Cuban Culture

When someone once asked the novelist Aleh Carpentier, Cuba’s contemporary literary superstar, about the origin of Cubans, he replied without thinking: “We all came from the boat.”

In 1510, Spanish colonists took ships across the ocean and arrived in Cuba, where they began to conquer and colonize Cuba. In search of gold that never appeared, they made the native Cuban Indians victims of the gun, and the relentless disease and heavy labor of planting on the riverside devoured the entire nation. Spanish colonists and human traffickers used violence to capture indigenous people from the African coast of the Gulf of Guinea and from the ancient forests of Calabar and Mayombe. They were tied with handcuffs and shackles on black slave ships and transported thousands of miles to Cuba to replace the local labor force. Thousands of black people died of various reasons on the way. The black slaves who arrived in Cuba were driven by leather whips to develop and plant. The sugar economy of the orchard. In the mid-19th century, a large number of Chinese coolies were tricked into Cuba as indentured laborers to engage in cheap labor. Subsequently, French colonists who escaped from the Haitian Revolution flooded into eastern Cuba by boat and engaged in the coffee plantation economy. Carina farmers also disembarked from the ships to grow tobacco and harvest tropical fruits in western Cuba. Arabs and Jews also came to Cuba's urban areas to engage in business activities. The Japanese, Americans, and Scots also came, and Haitians, Dominicans, Jamaicans, and Yucatan Indians all came to Cuba from the ships…. Among such a large number of people, over the long centuries, in the harsh reality and the crucible of struggles that have not shaken off the shackles of colonial rule, they have intermarried, mixed, and assimilated with each other generation after generation, gradually integrating into their different realities. , an eternally great group of people with various skin colors emerged: the Cuban nation.

This is a unique nation in the world. Cubans have their own unique national character, religion, culture and customs. In terms of human origin, this is a brand-new young race: they possess all the best national characteristics of the above-mentioned races, with excellent physical fitness, tall, well-proportioned, and strong bodies; they have optimistic, happy, and passionate personalities , bold, enthusiastic, friendly, good at singing and dancing, easy to socialize with, have no racial prejudice or racial discrimination, but have a strong sense of patriotism and national pride. Due to differences in region and climate, people in the western region, represented by Havana, are more civilized, educated, polite, and gentle as a modern nation, and open their hearts to the people of the world in a calm and friendly manner; while in the hot eastern region, represented by Santiago, The people of the Caribbean have the rough, brave, martial and unyielding character, and have the national spirit of "when friends come, there is good wine, and if the jackal comes, there is a shotgun to greet it." So that's where heroes come from.

Hemingway, the famous American novelist, was familiar with the people-like character of Cuba and the personalized sea of ??the Caribbean, and left the world with his immortal masterpiece "The Old Man and the Sea". This unique nation has its own special emotions and culture. Mr. Fernando Ortiz, one of Cuba's most famous scholars, has studied the entire process of Cuban cultural history and calls Cuban culture a culture of penetration.

In the early 19th century, Cuba's purest poet Jose Heredia was good at chanting and praising palm trees. Palm trees are the most iconic feature of Cuban scenery. But people also celebrate the monuments of pre-Columbian Aztec architecture, the majesty of the ancient temple of Cholula and the waterfalls beneath the rapids of Niagara in North America.

The most representative poet in Cuba is the Cuban national hero José Martí. It has noble personality and social sentiment. It has traveled to Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Guatemala and Costa Rica; it has also lived in the United States for many years, engaged in organizing the work of liberating the motherland. But at the same time, José Martí also had a rich literary career. Literary critics of all tendencies regard his prose and his poetry as the essence of Spanish and as the forerunner of Spanish American modernist literature. Between the lines of all his themes, in the eyes of his ethics, they reflect all the novelties of human beings, which are related to the improvement of human living environment and the sowing of charity; he advocates university education and the national quintessence of Cuba, and advocates cultivating and appointing native-born people. The Creoles?.

This idea is also reflected in the works of Aleh Carpentier. He discovered in exact words the beauty of Havana, a city of extraordinary baroque columns. He proposed unpublished ideas about Columbus: using harps and phantoms to attract European readers to the beautiful scenery of the island; he translated the entertainment of Indians and blacks into Baroque concerts and Carnival carnivals in Venice. Its ideas shine brightly across the Caribbean for centuries.

In their most joyous creations emerged Cuban culture, noble folk art, community folk culture.