The ship that desecration called a slaver; the row of exhausted beings, after the cruel and extensive journey; mothers with their babies who endured, perhaps because of that strength that comes with pregnancy, the terrifying journey; some man, probably due to irreverence in the face of punishment, already without a soul, hanged; shameful scenes that will not be forgotten.
Moved by pain, a Cuban boy trembled before such spectacles, and “(…) swore to wash away the crime with his life!” As an adult, and in defense of the equality of his fellow men, he would deny the existence of races, and would assert that “everything that divides men, everything that specifies, separates or corrals is a sin against humanity.” humanity”.
The greatest of the Martians, born in the 20th century, made a Revolution in Cuba. In it, nothing has been more important than fighting for the dignity of an “all mixed” people of very Cuban color. The work was born, whip in hand, destroying “the absurd virus of discrimination”, and within it armies would be created to contribute to the freedom of Africa.
In Black Woman, one of the most emblematic texts that have been written in reference to slavery and the descent of the continent, its author, the intellectual Nancy Morejón, intoned: I still smell the foam of the sea that they made me pass through (…) They left me here and here I have lived, and he speaks, reviewing his ancestry, of walking, of revolting, of working, of going to the mountains and coming down from the Sierra. Now I am: only today we have and create. / Nothing is foreign to us. / Our land.
In an evocation titled Africa, another very high voice, that of the distinguished poet Georgina Herrera, assures that motherland, surrendered with love: You can / close your eyes quietly in rest /, lie down / for a while in peace. / I take care of you.
And that is exactly what it is: to love, from the soul, and every day, that unfathomable Africa that has nourished our essences, and without which we would never have been everything we are.
