Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 116

has deep roots in encyclicals explicitly condemning communism, with aggressive challenges and
critiques regarding social issues.
In academe, La leyenda negra has free reign. The
Cuban chapter starts with Hatuey’s rebellion,
which is preserved in our popular culture as: “I
don’t want to go to heaven if that’s where the
Spaniards go.” That’s what history demagogically and subjectively says. When children finish
hearing the story as told by their teachers, they
have the notion that it was the church that burned
the rebellious Indian—for the rest of their lives.
Never is it explained to them that burning at the
stake was one of most common punishments at
that time, or that the conquest was carried out by
illiterate men, by adventurers and ex-prisoners,
and all sorts of men with a hunger and ambition
for things that had nothing to do with the sublime
souls of people like Father de Las Casas, John of
the Cross, Ignacio de Loyola or St. Theresa of Jesus.
Closer to our own time, Castroist historiography
decides to simplify the island’s phenomenon of
syncretic religions by throwing another log on the
legend’s fire. The idea of evangelization as a
hardly effective mitigation of the barbarism and
greed of the Spanish or Cuban landowners is
taken out of context. The same is done with corrupt politicians and functionaries from the Spanish colonial period.
Nevertheless, Cuban syncretism’s positive contribution as one of Cubanness’s pillars - and one of
the greatest contributors to it, perhaps - is the fusion of the two principal cultures that today make
up what is Cuban. Castroist historiography kills
two birds with one stone when it distorts the extremely complex phenomenon of two or three
sentences that are actually easy to process: to
avoid religious repression and overwhelming
Catholic indoctrination, slaves disguised their Orishas by giving them the names of the saints the
Spain brought from Spain. This way, of course,
Castroism is able to contribute one more argument to the “religion is the opium of the people”
theory, and garners more favor in the myth of it
being a liberator of the black population.

116

Notwithstanding, there is no room in my imagination for the idea of a fanatical, Catholic landowner or foreman fervently indoctrinating his
slaves. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea may have been able
to think this, when he was trying to create films
about class struggle, but I cannot.
What I can imagine is the exploitative aristocrat
or bourgeois man, assassin, rapist, and the sadist
who was indifferent to religious matters. In all
fairness, we should all acknowledge that the pious
landowner who does everything within his reach
to reduce the suffering of others due to a situation
they inherited. But I just can’t imagine the Catholic fanatic. There may have been someone who
orders his slaves whipped in the name of Christ
among U.S. slave owners. But in Catholic countries like Cuba and Brazil, strong adjectives don’t
go with the idea of religious indoctrination.
Just one example should suffice: each Protestant
believer is also a religious minister of his own free
will, regardless of the intellectual capacity he may
or may not have for interpreting Scripture.
To the contrary, the Catholic follower is not expected to make an intellectual effort beyond his
capabilities because it is not desirable. This is to
keep him from becoming a fanatic.
Free interpretation of Scripture can be found in
Protestant practices (Fundamentalism), but not in
Catholic doctrine. It interprets Scripture according to tradition.
On the other hand, the celibacy of priests has always been an object of resentment on the part of
Hispanic machismo, which generally relegates religious matters - like attending mass on Sundays
- to the women of the family.
One of the arguments Juderías uses to justify his
theory of the Leyenda negra is that it coincides
with the Spanish Golden Age.
By nature, classical literature and art needed a climate of freedom to flourish and also did not admit
manipulations.
Thus, it is not hard to understand that serious art
from this period reveals nothing about the Black
Legend’s existence.
It should not surprise us that for it to become universally known, it took a century for distortion (a