Rediscovering lo cubano Through Capoeira in Cuba

Abstract

When members of the Cuban capoeira group Caiman Capoeira were asked what the world should know about their group, almost unanimously they responded, “Let the world know that in Cuba we practice capoeira…Here we feel it because of what we have inside ourselves” (Cobrinha May 28, 2013). Capoeira has become an international sport, yet the consequences of its global movements are just beginning to be appreciated. In the discussions about global capoeira (mostly referring to academies in the United States, Canada, and Europe), the processes of globalization have been associated principally with the ease of world travel as Brazilian mestres open capoeira schools abroad and their dedicated students travel to Brazil. Cuban culture has evolved under a radically different set of social, political, and economic parameters. However, no culture can be hermetically sealed off from other cultural influences, and least of all Cuban culture with its “supersyncretic archive” (Benítez-Rojo 1996, 155). Cuban capoeiristas both consciously and subconsciously create a style of playing capoeira that is Brazilian in practice yet Cuban in essence. By focusing on parallels between the Afro Atlantic cultural contexts of Brazilian capoeira and Cuban Afro-Diasporic traditions, Cuban capoeiristas insert themselves into dialogue with both an international capoeira community and Cuban cultural performance traditions.

Although there are numerous cultural connections linking Cuba and Brazil through the Black Atlantic, surprisingly little has been written about the similarities in performance between the two countries beyond simply acknowledging similar ethnic makeup.[1] In most parts of the world, the capoeira diaspora has been expanded since the 1980s by Brazilian mestres travelling abroad and opening new capoeira schools. In the Cuban context, however, no capoeira mestre ever arrived with the sole purpose of opening a capoeira academy. When capoeira arrived in Cuba in the 1990s, through Brazilian telenovelas and through student-capoeiristas studying at universities in Havana, Cuban practitioners connected capoeira to their own lived experiences and sense of Cuban identity. Learning to embody and relocalize Brazilian capoeira has created an incentive for a reencounter with their Afro Cuban traditions. As the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil (1886 and 1888, respectively) have both engaged in historic cultural discourse around the integration of a large African Diaspora into the concept of a national identity.

El contrapunto histórico entre africanos, cubanos, y brasileños tuvo lugar, a nivel simbólico, en los relatos contados a ambos lados del Atlántico, que así conforman una cuenca épica. Esos lugares comunes del imaginario afro-románico sobrevivieron gracias a los continuos intercambios entre América y África. (Leo 142)

The capoeira practiced in Cuba today is not only a recent phenomenon of globalization, but is an ongoing reconfiguration of the circular movement of ideas, people, and practices that emerged in the New World and has continued into the present. National consciousness is an imagined expression of “people” in its collective form. In both Cuba and Brazil this imagining played itself out in the realm of performance. The myths and icons of nationality in Cuba and Brazil, often embodied through the mulato or creole figure, personified the social inversions, hybrid cultures, and the violence of colonialism.

Contextualizing Capoeira

In the words of Floyd Merrel, to define what capoeira is, it is necessary to define it by saying what it is not (2003, 279). It is not just a Brazilian martial art, although its characteristics are very martial and its history is in self-defense. It is not a musical tradition, although all the movements follow a distinctive rhythm and capoeiristas (capoeira players) must learn to be equally skilled on the berimbau, atabaque, pandeiro, agogô, and reco-reco. It is not a dance, although many moves are so fluid and graceful that you would think that the players were dancing. And it is not a ritual, although the roda of capoeira (the place where capoeira is performed) follows the traditional characteristics of ritual in that there are predetermined and symbolic actions that reoccur in a particular environment and sacred space.  Capoeira is all of these things and none of these things. And this enigma has been what has drawn practitioners and helped preserve this art form for hundreds of years.

Although capoeira is a Brazilian art form, it has origins in different dances and martial traditions of Africa. The Angolan martial arts n’golo, basula, and gabetula may have been influences in the creation of capoeira. It may also have picked up elements of West African culture such as the use of the agogô instrument and references to Yoruba orixás (sacred deities of nature in the African religion). (McGowan 118) Mathias Assunção explains that history is paramount in contemporary capoeira through the invocation of its historical roots and its performative reenactments of the resistance techniques used by the first practitioners of capoeira who were living under oppressive institutions. “The belief in the remote origins of the art, coupled with the conviction that an unaltered ‘essence’ of capoeira has been transmitted from that foundational moment down to the present, confers greater authority to contemporary practice, and is therefore shared by many practitioners” (McGowan 5).

Some of the first documentation of capoeira is among enslaved Africans and Creoles in colonial Brazil as early as the 18^th century. Despite periodic clampdowns by the police, the martial art continued to spread to the free underclasses in Brazilian cities throughout the nineteenth centuries (Assunção 1). While many of these legends come from the rural setting of capoeira during plantation life, much of capoeira’s development actually took place in the urban centers where there was obviously a tension between public authority figures and lower class Blacks (Chvaicer 546).  The fact that the performance of a historical past is at the very core of the game of capoeira means that its past has serious implications for its current practice in global settings worldwide. In the case of Cuba, practitioners are able to draw parallels with their own Cuban performative traditions of resistance, feeling a connection to capoeira’s history through a circum-Caribbean dialogue.

Capoeira in Cuba

The few foreigners who have come to Cuba and have made their mark on the capoeira community have not stayed in Cuba to create a new diaspora, rather they have been part of transnational flows, coming and going for brief periods of time over the years. Capoeira in Cuba has developed through sporadic encounters with these foreigners (who are mostly not Brazilian nor capoeira mestres) who come to the island for short periods of study or tourism and, in periods of their absence, Cubans continue training by improvising movements learned through studying the CDs, DVDs, books, or flash drives of capoeira music and videos left behind by these visitors. As Cubans inevitably learn about capoeira’s historical myths through playing capoeira and through media that has been left for them, Cuban players begin to find similarities with their own Cuban experiences of resistance to oppressive systems from their remembered historical past and from their present conditions.

Derrida argues and Stuart Hall elaborates that identity formation can be captured by the term, différance. According to Derrida, this term can refer to both French verbs “to differ” and “to defer.” Not only does identity describe a difference, but also characteristics of identity are often “deferred” or “postponed” as we focus on the more sounding likenesses. This creates bonds of commonality.[2]  The capoeirista historically has embodied this idea of différance. During times of slavery, traditions of different tribes and African nations were melded and incorporated into a system of resistance made solely for the context of the New World. As players and the game developed, this différance was reoriented to unite people of different social classes, ethnicities, countries, and languages. Today Cuban capoeiristas defer what may be seen as differences in Cuban and Brazilian cultures and instead focus on their imagined likenesses.  Capoeira evokes the struggles of resistance of Afro Brazilians throughout history and holds the healing powers to confront injustices committed against a group so often overlooked and forgotten. The processes of transculturation and globalization then make it so that the transformative powers of capoeira performance are not confined to a solely Brazilian experience; Cuban capoeiristas are able to connect its history to their own present and historical struggles, both real and imagined.

Transnationalism is defined as “the flow of people, ideas, goods and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution” (Braziel and Mannur 8). Transnationalism is often talked about in parallel with diaspora; however, diaspora refers specifically to the flow of people. The arrival of capoeira in Cuba is transnational but it is not diasporic since there has not been a relocation of Brazilian mestres or Brazilian capoeira academies to Cuba. Cuban capoeiristas, thus, are processing their capoeira training through their own lived experiences in Cuba. The processing of capoeira through a Cuban lens, however, is an example of an African diasporic connection. In Cuba, as in Brazil, the ritualized violence of social inversion is an important allegory of national culture. According to Jossianna Arroyo, both Cuban and Brazilian national culture is found in spaces where creole masculinity is performed.

…es un discurso sobre la necesidad de hacer un performance de la supervivencia del más fuerte y del más apto. La masculinidad se funda, entonces, a partir de la articulación de la ansiedad de subvertir espacios sociales y negociar las divisiones raciales y de género, y de obtener la libertad.” (Arroyo 177)

Arroyo points out that the performative and violent concept of masculinity in the Americas is represented through the often criminalized and carnavalized creole performer.

Creating a linkage between the similar images of embodied culture in Cuban and Brazilian tradition has meant that the Cuban capoeira group, Caiman Capoeira, has made a conscious decision to define its practice as a cultural expression rather than as sport, even though capoeira in Cuba was first registered as an official sport and as a martial art under the Federación Cubana de Artes Marciales, which is a subdivision of Instituto Cubano de Deporte (INDER). After the revolution in 1959, the right of the population to practice sports took a central place in the imaginary of Cuba and INDER was created to regulate all sport activity within the country. In 2008, La Escuela Superior de Educación Física, “Comandante Manuel Fajardo,” which was created in 1961 as the school to train and graduate professionals in physical education, began to teach capoeira as part of its curriculum. It now organizes community projects in Havana and in the neighboring provinces of Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, and Ciego de Ávila.

However, even though there is a central governmental institution (INDER) given the duty of promoting capoeira in Cuba, focusing on capoeira as culture rather than sport allows Caiman Capoeira to access funds and visibility as a cultural group through the Cuban Ministry of Culture and through the Brazilian Consulate in Cuba (both of which provide more access to prominent cultural [and touristic] performance spaces than would be available solely through INDER). Capoeira as culture is parlayed into a resource for accessing and debating rights and capital among capoeiristas on an island where culture is a powerful economic resource.

Ultimately, the way and the extent to which a cultural identity is performed in the minds of a public and a governing body have dramatic effects on policy, capital flows, and the extent to which a people’s way of life is to be performed.  This point is articulated in George Yudice’s The Expediency of Culture when Yúdice argues that what is considered cultural, as well as the very concept of multiculturalism, has become a resource in the sense that they are endowed with near-quantifiable values, and that the value imposed on the cultural by an audience has a direct effect on how culture is performed (1). Yúdice’s linkage of cultural practice with political and economic access foretells Cuban capoeiristas interest in performing Brazilian capoeira as an expression of a cultural linkage between Cuba and Brazil. While capoeira’s arrival in Cuba may not be a diasporic experience, the imaging of this linkage of Brazilian capoeira to Cuban soil is elaborated through the diasporic experience of the Black Atlantic where performative acts of resistance are part of cultural survival tactics of those affected by the slave trade. They are, thus, expressions that can be both Cuban and Brazilian simultaneously and increase practitioners’ cultural clout within the Cuban performance space.

When enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, their direct connection to their countries of origin was cut off. When the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1850, memory and oral tradition became paramount in communicating these individuals’ sense of their past and their history. Furthermore, they adapted to their new social environment, adapting people from other ranks of society and incorporating other worldviews into those of their own.  The process of transculturation, the malleability of culture to fit the local context, is ever-present in the capoeira game.[3] Cuban capoeirista Daniel says, “We respect the Brazilian culture and we mix it with what we are able to get here in Cuba” (Daniel June 30, 2012). In practice, this means players construct berimbaus out of local bamboo wood, sew their own abadá (uniforms), or cut and dye their own chords at capoeira batizados[4] that they organize without the direction of a Brazilian mestre. Such an attitude embodies these fundamental ideas of transculturation employed in the New World.

Even though no Brazilian mestre has ever come to Cuba to teach classes formally for any extended length of time and although Cubans face limitations in access to the Internet, a tool usually utilized by capoeiristas abroad to exchange information about the sport, the capoeira community in Cuba is training regularly, expanding their presence on the island and developing a style of play that is unique to Cuba. We often think of Cuba mostly as an exporter of cultural traditions, since the Afro Cuban musical traditions based around the beat of the clave are at the basis of so many Latin musical rhythms. Also, because of the isolationist position of the Cuban society exacerbated by the US embargo, we often think of Cuban culture as developing independently from the same global influences on popular culture that are common throughout the world. But while the processes of this consumption may happen under different parameters, Cubans are constantly consuming popular culture from abroad and making it their own.  There is no such thing as a fixed or static national cultural identity, especially when this culture comes in contact with imaginings of an outside eye.  What does arise is a connectedness between cultures, identification with a set of imagined cultural norms, and a self-understanding that is negotiated within the overlapping of the convergences. In discussing these convergences, one member of Caiman capoeira said the following:

I see many comparisons between Brazilian culture and Cuban culture because of the African influences. It is a mixture that comes directly from Africa. It makes me think about how cultures so far away from one another could have so much in common. They are different, but the essence is the same. The ideas about trying to get energy out of the earth, for example, are the same. (Haisa July 1, 2012)

Uprooting and transplanting a cultural form is followed by compromise, sharing, and ultimately a transformation into a new cultural whole based on the conglomeration of various cultural traditions within a new territorial space. Fernando Ortiz explains this process through transculturation, a complex process of cultural transmission and diffusion. Fernando Ortiz’s classic work Cuban Counterpoint emphasized individual agency in selecting parts of dominant discourse and reworking this discourse into something new (1947: 102-103). Meanings are always adapted to fit the local context. While Fernando Ortiz’s work is cited as a fundamental text for understanding Cuban culture, it is important to note that his social and intellectual links with Europe and other parts of the Americas meant that his definitions of Cuban culture were in a transnational dialogue. There are many comparisons between the theoretical arguments of Ortiz who aimed to systematize the geographic origins of Africans in Cuba with the work of ethnographer Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil, for example. “Assim, o conhecimento etnográfico dos africanos vindos escravos para o Brasil, o qual não me consta tenha sido tentado antes de meus estudos, projeta larga e intensa luz sobre todos estes fatores, conferindo a cada qual uma fisionomia histórica justa e racional” (Rodrigues 70). The works of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba theorize “un sujeto masculino ‘de color,’ delincuente, excesivo y atávico” who is an important figure in defining nation in the respective countries (Arroyo 19). These founding ethnographers, who were so important in recording cultural performances seen as being “Brazilian” or “Cuban” respectively, communicated that the tastes, sounds, smells, and dances produced by the African Diaspora were paramount to creating and defining national identity. This was especially the case in terms of performances in which the black (and especially the mulatto) body used creativity to escape, at least during the space of the performance, his marginal position (Leo 29-47).

The modern discourse surrounding the globalization of capoeira emphasizes that changes in capoeira over time and place should not be viewed as a lack of authenticity but as an active, inevitable, and pervasive social tool by which culture becomes expedient, recreating the idea of bodily performance as a tactic to escape a marginal position. Following this logic, capoeiristas in Cuba, whose “communitas”[5] was once defined solely by their Cuban cultural expressions, have entered into a global context and are redefining definitions of culture and authenticity. This speaks to changes in gender and racial norms among practitioners globally, in which females and white practitioners can also embody the allegorical figure of cunning and resistance that had previously been associated with masculine creole identity. And it also explains how Cuban capoeiristas imagine their connection to capoeira and to Brazil not through a lived connection to a mestre, but through using creative malleability as a survival tactic, an expression consistent with their own social contexts.

As a physical manifestation of how Cuban and capoeira identity combine, Cuban capoeirista Daniel decided to get a capoeira tattoo on his forearm to mark the importance of capoeira in his life. But, he emphasized that the tattoo needed to highlight the Brazilian cultural tradition that he loved (capoeira) as well as the centrality his own Cuban identity and, inevitably, the Cubanness of the capoeira that he practiced. He designed a tattoo of a berimbau, the central musical instrument in capoeira, made not from the traditional beriba wood customary of berimbaus in Brazil, but from bamboo, the wood that Cuban capoeiristas have available to fashion their own berimbaus. The design of the tattoo has a Cuban flag wrapped around his berimbau, symbolically highlighting the importance of the local in the practice of Brazilian capoeira. (Daniel June 7, 2012)

Francisco, another Cuban capoeirista, explained that learning about the history of capoeira deepened his own connection to his Afro Cuban heritage. He described that he received the book Fundamentos da Malícia from a visiting student from Mexico and, after he understood the concept of malícia in capoeira, it motivated a deeper spiritual connection to similar concepts and practices in Cuba. As an example of how malícia becomes interpreted within the Cuban context, I remember the first time I met Francisco (who is now one of the instructors of capoeira at the Escuela Superior de Educación Físcia). We were playing capoeira in front of the arts and crafts market, Mercado de San José, in Habana Vieja. This market is very similar in concept to Mercado Modelo in Salvador, Bahia, and the capoeiristas in Havana often go there on the weekends to perform rodas, the circular space where the capoeira game is performed, for tourists and locals alike. Before we played, Francisco made a special signage with his fingers on the ground at the foot of the berimbau that he would later tell me was for his muerto (the spirit of a deceased, enslaved Cuban) that protects him during the roda. For Francisco, Cuban cultural traditions that were born of a similar Afro Atlantic experience are what drew him to develop such a strong passion for capoeira. His Cuban muertos, he said, protect him during the roda and guide his movements. He confessed he also secretly hides his resguardo, his protective charm from the Cuban Palo Monte religion, before entering any roda. (Francisco June 9, 2013)

What Francisco’s story represents is that Cuban capoeiristas can hold a cosmic view that approximates to both the historical setting of capoeira in Brazil and to their own lived Cuban experiences. While most practitioners would agree that capoeira as it is practiced today is a secular event and that any connection with spiritual practices, such as Candomblé or Catholicism, are indirect, rodas often begin with an invocation that explicitly gives praise to God (Deus) and many songs refer to saints and deities, both Christian and African (Lewis 14).  Brazil, and Salvador in particular, was (and is) home to many different religious traditions that intertwined in practice. Capoeira, according to Mathias Röhrig Assunção, was an important part of this uneasy coexistence during its formative years (116). Francisco’s understanding of the malícia in capoeira, the secularized understanding of how cunning has a greater spiritual significance, is often difficult to discern and describe to foreign capoeira players, the most common transnational manifestations of capoeira being in Europe and the United States. Globalization has made it common to see an American, French, German, or Italian make the sign of the cross before entering into the roda or even to touch the ground to make reference to the African ancestry of capoeira, even though it is likely that this is not part of the student’s own personal history. These foreign practitioners are following the codes of the ritual as they were taught, passed on via oral tradition from mestre to student, and then appropriated, creating a new spiritual significance to the capoeira ritual within the global context. For Cuban students, however, these codes and rules were not taught by a mestre but are often a manifestation of their own lived understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred understood through similar slippages in Afro Cuban manifestations of culture such as abakuá or rumba, for example. In fact, these elements of deep play in the Cuban capoeira game are becoming less visible in capoeira even in Brazil due to inevitable globalization and commodification as capoeira and culture itself becomes farther removed from this defining historical past. However, the ritualized understanding of malícia continues to be the key element of any capoeira game. In Cuba the ginga flows from Cuban experiences of performances of cunning and social inversions.

Embodying Malícia with Cubaneo

An Italian capoeirista who was living in Havana for six months in 2012 had the following to say about Capoeira in Cuba:

For what I have seen of capoeira in Cuba, people have a lot of feeling. I have seen capoeira in Brazil, in France, in Italy, and in Sweden. Sometimes people have a lot of financial possibilities to buy a berimbau, but they don’t even play it well. They don’t have the “sandunga” (swing), as they say in Cuba. And here the fact that Cubans have music in their blood means that it comes easier to them. They sing and they sing in rhythm. They play and they play with rhythm. If the music isn’t good the energy isn’t born. But here with very little they make marvelous things happen. We need to help them a little, right?  Send them things. Because they have the talent, the swing, and the malícia… (Vilma June 23, 2012)

According to Floyd Merrel, “Malícia is a little bit of ‘malice’, but with a sly, clever, ingratiating roguish gesture. It involves awareness of what’s going on under the surface appearance. Malícia is cunningly putting something on someone before she does it to you…The slaves developed malícia into a carefully honed instrument by means of which to generate subversive acts against their masters. Malícia became their way of coping with life, a way of life, the heart and soul of which is found in capoeira.” (Merrel 2005: 280)

Just like the upside-down aú and bananeira movements, capoeira is a microcosm where elements of power, prestige, politics, and existence are turned on their heads. Only the most cunning will survive. Literally and figuratively, the capoeirista has made these capoeira movements his weapon. The capoeirista is playful, but also very careful. Your opponent may smile in your face as he pulls your feet out from underneath you. In doing so, the capoeirista embodies this subversive behavior learned as street smarts for those born into colonial systems of servitude. Roberto Da Matta comments that “malícia” and “jeitinho” (finding a way to make something happen when there are no resources available) are characteristics of the Brazilian national psyche (204).

These traits of the national psyche are also true in Cuba and are, thus, naturally incorporated into the Cuban capoeira game. Although making resources out of nothing is not in and of itself revolutionary and, in fact, is characterized by making changes to better individual social situations without changing the status quo, it is representative of the politics of the everyday. It turns the average individual into a heroic figure resisting dominant oppression with creativity and skill. Representing the common man as an heroic figure is at the basis of Che Guevara’s conception of the “new man” put forth in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) through which Guevara called for the average man to use his creativity and spontaneity to battle the repressive systems of capitalist embargoes. Today, post-Special period, the “new” new man in Cuba questions this very institutional discourse; the common man looks at the unfulfilled promises of what was supposed to be a bright future, and uses the same social cunning to question the official Cuban discourse, citing the frustration of accessing the limited resources available to them in an outdated Socialist system.

Capoeiristas in Cuba talk about connecting to capoeira because it is an escape from “la lucha diaria,” literally the daily struggle for survival. Capoeira songs and movements are filled with irony and double meanings, incorporating the concept of malícia that is often so hard for foreign students to grasp because it cannot be taught, but must arise from its own social context of marginalization. For Cuban capoeiristas, a similar cultural language of metaphors and riddles are employed daily to deal with the difficulties of living through moments of scarcity caused by the political climate and/or the effects of the US embargo, using humor, metaphor, and performance to assert presence and identity.  Thus, the same concepts of malícia are at the heart of the Cuban psyche, only under a different name. For Cuban capoeiristas who have not had direct contact with Brazilian mestres or Brazilian cultural contexts, the idea of malícia, with its connections to spiritual powers as well as its ability to make something out of nothing, is interpreted through a Cuban understanding of cunning and street smarts known as cubaneo. In the Cuban context, inventing ways of survival or getting around the system when there does not seem to be any visible solution has become an important cultural marker of Cuban identity.

According to Pérez-Firmat,

Rather than naming un estado civil, [la cubanía] cubaneo names un estado de ánimo, a mood, a temperament, what used to be called a ‘national character’…Its frame of reference is not un país—a political entity—but un pueblo—a social and cultural entity… Cubaneo, finds expression in all of those habits of thought and speech and behavior that we know as typically criollos—the informality, the humor, the exuberance, the docility…” (Firmat-Pérez 4)

Cubaneo is a term to refer to a loose repertoire of gestures, customs, and vocabulary that mark Cuban national character. Works such as Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del Choteo (1928), Calixto Massó’s El carácter cubano (1941), and José Muzaurieta’s Manual del Perfecto Sinvergüenza (1922) are the best-known studies exploring the ways that Cubans invent a vocabulary of informality and humor towards living and survival. Unlike cubanidad or cubanía, which are born out of legal documents and governmental decrees of nationality, cubaneo denotes membership in a cultural community (Ibid). This cultural community and way of using methods of informality, gestures, and street smarts as survival tactics denote a similar understanding to the Brazilian malícia. Playing capoeira in Cuba then becomes an act of ritualizing cubaneo.

Capoeira and Baile de Maní

As such, capoeira is not a foreign practice to Cubans who have grown up with similar corporal gestations in which movement, music, and sacred energies are in dialogue. In explaining how learning about the history of capoeira has revealed similarities between Cuba and Brazil Minhoca said, “Santería and Candomblé. Here [in capoeira class] we learn about both of the religions and the drum rhythms for both” (Minhoca June 30, 2013).

In Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba Fernando Ortiz writes,

…la danza [afrocubana] es originariamente un fenómeno dialogal, de magia o religión; por los efectos psíquicos de la danza y por la relación de su dinámica con los conceptos de la trascendencia de la acción sacromágica” (Ortiz 1951: 75).

Similarities in the institutional structures of colonialism in the Americas shaped the cultural sphere. Cuba became the largest producer of sugar after the Haitian Revolution of 1804. And in Brazil, sugarcane production was the largest earning crop in the slave plantations of Northeastern Brazil, especially in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Plantation systems as well as urban spaces in slave-holding societies in which slaves and poor, marginalized freedmen would congregate for social and financial reasons became places of creativity and performed resistance. Benítez-Rojo describes how the Caribbean (and I would argue that Northeastern Brazil can be included in this description) share a cultural history related to the structures of the sugar cane plantations. “The powerful machine of the sugar plantations attempted systematically to shape, to suit to its own convenience, the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it until that country is changed into a sugar island” (72). The Casa Grande became the basic structuring model for society and was a space for the generation of new cultural practices (Mwewa 153). The plantation system and slavery created the need for cultural acts of resistance in order to keep African (and indigenous) cultural traditions alive. These cultural performances that had their roots in systems of oppression created on plantations made their way to the cities through rural to urban migration.

Whereas in Brazil, capoeira was one of the products of the plantation system, making its way to urban centers when free Africans and Creoles moved into marginalized communities known as zungus, Cuban solares were parallel collective urban housing spaces for the poorest of the poor that also harbored cultural forms of resistance. Rumba, for example, is said to have “flourished in urban and rural settings where Cuban workers of all colors and occupations [gathered to share] their Creole heritage in music and dance…where free blacks gathered to communicate their feelings or comment on their struggles and enslaved Africans were permitted to congregate after work”  (Daniel 17). Musical synchronization between the drumbeat and the dancer is seen in the “rumba brava” or the “rumba de solar” just as it is in capoeira, for example.

Not only have Cuban capoeiristas brought up the connections between the cultural settings of rumba and capoeira and the importance of these practices in the performance of national identity, but playing capoeira has caused a new interest in a Cuban martial art that seems to have faded out of modern-day practice in Cuba: baile de maní. Maní, also known as Bambosá, was an African-derived acrobatic combat game that is rumored to have been widespread in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba, especially in the central areas of the island such as in Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus, and on the outskirts of Havana. These were all areas known for their sugar cane plantations. Fernando Ortiz documented one of the few detailed descriptions of maní in the 1930s in the neighborhood of “Los positos” in Marianao. This, interestingly, is also one of the last written documentations of baile de maní. Ortiz defined it as “consisting fundamentally in boxing, during which the player who is dancing tries to knock down one of the various participants, who remain on the defensive, and form a circle around him” (Ortiz 1951: 161).

El juego de maní consiste fundamentalmente en un pugilato, durante el cual un jugador que está bailando trata de abatir con un fuerte golpe a puño cerrado a uno de los varios participantes que están a la defensiva, formando un corro a su alrededor…Los maniseros iban descalzos, desnudos de la cintura para arriba y con calzones cortos o subidos a la rodilla; sin armas, insignias ni otro adorno que algún pañuelo de colores colgando de un ancho cinturón de cuero que les protegía el vientre. (IBID)

Mathias Assunção highlights its comparisons to the game of capoeira.

Despite its likely West African origins, maní offers a number of important parallels with capoeira, both in its formal aspects (played in a circle, with similar instruments, strikes embedded in a basic rhythmic movement) and its cultural meaning (multiple social functions, corresponding to the various modalities of the game, the role of ‘witchcraft’, and the importance of deception” (Assunção 63).

The origins of maní, like capoeira, are steeped in myth. It is possible that the name comes from Mani-kongo (King of the Congo Empire), which, according to Fernando Ortiz (1951: 160-161), is what the powerful freed blacks from the Congo region would call themselves.[6] Ortiz proposes that both rumba and maní are attributed to the Ganga, located in what are today the Sierra Leone and Liberia regions of West Africa. There are similarities between the two terms baile de maní and gangá maní, which is a term used to describe the dances of the manis, a group of people who migrated to Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century (Ortiz 1951:164). Argeliers León supports this idea that baile de maní may be of bantú origin from the Congo region in his ethnographic study of Cuban folkloric traditions in “Del Canto y el Tiempo” (León 67-68).

Just as in capoeira, maní responded through lyrics to the game being played. The instrumentation of maní was usually two or three drums and an agogô.  Mathias Assunção makes the interesting observation that, although the berimbau is considered to be the iconographic instrument of capoeira, the first documentation of capoeira does not include the berimbau (7-8). The instrumentation of maní is actually very similar to capoeira as documented in the well-known engraving “Jogar Capöera-danse de la guerre” (1835) by Johann Moritz Rugendas, which is one of the earliest recorded visual representations of capoeira.[7]

There was also much exchange between players and musicians in both folkloric practices. For example, the leader of the musical line in maní was the cajero drummer. The cajero was supposed to mark a hard hit during the game with a hard hit of the drum. If the cajero missed the hit or was behind, he was taken off the instrument and put into the ring to be taken down. Similarly, different rhythms on the berimbau in capoeira mark a different style of game to be played. Whereas in capoeira, the circle of players surround a game of two capoeristas who battle in the middle, in the maní game, all men forming the circle could throw a hit. In both cases, however, the act of playing became an allegory of the physical violence one must avoid outside of the ring and a ritual for survival of the fittest.

Like capoeira, el baile de maní did not have a set choreography. Players would perform acrobatic punches and kicks to the rhythm of the music within a circle of other maniseros. In both practices players were noted for the surprise attacks that they performed on their opponents and the games were based in techniques of defense rather than attack. Yet, there are violent accounts of both maní and capoeira to the death.[8]

The spiritual worlds of maniseros and capoeiristas also hold parallels. The maniseros often used wrist bands or hid makutos in their belts, powerful charms prepared to help protect them and aid in their opponent’s defeat. In a parallel context, patuás, believed to ‘close the body’ and protect the owner from bad spells, were very popular historically among capoeiristas in Brazil (Assunção 118). Finally, although both were solitary fights, players often formed collectives. In Cuba, for example, one sugar cane plantation could challenge another plantation in maní games (Ortiz 1951:165). Capoeira is famously associated with maltas, Afro Brazilian gangs that would protect one another and battle rival gangs as well as the local authority.

The embodied performance of these cultural affinities parlays into powerful redefinitions of both Cuban and Brazilian culture. Maní was a Cuban folkloric practice that had all but disappeared since Ortiz’s last known documentation of it published in 1951. Today, however, capoeiristas in Havana are rediscovering it in their personal narratives explaining the Cuban connection to Brazilian capoeira. Since Cuban capoeiristas do not have mestres that are shaping their styles of play, they look towards and incorporate Cuban folkloric practices into the swing of their play. It is not uncommon to see movements from rumba or abakuá, for example, in a capoeira roda in Cuba. Players have also mentioned that they are incorporating the steps of baile de maní as part of their cubanization of capoeira. But, maní is not a contemporary practice in Cuba. This means capoeristas are reinterpreting what they imagine baile de maní must once have been like and applying that idea to their capoeira games. The interpretive powers of a Cuba-Brazil hybrid capoeira experience are actually resulting in a revival, or, at least, a rethinking of a Cuban cultural tradition that had been almost all but forgotten.

The capoeirista and the Íreme

Capoeira culture is also being incorporated into performances of Cuban cultural traditions. The way in which I first became involved with the capoeira community in Cuba is a particularly interesting example to illustrate this point. On November 27, 2011, I went to a march in honor of five Abakuá members who were killed in 1871 trying to defend eight medical students executed by the Spanish firing squad for allegedly desecrating a Spaniard’s grave; this was in the time of Spanish colonial rule when tensions between Spanish-born peninsulares and Cuban-born criollos were high. The yearly procession in honor of the 19^th-century medical students departs from the University of Havana and goes across town to La Punta del Prado where there is a statue in honor of these martyred medical students.  However, what is rarely mentioned in the commemorating event is that, along with these eight medical students, five black men also died that day trying to defend the students’ rights. These men were Abakuá members, a male initiatory secret society, who take oaths of lifelong loyalty to one another.

Abakuá Society[9] was founded in 1836 in La Regla and members, descendants of the Calabari cabildo, historically took a rebellious stance against Spanish colonial rule and slavery. As a mutual-aid secret society, Abakuá culture and lore has been transmitted orally and, though Abakuá lore has become ever-present in Cuban popular culture to represent the rebellious and anti-colonial aspects of Cuban culture, much of its meaning remains uninterpreted by outsiders. (Miller 161)

On the day of remembrance of the execution of the 19^th-century medical students in 2011, I did not actually go to the main procession leaving from the University of Havana, but to an alternative event, organized by the Abakuá Association of Cuba, that met in front of Editora Abril in Havana Vieja. I had heard of this event through the rumba circles where I had been studying dance, many of whose drummers and dancers were, themselves, Abakuá members. One of my dance partners was scheduled to play the part of one of the íremes for the march. The íreme, often referred to as the diablito ñañigo, is one of the principal figures in the Abakuá ceremony, representing an ancestral spirit from the other world that dances in typical Abakuá fashion for the duration of the ceremony.

When intellectuals and Abakuá members Orlando Gutierrez and Ramón Torres Zayas began their speeches, instead of beginning the event accompanied by the coro de clave of the abakuá or the beat of the Ékue drum (the ritual drum through which Tánse, the divine fish whose capture supposedly led to the creation of the abakuá society in Africa, and through which the voice of God is said to reverberate), the ceremony opened with the berimbau of capoeira. That was the first day that I met Cuban capoeira instructors Libre and Cobrinha, instructors for the group Caiman Capoeira. Libre played berimbau and sang capoeira songs to lead the event as Cobrinha answered the refrains and called for the crowd to join in.

The Brazilian berimbau opened a public event honoring the Cuban tradition of abakuá and its heroes, which is very significant given the strong markers of specifically Cuban creole culture that commemorate this particular day. Abakuá rhythms are in the basis of most Cuban music, including the rumba guaguancó rhythm, which is the symbol of Cuban national pride. So why was it that if there were Cuban drummers present, the organizers chose the berimbau to introduce the event as well as to be the musical accompaniment during the poetry reading? Purposefully or not, the berimbau, as a symbol of capoeira and, thus, an Afro Brazilian performance of cultural resistance against a dominant colonial system, brought a sense of universality to the specifically Cuban abakuá ceremony that day. The abakuá martyrs became martyrs of a whole cultural process that went far beyond the confines of Havana and linked the creole experience in Cuba to the rest of the Diaspora, sharing an historical experience in slavery and creative resistance across the black Atlantic.

After the berimbau, speeches, and poetry readings, the procession began down Prado Avenue led by two iremes. When the íremes finally arrived at the statue in honor of the medical students, the crowd watched as these íremes danced across the monument and the capoeiristas in the group began to organize a small roda off to the side. I watched in awe as I saw the movements of the íremes and the movements of the capoeristas blend into one.

Cuban capoeiristas overcome obstacles and pool their resources to reproduce capoeira a lo cubano. Players are transforming culture into a form of social capital within their own cultural context. Capoeira in Cuba embodies an experience of social inversion and performative resistance that was developed over centuries of Afro Atlantic exchanges. Though it is a Brazilian expression of national identity, capoeira blurs lines of nationality when localized into the Cuban context, creating a performative dialogue between observable Cuba-Brazil cultural affinities—of both past and present.

All photos are copyrighted to Annie Gibson, the author of this article.

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