Urgency and Possibility: Afro-Latin@ Identities

Abstract

On a September morning in the year 1900, Afro-Cuban political leader Rafael Serra y Montalvo found himself returning to his native Cuba after a 20-year exile in the United States. He had been forced to leave the island in 1880, persecuted by the policies of Spanish colonial administration; but 20 years had passed, and on that September morning, he was returning a hero to the new Cuban republic engineered by the US government. The presence of Serra in the delegation accompanying new President Tomás Estrada Palma was more than an allegory; Serra was a clear manifestation and the very embodiment of the idea that the long years of war had not been in vain, and that finally a republic would be established following Martí’s famous precept: “by all and for the good of all.” Serra’s prolonged years of exile, his work as an educator and founder of The League (La Liga) and his role as strategic planner and political leader in Cuban exile clubs, from Veracruz to Santiago de Cuba and from Santiago de Cuba to New York, infused him with a vision of the possible in terms of revolutionary and communitarian praxis. In this sense, Serra viewed the new Cuban republic as the “possible community” in which these radical agendas could become a reality.