By: Oreidis Pimentel Pérez

We are an incomplete body without Africa, while thinking that the slaves were people without culture. There was so much wisdom in them, and closer to Cuba, as in the Roman or the Greek. The act of faith was their resistance, therefore, there is convenience, not philosophical, but of values, in rescuing the black mythology and the ancestral wisdom.

This can be seen from the Island on May 25, a date dedicated by UNESCO to the ardent Africa since 1963 when the leaders of some thirty nascent nations met in Addis Abbeba, Ethiopia, to form what is today known as The African Union. It was an emancipatory shake after centuries of colonialism and divisions with imperial rules on the maps, beyond the extension of their languages ​​and cultures, a symbolic date for the reflection of the essence of the continent.

Each year the commemoration calls for scientific debate, the memory of the slave transit, occasion where the city of Camagüey has several spaces. For example, in the present 2019 the foreign scholarship holders at the Ignacio Agramonte University have developed sports competitions, culinary exhibitions and a cultural gala in coordination with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples. From the House of Cultural Diversity of Camagüey (belonging to the Office of the Historian of Camagüey City) will meet a scientific panel composed of scholars and academics from this province.

“Without the black man Cuba would not be Cuba” said Cuban anthropologist and researcher Fernando Ortiz, someone who taught us to understand that Africa is in our Cuban variant of the Spanish we speak, in music, in the kitchen, in traditional festivals, in the different religious manifestations and in other ethnological elements with the unmistakable original stamp of that continent and of any vestige that the brown ancestry reveals to us.

Image: @Fontesruben

Translated into English by Yisel Torres Ruiz