The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
July 2003
Footnotes for
Comments on "The Iconization
of Elián Gonzalez"
by Stephan
Palmié
1 Think here, for example, of the infamous pamphlet alleging Castro's need to sacrifice Elián to the deity whose avatar the boy supposedly was. None of this made any sense at all within the universe of discourse constituted by contemporary Afro-Cuban religion. But it undoubtedly jived with what every Miami Cuban knew: namely a story of the alleged sacrifice of white children to African deities (presumably for the benefits of elderly ex-slaves) that has long, in fact since 1904, been a staple of a peculiarly Cuban discourse on the relation between racial and cultural difference in the constitution of Cuban national identity. Now an exiled nation conceiving of itself as "white" in increasingly North American terms pegged its future to an involuntary child refugee (of sufficiently "Caucasian" appearance to satisfy even US standards) from a country ruled by the son of a Galician immigrant suspected of having allied himself with the mystical forces of "darkest Africa." Contrariwise, the much-described Miami mural depicting (among many other things) Cuba's national protectress, the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, hovering over little Elián and his inner tube - or, for that matter, Marysleysis' raptures and the Virgins in the Totalbank Windex-smears - made sense only on the grounds of the suppression of a long history of the transplantation of Iberian traditions of "inventiones" to the New World, and their strategic appropriation by "racial others" - such as, in the case of Cuba's national protectress, the African slaves of the mines of El Cobre who used a Mariolatric template to write the story of their freedom into the archive of His Catholic Majesty, and the Vatican. No syncretism here, or was there?
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