. Jose Gaos, (Madrid, 1953). 4. I, pp. 208, 209; II Pt. IV. 5. "Chamberlain's Bases of the 19th Century (1899-1904) in many ways anticipates Spengler's

The Decline of the West, which succeeded and bested it." Francisco Romero, Filosofia de la persona y otros ensayos de filosofia, 2nd and revised ed. (Buenos Aires, 1951), p. 144. Let's recall what the frenetic theoretician of racism thought of Our America: "the so-called savages of central Australia lead almost 'saintly' and harmonious existence, more deserving of humankind, than the inhabitants of those countries." (Ibid.)

6. In explaining the central idea of his Study, that "society is the 'intelligible' field of historical

study," Toynbee adds: "This conception of society was already familiar to Gobineau three quarters of a

century ago." Estudio de la historia, 2nd ed., trans. Jaime Perraux, (Buenos Aires, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 67-68n. Cf. another reference on p. 77, The Essai sur l'in6qalite des races humaines (1853-55) prefi- gures the lament for the "decline of the West" that so many voices would chorus. Compare the

following words by Gobineau: "We are the modems, the first who know that every grouping of man, and the intellectual culture resulting therefrom, must perish," with the well-known words by Paul

Valery regarding WWI: "We, civilization, now know that we are mortal." We do not ignore, of course, the differences between Spengler and Toynbee. In this regard, cf. Nikolai I. Konrad, "Reply to Arnold

Toynbee," in Cultura, ideologia y sociedad. Antologia de estudios marxistas sobre la cultura, trans. Desiderio Navarro, (Havanna, 1975).

7. America en la conciencia de Europa (Mexico, 1955), p.8. 8. El Capital I, (Havana, 1962), p. 656. 9. America en la historia (Mexico, 1957), p. 80. Also, Jose Carlos Mariategui had already

referred to "Western or, better yet, capitalist civilization." Siete ensayos (Havana, 1963 [orig. 1928]), p. 5.

23


10. Only one country-Japan-not populated by Europeans has attained full capitalist development. On its exceptionality and the contradictions among western powers that made this develoment

possible, see Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, (New York, 1957). 11. El capital I, p. 751. 12. Jose Marti, "Nuestra America," Obras completas VI, (Havana, 1963), p.18. 13. On this, cf. N.I. Konrad, "The Substance of History," West-East: Inseparable Twain, (Mos-

cow, 1967), esp. pp. 220-222. 14. Celso Furtado, La economia latinoamericana desde la conquista iberica hasta la Revoluci6n

Cubana (Mexico, 1969), p. 6. Laurette Sejourne, with the colaboration of Josefina Oliva de Coll, America Latina, I. Antiguas culturas precolombinas, (Madrid, 1971), p. 63.

15. Alejandro Lipschutz, Perfil de Indoamerica de nuestro tiempo. Antologia 1937-1962 (Havana, 1972), p. 91. The "presence of blacks in the New World," according to Jose Luciano Franco, is capital for the eventual development not only of Our America but also Europe and Africa. Starting in 1492, there has been, according to Fernando Ortiz, "a great commingling of white, red, and black men, setting into motion the Westernization of three continents along the axis of the Atlantic Ocean." In "La

'leyenda negra' contra Fray Bartolome," Cuadernos Americanos (Sept.-Oct. 1952), pp. 158-59. 16. Cf. Juan Jose Arrom, "Criollo: definici6n y matices de un concepto," Certidumbre de

America, 2nd and revised ed., (Madrid, 1971). 17. Ensayo politico sobre el reino de la Nueva Espana v. II, 6th ed., (Mexico, 1941), p. 118. 18. Karl Marx, El capital, p. xxiii. 19. Arnold Toynbee, El mundo y el Occidente, trans. L. Rodriguez Aranda (Madrid, 1967), p. 9. 20. Cf. Jean Price Mars, Asi habl6 el tio (Havana, 1968 [orig. 1928]). 21. Cf. El pensamiento vivo de Bolivar, 3rd ed., Rufino Blanco Fombona, ed. (Buenos Aires,

1958), p. 39. 22. There are exceptions among the uprooted bourgeoisie. Cf. the examples in Gast6n Garcfa

Cantfi, El pensamiento de la reacci6n mexicana. Historia documental 1810-1962, (Mexico, 1965). 23. Cf. Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: evolution d'un mot et d'un groupe d'idees" [1930] in Pour

une histoire a part entier ('Paris, 1962) and its complement, Emile Benveniste, "Civilisation. Contribu- tion a l'histoire du mot," in Problemes de linguistique generale, (Paris, 1966), in which civilization is called "one of those words which inculcates a new vision of the world." The term appeared in the middle of the 18th century, first in France and a little afterwards in England.

24. "Race prejudice as it exists in the world today is almost exclusively an attitude of whites and had its origins in the need of European conquerors from the sixteenth century on to rationalize and justify the robbery, enslavement, and continued exploitation of their colored victims all over the globe." Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Capital monopolistico. Un ensayo sobre la estructura socioecon6mica norteamericana (Mexico, 1968), pp. 199-200; Monopoly Capital (New York: MRP, 1966), p. 251. Race prejudice, then, is one of the West's greatest contributions to the world.

25. Noel Salomon, "Jose Marti et la prise de conscience latinoamericaine," Cuba Si 35-36

(1970-71), 3. 26. Manuel Gonzalez Prada, "Nuestros indios," Ensayos escogidos, 3rd ed., Augusto Salazar

Bondy, ed. & introd. (Lima, 1970), p. 62. 27. Jose Marti, Fragmentos [1885-18951 Obras comletas vol. 22, (Havana, 1965), p. 116. 28. Jose Carlos Mariategui, "The Problem of the Indian," Seven Essays in Interpretation of

Peruvian Reality (Havana, 1963), pp. 23, 28. Ricardo Pozas advances this view considerably in The Indians Among the Social Classes of Mexico, (Havana, 1971).

29. Alejandro Lipschutz, Marx and Lenin in Latin America and the Question of the Indian, (Havana, 1974).

24

25 Our America and the West

30. Frantz Fanon, "Antillais et africains," in Pour la Revolution Africaine (Ecrits Politiques),

(Paris, 1964), pp. 28, 36.

31. American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. A Peruvian political party founded in 1924 by

Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Influenced by the Mexican revolution, bolshevism, and socialism, it was

originally conceived as an international party. (Translator's note).

32. Julio Antonio Mella, iQue es el ARPA? [1928], in Documentos y artticulos, (Havana, 1975),

p. 378. 33. (Mexico, 1974). 34. (Mexico, 1968). 35. See the issue of Textual dedicated to him in December, 1974.

36. "Aniversario y balance," in Ideologia y politica, p. 249.

37. Editorial in Diario de la Marina, (May 10, 1960).

38. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, ed. Angel Rosenblat, prol.

Ricardo Rojas, vol. 1, (Buenos Aires, 1943), pp. 11-12.

Leandro Soto: "Family Portrait"

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