An Ontological Review of the Construction of So-Called Afro-Cuban Folklore

 

Living Folklore or Fabricated Folklore?

An Ontological Review of the Construction of So-Called Afro-Cuban Folklore

There is a question that must be formulated without hesitation and without concessions: to what extent does what is currently presented as “Afro-Cuban folklore” correspond to a living and continuous popular tradition, and to what extent does it result from a later process of construction, selection, reorganization, and institutionalization?

This is not a minor issue. The answer determines not only how Cuban culture is interpreted, but also how the cultures of the New World have been shaped under the influence of ruling classes, ideological frameworks, and institutional systems of cultural legitimization.

For decades, it has been assumed that Cuba represents an exceptional case in the preservation of African-derived religions, chants, and dances. However, the problem cannot be approached in a naïve or simplistic way. It is not accurate to claim that Cuba is the only territory in the Americas with visible Afro-descendant survivals. In the United States, the ring shout persists; in Brazil, capoeira and the ritual universe of Candomblé; in Haiti, Vodou; and in Central America, the Garifuna tradition preserves a complex system of language, music, and dance of African origin. Therefore, Cuban singularity cannot be seriously grounded in the mere existence of Afro-descendant expressions.

And precisely here the real problem begins.

Cuba’s distinctiveness appears to lie not in the mere survival of African elements, but in something else: in the degree of visibility, canonization, staging, and institutionalization that such elements achieved within the national narrative. In other words, it is not simply that African-derived practices existed in Cuba, but that these practices were transformed into a recognizable, nameable, teachable, performable, and exportable cultural system as part of national identity.

At this point, a fundamental distinction must be introduced.

One thing is living tradition, transmitted organically from generation to generation within specific communities. Another is ethnographic reconstruction. Another is stage codification. Another is academic selection. And yet another is the ideological canonization of certain practices as official symbols of a nation.

Confusing these levels has been one of the most persistent errors in contemporary discourse on Cuban culture.

From an ontological standpoint, it is not enough for a practice to exist—or even to have existed—for it to be strictly defined as “folklore.” To properly speak of folklore or living cultural heritage, at least the following criteria must be met: community-based transmission, historical continuity, recognition by its own practitioners, and real sociocultural functionality. When a practice is removed from its original context, reorganized for the stage, refined by specialists, dramatized by institutions, and then presented as a total representation of identity, we are no longer dealing simply with folklore, but with a mediated cultural production.

And this seems, at least in part, to be the Cuban case.

Cuba’s own cultural institutional framework during the revolutionary period offers a crucial clue. The National Folkloric Ensemble of Cuba, founded in 1962, did not merely passively observe an intact tradition; it explicitly undertook a process of recovery, rehabilitation, selection, and stage organization of what was called Cuban folklore. This operation may be understood as preservation. But it may also be interpreted, from a critical perspective, as the moment when dispersed expressions were elevated, refined, theatricalized, and converted into a visible narrative of nationhood.

The critical point lies here: to preserve is not the same as to produce, and to represent is not the same as to describe.

Therefore, the central question should not be framed emotionally, but analytically:

What portion of so-called “Afro-Cuban folklore” is organic continuity of community practices, what portion is academic reconstruction, what portion is stage stylization, and what portion is the result of state-driven identity policy?

This question becomes even more necessary when considering the role of certain modern disciplines in defining cultural reality. Anthropology, sociology, and much of the contemporary social sciences tend to privilege phenomenological, contextual, or functional descriptions, but often avoid rigorous ontological determination of their objects. They describe uses, perceptions, beliefs, narratives, and practices, but do not always clearly distinguish between what a community lives, what an institution codifies, and what a state promotes as a symbol.

For this reason, an ontological critique is now indispensable.

This is not about denying, in an absurd manner, the African presence in Cuba. That would be untenable. The African influence in Cuban culture has been profound and well documented. What must be examined is something else: the proportion, status, and mode of public construction of that presence.

In other words, one thing is to acknowledge the real existence of African contributions within Cuban culture; quite another is to accept without examination the narrative that Cuban cultural identity is primarily defined, explained, or hierarchized through an institutionalized Afro-centered reading.

This is where the suspicion of identity engineering emerges.

For more than half a century, the Cuban regime has exercised a strong influence over the symbolic production of the nation: education, cultural institutions, historiographical narratives, artistic programming, official companies, publishing systems, museography, and academic discourse. To assume that this machinery has not also influenced the selection of what should be understood as “authentically Cuban” would be methodologically naïve.

Therefore, the hypothesis is not that all so-called Afro-Cuban folklore is false. The more serious and defensible hypothesis is the following:

The visible and canonized Afro-Cuban folklore of contemporary Cuba should not be automatically accepted as a simple spontaneous survival of the past, but must be examined as a possible composite result of popular memory, academic reconstruction, professional staging, and ideological instrumentalization.

This formulation allows us to move beyond emotional reaction and into analysis.

And it forces a reconsideration of several fundamental questions:

• What strict definitions of folklore are being used?

• What documented continuity exists between original practices and their current forms?

• What role have researchers, companies, schools, and cultural policies played in this transformation?

• When does a practice cease to be community folklore and become stage folklore?

• To what extent did socialist Cuba transform certain cultural forms into political emblems of national representation?

• How much of what is now presented as “ancestral” was in fact selected, fixed, named, and dramatized in modern times?

Without these questions, the discussion remains trapped in cultural sentimentalism or ideological compliance.

With them, however, a serious research program becomes possible.

What is needed is not the repetition of slogans about “roots,” “syncretism,” or “resistance,” but the construction of an ontological critique of Cuban culture, capable of distinguishing between origin, persistence, transformation, representation, and manipulation. Only then will it be possible to determine whether we are dealing with living folklore, reconstructed folklore, or a form of synthetic folklore legitimized by the cultural apparatus of the State.

And that distinction, far from being secondary, may fundamentally transform how Cuba understands itself.

Yoel Marrero
Author of the Cuban Casino Square Method (MCC)

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