A Framing Statement

Video: Afro-Cuban Sentimiento: A Politics of Affect in Conga Santiaguera Music

This video-essay opens with a card reading “always-opaque,” following Édouard Glissant’s claim to opacity as an epistemological right against the colonial demand for transparency.¹ Flanking that declaration are brief invocations of Èṣù (trickster deity, opener of paths) and Odù Ifá (Ifá divination scripture), specifically Ìká Méjì, the eleventh principal Odù, and the precarity of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, deity of wisdom and divination, that place the work under the sign of divination, indirection, and trickster mediation.² What follows practices what it names: the piece transmits without requiring full comprehension, trusts viewers to feel what they may not fully grasp, and refuses to explain its sacred referents within the frame. The framing statement you are reading offers keys; the video offers experience.

The opening footage, shot in the Credit River near Streetsville, Ontario, shows Chinook salmon struggling upstream in water too shallow, bellies scraping rock. My young daughter’s off-screen voice enters as she discovers the fish, casting her as a contemporary Sikán who stumbles into dangerous knowledge. For those who know Abakuá tradition (Afro-Cuban male initiatory society of Calabarí origin), this scene allegorizes a founding myth: Princess Sikán, walking by the river, traps the sacred fish Tanze in her clay jug. For possessing dangerous knowledge, Sikán is sacrificed by the elders, and her voice is captured in the goatskin drum Ekwé, which still speaks in Abakuá ceremonies today.³ The fish’s voice lives on, transmitted through the vessel, across generations. This Tanze-Sikán relation, fish encountered by a woman at the water’s edge, sacrificed and transformed into a vessel of voice, is the undercurrent for the piece’s other aquatic figures. They killed her for knowing; her voice lives in the drum of those who killed her. My daughter discovers and is not consumed. The video transmits without that sacrifice, though it cannot settle the debt. The salmon’s impossible return, pushing toward a spawning ground it will not survive, figures the Afro-Cuban diasporic condition: there is no “Afro-Cuba” to return to, no geographic origin, only the relentless movement forward. But this is not tragedy befalling the fish. The run is the salmon. Cyclical hardship is not external to existence but constitutive of it.

Following Caribbean critical ocean studies, which treat sea and submarine space as archives of colonial modernity and as sites for reimagining kinship, I read the Credit River’s salmon run as part of the same hydrographic system that bears Afro-Caribbean histories: a cold-water tributary to an Atlantic world in which fish, ships, and Black (Afro-Cuban) bodies have always been entangled.⁴ In dialogue with Caribbean aquatic poetics and submarine aesthetics, I treat the salmon not as documentary nature footage but as a cold-water kin to the marine figures that populate Caribbean literature, a nonhuman body whose impossible return and scraped belly inscribe cycles of migration, extraction, and survival into the riverbed itself.⁵ Like recent Black hydro-criticism that turns to marine mammals as teachers in a “blue” Black feminist tradition, the piece treats salmon not as metaphor alone but as co-theorists: beings whose patterned movement, repeated return, and bodily abrasion offer lessons about Afro-diasporic survival under changing ecologies.⁶

I am interested in what Caribbean Indigenous peoples, the Taíno, the Ciboney, might have known about the islands’ cycles: whether they submerge and resurface, how to ride them when they transform. Celia Sorhaindo’s Guabancex, invoking the Taíno storm deity to think hurricane devastation in Dominica, offers a contemporary precedent for mobilizing Indigenous Caribbean cosmology in climate and survivance work.⁷ Recent scholarship on contested Caribbean Indigeneity insists that Taíno and Carib presence persists both demographically and symbolically, actively being reconstructed in the present rather than consigned to extinction.⁸ Some who know Cuba and its Afro problem have described the island as a cruise ship, as a slave ship. Yet we might also think of the island as an animal, as a large caimán (crocodile) that twists and turns in the Caribbean Sea’s muddied waters, or as a huge fish that goes under while the people whose habitat is the skin of the fish ride it. That Indigenous knowledge was largely destroyed. What Afro-Cubans have acquired instead, through the compressed intensity of revolutionary hope, Red Atlantic participation, and collapse, is an affective epistemology: a way of knowing the island through the deposits of sentimiento (feeling), transmitted across generations through rumba, conga, and bolero. “Red Atlantic” here carries a double valence. First, it echoes the radical maritime circuits of the revolutionary Atlantic mapped by sailors, slaves, and commoners.⁹ Second, it names the Indigenous Atlantic presence and routes that preceded and persist beneath colonial modernity, now overlaid by Cuba’s later circuits of proletarian internationalism, from Angola to Grenada.¹⁰

If Tanze is the river fish whose voice is captured in the Ekwé, the island-as-fish is that principle scaled up and inverted: not discovery from the shore but recognition from the back of an animal already in motion. Afro-Cubans did not observe the island becoming fish; we feel it go under, and that we go with it. Could submergence be it? A claim to Indigeneity for those who hold their breath? Could the lungs bloated with CO₂ be it?¹¹ It might perhaps be what distinguishes sentimiento from ethnographic knowledge: we learn what the island we are riding is through the experience of submersion itself. Cuba, March 2026, thirteen, twenty-four, seventy-two hours, no power, no water; Jamaica, after Hurricane Melissa, three months, no power, no water. Here piscine and archipelagic thinking sits squarely in the ways Afro-Cubaneity as an approach to anthropological method reaches out to Afro-Cuban/Indigenous and Black oceanic theory.¹² Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” history and consciousness moving like the tide, offers a temporal-aquatic figure for the cycles, submergences, and resurfacings that sentimiento registers without fully articulating.¹³

As the late Afro-Cuban rumba legend Amado Jesús Dedeu Hernández (1945–2026) of Clave y Guaguancó insisted, La rumba es sentimiento: rumba is feeling, thick with political and psychosocial deposits. This is not the sentimiento cubano of filin music (feeling, the Cuban romantic ballad style) and bolero alone, though Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo are part of its genealogy. It runs deeper, into the solares (tenement yards) and cajones (wooden box drums) of the nineteenth century, into Afro-Cuban spiritual practice and communal survival. I distinguish sentimiento from Cuban choteo (ironic mockery), the national mode of ironic deflection that Jorge Mañach diagnosed in 1928 as covertly anarchic mockery, a tendency to drag the lofty down and take nothing seriously.¹⁴ Choteo is a Cuban stance; sentimiento is specifically Afro-Cuban. Choteo mocks; sentimiento carries. This does not mean Afro-Cubans don’t also deal in choteo—they live in the nation, they speak its language—but sentimiento marks something else: a relationship to the Cuban project that is not mockery but claim, not deflection but demand. And 1912 was just yesterday.¹⁵

The cynicism that emerges from contemporary Afro-Cuban life is not Mañach’s choteo, nor is it Frank Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism with its ontological foreclosure.¹⁶ It is the cynicism of people who once believed, who experience our uncommon victory. Some of it definitely at home. But mostly in Africa and the Caribbean, and who watched solidarity submerge, mostly after 1991, since then a small paper boat at sea with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe socialist bloc. Cynicism keeps the door open that Afro-pessimism closes. It says, We know nothing will really change, and yet we still speak, still move, still carry, still learn to dance with the fish like Jamaica does after Melissa, as Puerto Rico or Dominica do since Hurricane Maria. My use of tragedy aligns less with David Scott’s reading of C. L. R. James, which has been critiqued for domesticating James’s revolutionary wager and foreclosing the very futures The Black Jacobins kept open, and more with a tragic sensibility that holds onto the dialectic of realism and utopia, tragedy embedded in structures and contingencies without evacuating the present of possibility of Afro-Cuban agency.¹⁷ Would the air in our cheeks be enough air?

The piece juxtaposes two moments of Afro-Cuban collective movement separated by sixty years. The first is Pello El Afrokán’s mozambique craze at Jardines de la Tropical in 1960s Havana, when Afro-Cubans danced toward a revolutionary future that promised shared power. Pedro Izquierdo Padrón, “Pello,” was both percussionist and Ifá divination priest; the mozambique rhythm he created circa 1962 was not secular entertainment but Afro-Cuban spiritual technology brought into revolutionary celebration.¹⁸ The archival footage shows sweaty Afro-Cuban bodies dancing to newly acquired power, an Afro joy lost ever since.¹⁹ The second moment is the July 2021 street protests in Santiago de Cuba, where Rubiester Porte Carrión, “The Poet,” improvised a conga that inverts Nicolás Guillén’s 1964 poem “Tengo” (I have).²⁰ Where Guillén enumerated what the revolutionary triumph gave dark-skinned Cubans, “Tengo, vamos a ver, / tengo el gusto de andar por mi país” (I have, let’s see, / I have the pleasure of walking through my country), Porte Carrión’s lyrics enumerate what has been taken away: soap removed from the libreta (ration book), sugar reduced by a pound, toothpaste “liberated” (the revolutionary verb turned bitter), children’s milk cut off at age seven, the disappearance of toys for kids. Formally, he stages this as a terse call-and-response: each item of loss is hurled into the street and immediately answered by the crowd, turning enumeration into collective judgment. The crowd responds: Los niños están embarcados, the kids are doomed, or perhaps already embarked, already on boats; nearby others drowned.

I layer these archival sources with an original rap track I produced with Alexei “El Tipo Este” Rodríguez Mola of the duo Obsesión, his voice entering footage he was not present for, extending the conga rather than commenting on it, placing new voice in the drum. His lyrics move through three-thousand-peso salaries, cracked walls in his house, trips to Vivienda (the housing office) hoping for support and resources, the empty muela (hot air, blah) of bureaucratic speech, and the refrain, “Es lo que hay / si quieres rema / tú ponle huevo, separa yema” (It is what it is / if you want, row / put in the effort, separate the yolk), where resignation and insistence share the same bar.²¹ A recurring pirate figure with a cowbell briefly surfaces in the visual field, condensing musicality and protest into a single opaque ritual that refuses easy allegory. The color treatments mark temporal registers: teal for the degraded cell-phone footage of 2021 protest, blue for the 1960s archive, black and white stripped of color treatment, natural color for the Credit River present.

Between the two archival sequences, a methodological pause poses questions over blurred footage: “Imagine being there,” “Is ethnography possible?,” “What do we do with it?,” “Who is it available for, who has access to it?,” “What’s accessible?” These are not rhetorical. The woman in the conga may never see the piece that circulates her image. As Ariella Azoulay argues, the photograph (and by extension, the protest video) establishes a civil contract between image, subject, and viewer that is never fully symmetrical.²² The ethnographic artifact extends the transmission but cannot resolve its inequities. In the coda, the dancing bodies at La Tropical back in the 1960s dissolve into the salmon, the past washing off as the sound loops and fades. What remains is the cycle itself.

Afro-Cuban sentimiento, then, names two temporal registers. In its romantic mode, it was the affective charge of revolutionary futurity: Afro-Cuban youth believing the promises, dancing into a future that seemed to be arriving, power felt as shared. In its tragic mode, the present, it is what remains after the promised future has buckled: a weightier verb for submergence. Residue, ache, sometimes cynical punchline, but not entirely gone. In the voiceover, this slippage registers as a tense shift, from “when power is” to “when power was,” marking the barely audible moment when futurity hardens into retrospective loss. As David Scott argues, the anticolonial utopias of an earlier generation have withered into postcolonial nightmares, and we require new genres, tragic rather than romantic, to apprehend our present.²³

Yet Afro-Cuban cynicism and its moralist relationship to history offer something other than foreclosure. By Afro-Cuban moralism I do not mean prudish moralizing or the “political moralism” Bernard Williams rejects, in which politics is simply the application of abstract ethical theory.²⁴ I mean something closer to what Paget Henry calls Caliban’s reason: a historically embedded practice of moral judgment, articulated through the tenets of spiritual practices, petitions, pamphlets, party platforms, songs, but most importantly, blood shed in the forging of Cuba as a nation. Measures by which Afro-Cubans have continually held both the republic and the Revolution to the standards of equality and dignity they proclaimed.²⁵ From the claims to “our rightful share” in the early republic to Juan René Betancourt’s Doctrina negra (Black doctrine) and El negro: Ciudadano del futuro (The Black: Citizen of the future), to Devyn Spence Benson’s Afro-Cubans who turn revolutionary antiracist rhetoric back on the state, this moralism measures Cuban sovereignty by its treatment of Afro-Cuban life.²⁶ It is post-Manichaean in Achille Mbembe’s sense: it does not cast Afro-Cubans as pure victims or the Revolution as pure evil but names and judges necropolitical arrangements from within a dense mesh of domination and complicity.²⁷

Afro-Cuban cynicism names a related but distinct stance: an affective posture of wary disbelief toward official narratives of raceless harmony and completed revolution, forged in the shadow of massacres, unkept promises, and the necropolitical distribution of precarity. It is not Afro-pessimist foreclosure; like Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” it persists in attachments it no longer fully believes.²⁸ This cynicism often takes vulgar, slack forms. Mbembe’s “aesthetics of vulgarity” describes the shared idiom of the African postcolony, a carnivalesque regime in which rulers and ruled alike traffic in buffoonery, obscenity, and grotesque display, where domination and subversion circulate through the same repertoire of jokes, rumours, and bodily excess.²⁹ Carolyn Cooper’s theorization of dancehall “slackness” specifies how, in a Caribbean context, that idiom is gendered and tactically redeployed against the very elites who condemn it, a vernacular aesthetics that contests so-called uppercase Culture and the moral authority of church and middle class, speaking through, not despite, what was done to them.³⁰ Read together, they suggest that vulgarity is not simply moral decay but a complex popular language in which power and critique, complicity and resistance, are entangled. Not hope, but unresolved questions, opaque openings, unknowable outcomes.

As Saidiya Hartman writes of waywardness, this is not heroic resistance but small acts of self-making under anti-Black conditions, deeply entangled with vulnerability and precarity, pleasure that does not presume things will get better.³¹ Kevin Quashie’s insistence on Black (in this context Afro-Cuban) interiority and the sovereignty of quiet names another register: joy as part of an inward, sovereign life not reducible to resistance or visibility.³² Fred Moten’s fugitive ensemble, the mic, the shout, the jam session, locates Black joy in sociality and surplus that arise in and against captivity.³³ The conga keeps moving. The salmon keeps pushing upstream. We made joy of a moment uncommon. In this sense, the piece participates in sx salon’s concern with climate and survivance: fish, island, and crowd all figure Afro-Cuban continuance in altered ecologies.

Acknowledgments

This piece grew out of a conversation on Black joy with Mark V. Campbell during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Afrosonic Innovation Lab. Special thanks to the University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and their 2023 Digital Storytelling Workshops for providing a space to complete the video piece. The original rap track was produced by me, with Havana’s supreme lyricist Alexei “El Tipo Este” Rodríguez Mola. I am grateful to Pellito El Afrokán, grandson of the great Pedro “Pello El Afrokán” Izquierdo Padrón, for posting the archival mozambique footage to YouTube, and to William Sabourin O’Reilly, whose 2022 documentary Lazaro and the Shark: Cuba Under the Surface provided footage of the July 2021 Santiago de Cuba protests.

Pablo D. Herrera Veitia is a Lucumí Òrìṣà / Ifá practitioner, poet, CUBADISCO Award-winning hip-hop producer, and an Afro-Cuban anthropologist. He is currently an ERC Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, working on the I-STREAM project, where he examines rhythm scenes, climate disaster, and tourism in Havana. Herrera Veitia is the author of Voicing Afro-Cubaneity (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic) and the founder of the Cuban Hip-Hop Archive and the Hip-Hop Diaspora symposium series at the University of Toronto. He is also coediting special issues for the journals Anthropologica and Global Hiphop Studies. His essays on hip-hop archives, sound, listening, and infrastructural life have been published in the Journal of Archival Organization, Anthropology News, and Seismograf. 

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[1] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

[2] See Emanuel Abosede, Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival (West African Book Publishers, 2000), 177.

[3] See Lydia Cabrera, La sociedad secreta Abakuá: Narrada por viejos adeptos (Ediciones C. R., 1959); and Ivor Miller, Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

[4] See Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).

[5] See Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff, “‘The One Who Comes from the Sea’: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015),” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, nos. 1–2 (2017): 98–111; and Leighan Renaud, “‘I Have Seen the Sea’: Caribbean Aquatic Poetics in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch,” Humanities 14, no. 7 (2025): article 154, https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070154.

[6] See Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020).

[7] Celia A. Sorhaindo, Guabancex (Papillote, 2020).

[8] See, for example, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism (Rutgers University Press, 2021); and Maximilian C. Forte, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (University Press of Florida, 2005).

[9] See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000).

[10] See Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[11] On the physiological experience of breath-holding and CO₂ buildup while submerged, I draw on Isis-Semaj Hall, WhatsApp message to the author, 17 March 2026. 

[12] I emphasize “Afro-Cuban/Indigenous” as my own framing. See Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019); and Sharpe, In the Wake.

[13] Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” in Annie Paul, ed., Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite (University of the West Indies Press, 1999).

[14] See Jorge Mañach, Indagación del choteo (Revista de Avance, 1928).

[15] See Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

[16] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020).

[17] David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2004). See also Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “A Singular Enlightenment: C. L. R. James, Anti-colonialism, and Transatlantic Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 119, no. 3 (2025): 1272–85; and Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015).

[18] See Mayra A. Martínez, Cubanos en la música (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2004); and Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (University of California Press, 2006).

[19] Archival footage in the video-essay draws on three sources, in order of appearance: (1) video posted to TikTok by @antonioluisgonzal4, 10 April 2021 (the original post is no longer available but can be found at Patria y Vida, “Oye Policía Pinga Tik Tok #4,” 5 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_GcEtF_rJo (accessed 7 November 2022); (2) William Sabourin O'Reilly, dir., Lazaro and the Shark: Cuba Under the Surface (TungstenMonkey, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJcUQOoDkj8 (accessed 19 February 2022); and (3) Cuban television archive footage of Pello El Afrokán, circa 1964, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ4aczRFHIw (accessed 22 October 2022).

[20] Nicolás Guillén, “Tengo,” in Tengo (Consejo Nacional de Universidades, 1964), 43. 

[21] Alexei Rodríguez Mola, “3000 Pesos”, unreleased track, produced by Pablo Herrera for Habana Hiphop, recorded September 2022. 

[22] Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008).

[23] See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.

[24] See Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton University Press, 2005).

[25] See Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000).

[26] See Helg, Our Rightful Share; Juan René Betancourt, Doctrina negra: La única teoría certera contra la discriminación racial en Cuba (Havana, 1955); Betancourt, El negro: Ciudadano del futuro (Havana, 1959); and Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

[27] See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001).

[28] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011).

[29] See Mbembe, On the Postcolony, chap. 3.

[30] See Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Macmillan Caribbean, 1993), chap. 8.

[31] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019).

[32] Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012).

[33] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).