IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 17

society. The official response to the
visit —branded by Cuban Foreign
Minister Bruno Rodriguez as an "attack
on our history, our culture and our
symbols"— was the apotheosis of the
revolutionary racism. And precisely the
founder of that racism and a black
journalist gave the most outrageous
answers. Fidel Castro warned against
the "more honeyed words" of the African American President's speech to the
Cuban people. They came loaded with
poison: "It is assumed that each of us
was on the brink of a heart attack upon
hearing these words." Castro did not
hide his favorable expectations: "Somehow I wanted that Obama's behavior
would be correct. His humble origins
and his natural intelligence were evident.”15 It draws attention Castro’s
insistence on Obama’s intellect, as if it
entails some contradiction. He had said
earlier: "Undoubtedly, Obama is intelligent, well-educated, and a good communicator; he made many people think
he emulated Abraham Lincoln and
Martin Luther King.”16 These expectations lead the founder of the only Cuban
dynasty to hold some kind of misconduct against Obama. And immediately it
leads Castro to invoke Mandela when
he was "a prisoner for life and had
become a giant in the struggle for human dignity." In his article "Brother
Obama," the old dictator became delirious, but did not distract himself from
his main goal: to warn that Obama —
however far he may be from the old
prophecies about the imperialist enemy:
that white and obese mister with a bag
full of money— is anyway this very
enemy in the flesh: "No one should be
under any illusion (...) We don’t need
any gift from the empire." And Castro
dips again into the talismanic phrase by
"the glorious black leader Antonio
Maceo". Taking by dictation "whomever attempts to conquer Cuba will only
gather the dust of her soil soaked in
blood, if not perish in the fight," the

clerk reinforced so Castro’s new call to
behead symbolically the old enemy.
Far more diaphanous was Elias Argudín, a black reporter from the newspaper Tribuna de La Habana, who
wrote that Obama "chose to criticize
and suggest, with subtleties, in a veiled,
yet unmistakable incitement to rebellion
and disorder, without caring about being
in someone else’s home. There is no
doubt, Obama went too far. I cannot but
tell him, in the Virulo style: "But Negro,
are you Swedish?”17 It is worth recalling the origin of the phrase, which
was also the title of the article and
generated so much criticism that the
author was compelled to retract somehow or other. It was uttered in an old
humorous skit from the early 1980s, in
which a black man was trying to enter
with a Swedish passport to an exclusive
Cuban shop for diplomatic personnel
and other foreigners. He was stopped at
the door with that phrase. The latter
originated in the conditions of the particular Cuban apartheid, which prevented the vast majority of Cubans from
having access to services and facilities
reserved for foreigners and certain
privileged Cubans. Since then it has
been used to remember, with some
insulting jocularity, both to Cubans in
general and to black people in particular, the limits resulting from their condition. In the new context, the phrase
seems to be designed to remind the U.S.
President what he could not do in his
situation as either a black person or as a
guest, however presidential he could be.
The revolutionary racism was evidenced
by the emphasis in certain expectations
associated to the race of the incumbent
U.S. President. Hence the visceral
reaction of the official media to his visit
and especially to his speech in defense
of the democratic values. Being black,
American democracy is not up to
Obama, even if Martin Luther King Jr.
started his anti-racist crusade with a call
to "apply our [U.S.] citizenship in its

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