IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 95

A Native Arsenal and Other
Notes about Bladed Weapons
Víctor Manuel Cantely Sardiñas
Poet and actor
Havana, Cuba

W

hat weapons has man had? In Cuba,
one talks about the ax, alluding to the
ear of the snail, to the sea snail’s earlobe. It was more like a tool with no handle. It was
used to strip bark off of tree trunks and coconuts
by holding it in the palm of one’s hand.
The mortar’s pestle was a round stone used for
grinding and the spear was already a spade used
for tilling and oxygenating the soil. It looks like
today’s crowbar, but is made of really tough
wood. In these stories, the spade was like a mansized stake, sharp at its end, like an ax. Yet, it was
rarely desecrated by being used for war. It was a
sacred agricultural instrument.
War was invented by man, an imaginary thing in
the air of the humiliation capable of causing men
to take leave of their selves, to stop being men. It
is an abstract order that on mistaken occasions has
attempted to rule over the earth as if by natural
law.
Then comes the club. This is really it. By definition, it is a weapon. For defending one’s self.
Against any image or semblance of any invading
army.
They say it is the primitive origin of the machete,
lord and master of the Cuban countryside, and of
the bat, which like the baseball diamond has its
native origins in Cuba.
In Mesoamerica, the club had one or two obsidian
petals. But those people practiced human sacrifices. Over this way, forgetting the historical

times when the black weapon and fire prevailed,
we came to the bed leg. The perforating solution
with an angled cut on a steel covered plate. Not
perforating and cutting like a tobacco-leaf knife,
but similar in style to a metal band, typically
made of worm leaf.
We also come to a bamboo-stick like thing that
comes from a giant fish and is used as a prosthetic
spur used in some cockfights. Then come the stapler and the slingshot, which seem like children’s
toys. All of a sudden, the latter is a weapon used
by furtive hunters.
It’s curious that the dove almost became extinct
during the so-called Special Period, because hungry people who became hunters pursued it just to
eat its breast meat, which fed young and old in
homemade soups. They used slingshots for this.
Today, this weapon is used to kill many sly cats,
as training.
The stapler seems to have left the schoolroom. It
is a sort of wired pitchfork whose cock is a rubber
band, a cock and trigger—one of those ordinary,
office rubber bands. The projectiles are copper
staples, very dangerous. They reach a high speed
at a short distance. And we should also mention
the peashooter, made with fixed-glove fingerstalls out of adhesive tape and a plastic tube. The
ammunition? Well…it’s already in the name.
In street slang, they talk of scissors. There is a
huge distance from the kitchen matron who always cuts the bad that enters the home and hangs

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