IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 67

created by Frederic Hegel. The remaining, seminal work was done by Romanticism, from which
we have all minimally inherited.
This second democratization became the volk (el
pueblo/the people), history’s romantic people.
The United States also had it own telos: the liberty of individuals with a society of equals
through a civic order that should seek the prosperity of its citizens above all other things. For them,
civic order equals legal order, the counterbalance
of power and skepticism regarding the State.
George Washington the man, the former President, explains this telos in an exemplary manner:
he refuses to continue in power, thus guaranteeing
his freedom to choose and goes back to the kind
of work that his rural, civic space allows him. He
belongs to that other people that usher in modernity: the civic citizenry that so impressed Alexis
de Tocqueville.
All throughout their difficult times and necessary
reorientations, these three, exemplary nations
have held on to their telos and offered the world
an important bio-history, determination and
unique progress. There is only one reason that it
is being seriously considered by all nation-building studies and projects: from their inception on,
their telos was guided by whatever their cultures
mandated, always redefining them and themselves according to the major mandates of each
era.
What do France, Germany and the United States
have to do with Cuba regarding its national telos?
Everything. A lot. Spain and Africa, seen here
without considering anthropological specificities,
gave Cuba their ways of being, but those nations
gave us our way of conceiving our convivial
space.
If Cuban culture always looked to France, and our
economic mindset to the United States, our political culture, as a vision and base, and not as institutionalism, had a lot to do with Germany. The
cultural consequences of that trifurcation should
be analyzed, extensively, with greater rigor.
However, it does seem undeniable that the process of preparing and conceiving the rules of our
coexistence are intellectually marked by those nations.

The paradigmatic confluence of these three historical sources in the fabric of our failed coexistence has created a tension; between us and the
historic, romantic people, that draws towards that
redeeming view that we have held since the times
of José Martí (Germany); the citizen-people of
politics (France), which in lacking a civic culture
and view of the State, led us to terrible power
struggles; and the society’s civic people (United
States), which in all its diversity continues to develop its specific and concrete activities far from
any historical view involving messianism, and
behind the backs of any political workings linked
to those power struggles.
That tension has never been resolved in Cuba. Its
unequal counterpoint always favored one of these
three historical sources, the one that most needed
the State to realize itself. It has a destiny that has
to project itself globally, even if it makes us
laugh. If not, it would not be a destiny.
This is where the Spanish component comes in,
time and time again. Curiously, it is counter-historical because if our coexistence as a nation
could and should have a sense of itself, it would
achieve this precisely by denying Spain and political tradition. Whatever the Bourbons had to do
with the Hapsburgs, and the Hapsburgs with the
Hohenzollern, is precisely what Cuba would not
have to do with Spain, as a civic-political nation.
That Messianic mentality that conceives the State
as the highest form of human realization, an idea
that is not actually Spanish, comes to us from the
German source, but through the monarchical
forms bequeathed to us by our old metropolis. It
is a rare mixture that also explains why and how
a totalitarian State can become concentrated in
Cuba via and only via one, single family.
This apparent, historic drift does have some cultural roots, but it took hold in Cuba at the expense
of our cultural matrix, which is why the coexistence of our cultural pluralities, which is not only
possible but also necessary, has not been translatable into a civic-political space. Moreover, the
absence of a satisfactory solution of that very tension between the historical man, the citizen, and
the civic man has made a coexistence of our con-

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