House Random - Cuban counterpoint, tobacco and sugar

Copyright 1947 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Published simultaneously in Canada by the Ryerson Press.

Originally published as Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azcar by Jesus Montero, Havana Cuba. Copyright 1940 by Fernando Ortiz.

eISBN: 978-0-307-82026-6

v3.1

Views of old Cuban sugar mills (from mid-nineteenth-century cigarette-package labels)

Boiling-room of the Armona Sugar Mill

Acana Sugar Mill

Manaca Sugar Mill

Buena Vista Sugar Mill

El Progreso Sugar Mill

Tinguaro Sugar Mill

Boiling-room of the Asuncin Sugar Mill

Boiling-room of the Santa Rosa Sugar Mill

Types and scenes among tobacco-users (from mid-nineteenth-century cigarette-package labels)

Woman of the tobacco country

Entracte

lgants

Of the pleasures that are no sin, smoking is the best

After dinner

De gustibus non disputandum est

Window-loves

Is this the tobacco your master smokes? What a poor house!

View of a sugar mill (early nineteenth-century engraving)

View of a tobacco plantation (early nineteenth-century engraving

Caricatures on the uses of tobacco (from mid-nineteenth-century cigarette-package labels)

His first cigar

Strength and Weakness

Effects of his first cigar

A family of smokers

Cigar-box label showing tobacco plantation and baled tobacco (late nineteenth century)

Cigar-box label showing steps in the manufacture of cigars (twentieth century)

The elegant manner of smoking and blowing out smoke called Cuban ebollition (from an English broadside of 1641)

London tobacco shop, showing the characteristic sign of a Negro smoking a large pipe (from Richard Brathwaits The Smoking Age, 1617)

Introduction

I HAVE known and loved Cuba ever since the days of a prolonged stay in the Canary Islands during my early years. To the Canary Islanders Cuba was the land of promise, where they went to make money and then return to their homes on the slopes of Mount Teide or around Gran Caldera, or else to settle in Cuba and return to their native islands only for a holiday, humming Cuban songs, parading the Creole mannerisms and customs they had picked up, and relating the wonders of that beautiful land where the royal palm queens it, and the sugar-cane fields and the bottom lands where the tobacco grows spread their verdure as far as the eye can see. After establishing these contacts with Cuba in my youth, my ties with the island were strengthened later when I became acquainted with the name of Fernando Ortiz and his work in the field of sociology. His research into the African influences in Cuba, his investigation of the economic, social, and cultural aspects resulting from the interplay of influences between Africans and Latin Americans, always impressed me as being model works in their field.

So when at last I met Fernando Ortiz during my first visit to Havana in November 1939, it was a source of pleasure and profit to me to take greater advantage of his time and patience than is generally considered permissible on such short acquaintance. As might have been expected, we often discussed those most interesting of phenomena: the exchanges of cultures and the impact of civilizations on one another. Dr. Ortiz told me at the time that in his next book he was planning to introduce a new technical word, the term transculturation, to replace various expressions in use such as cultural exchange, acculturation, diffusion, migration or osmosis of culture, and similar ones that he considered inadequate. My instant response was the enthusiastic acceptance of this neologism. I promised its author that I would appropriate the new expression for my own use, acknowledging its paternity, and use it constantly and loyally whenever I had occasion to do so. Dr. Ortiz then pleasantly invited me to write a few words with regard to my conversion in terminology, which is the occasion for the following paragraphs.

There is probably nothing more misleading in scientific work than the problem of terminology, of the mot juste for each idea, of finding the expression that fits the facts and thus becomes a useful instrument of thought instead of a barrier to understanding. It is evident that quarreling over mere words is but a waste of time; what is not quite so apparent is that the imp of etymological obsessions often plays mischievous tricks on our stylethat is to say, on our thoughtswhen we adopt a term whose component elements or basic meaning contains certain false or misleading semantic implications from which we cannot free ourselves, and thus the exact sense of a given concept, which in the interests of science should always be exact and unequivocal, becomes confused.

Take, for example, the word acculturation, which not long ago came into use and threatened to monopolize the field, especially in the sociological and anthropological writings of North American authors. Aside from the unpleasant way it falls upon the ear (it sounds like a cross between a hiccup and a belch), the word acculturation contains a number of definite and undesirable etymological implications. It is an ethnocentric word with a moral connotation. The immigrant has to acculturate himself; so do the natives, pagan or heathen, barbarian or savage, who enjoy the benefits of being under the sway of our great Western culture. The word acculturation implies, because of the preposition ad with which it starts, the idea of a terminus ad quem. The uncultured is to receive the benefits of our culture; it is he who must change and become converted into one of us.

It requires no effort to understand that by the use of the term acculturation we implicitly introduce a series of moral, normative, and evaluative concepts which radically vitiate the real understanding of the phenomenon. The essential nature of the process being described is not the passive adaptation to a clear and determined standard of culture. Unquestionably any group of immigrants coming from Europe to America suffers changes in its original culture; but it also provokes a change in the mold of the culture that receives them. Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, Spaniards always bring with them when they transmigrate to the nations of America something of their own culture, their own eating habits, their folk melodies, their musical taste, their language, customs, superstitions, ideas, and temperament. Every change of culture, or, as I shall say from now on, every transculturation, is a process in which something is always given in return for what one receives, a system of give and take. It is a process in which both parts of the equation are modified, a process from which a new reality emerges, transformed and complex, a reality that is not a mechanical agglomeration of traits, nor even a mosaic, but a new phenomenon, original and independent. To describe this process the word