IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 4 ENGLISH | Page 115

Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer are immersed in an intense circulation war regarding
their newspapers. Both are credited with creating
a new style of defamatory journalism that would
later be called yellow journalism. The SpanishAmerican War is considered a starting point both
for the history of propaganda and the use of this
form of journalism. Hearst and Pulitzer sent correspondents to Cuba to cover the conflict; incapable of obtaining reliable reports, they ended up
inventing most of the stories and published sensationalist articles based on facts given by questionable informants.
An unusual Elpidio Valdés (Cuban comic) pops
up in 1995, the result of a Spanish co-production,
during the time of socialist Felipe González’s
presidency in Spain and a dramatic rise in Spanish
investment in Cuba. The central theme unsuccessfully alludes to an un-contextualized phrase
attributed to Maceo: preferring to the join the
Spaniards in the events of an American intervention. Four years later, during Aznar’s right-wing
government, and thanks to Hugo Chávez, Castro
can allow himself to put an end to the honeymoon
with Spain, and open a new parenthesis in the
‘legend’s’ Cuban chapter. This new digression
demands that Cuba’s place as the first victim of
what later became fascism be acknowledged, and
equates Valeriano Weyler’s reconcentration with
future Nazi extermination camps.
Even if the earliest Elpidio Valdés comics managed to represent my generation, which was born
in the seventies, through the character and his
rough expression of patriotism, all other efforts to
foment the legend through comics failed. The
Spanish landowners in the animated series El negrito cimarrón [The Runaway Black] hardly
achieve the insolence expressed by the Spanish
soldiers in Elpidio. The kinds of pranks the panchos came up with in Elpidio are completely absent from the goings on of the aristocrats and
prelates. There are too many clichés for the audience. It is too intelligent. Unlike the likeable although negative General Resoplez [General Huff
n’ Puff], Don Cacafuco [Don Poopwrack] ends up
being like the vague and unbelievable creation of

the very worst Stalinist script. It was a grotesque
doomed to fail, but Castroist demogaguery used
it to demonize European culture as well as to earn
African sympathies.
When national politics returned to a sort of controlled secularism, in the early nineties, the key
tactic for keeping the Cuban chapter of the Spanish Black Legend on the back burner was to manipulate religions of African origin. The salsa
boom of nineties music is full of references to deities from the African pantheon. The same thing
happened in the country’s homegrown police and
detective series; they’d have Yoruba priests and
Santería practitioners, on Toña la Negra, for example, or the Santería priest on the popular Su
propia guerra. The profile of almost all of them
was that of the “misunderstood revolutionaries”
with regard to their traditions.
The priest, the Catholic worshiper, is overtly absent during this decade and those that followed.
After a half century of Castroism, perhaps only
one character has embodied this missing element
on television, Father Miguel, on the Sol de Batey
soap opera (1986). It is not hard to understand
why, by the end of the nineties and into the early
twenty-first century, a Catholic publication complained about the government’s veiled intention
to “sell” religions of African origin as a national
religion.
This should not surprise us if we closely examine
the dramas we get from Brazil (to which ours are
quite similar), which receive not a sing