The Cuban factors of humanity: Reproductive biology,historical ontology and the metapragmatics of race

In this brief contribution, I would like to try to shed some new light on one of the great Cuban savant Fernando Ortiz’s (1881–1969) perhaps least known works, his 1946 book-length essay El engaño de las razas (The Deception of Races). What I will argue is that this book, so far, has largely been read as a seemingly straightforward exemplar of mid-20th-century anthropological anti-racist interventions. As a result, its relevance as a contribution to science studies avant la lettre, and a sophisticated precursor to what we nowadays might call ‘theory from the South’ (though not necessarily in Comaroff and Comaroff’s (2012) sense), has gone unappreciated. I am deliberately employing anachronism here to highlight the relevance of Ortiz’s contribution for theoretical pursuits – such as a turn towards questions of ontological relationality – that have only recently become an articulated focus of concern in our discipline. And I do so in order to highlight a moment that Ortiz himself consistently foregrounded in his own work, viz. the inescapable historicity not only of human life worlds but our knowledge thereof, including our knowledge of the biology of such worlds. More specifically, my argument is that what Ortiz sought to develop in his fight against a metapragmatics of essentialist racial taxonomizing was an ethic of metaphoric predication: one that might not only reveal the linguistically mediated nature of ‘human nature’, but would afford us a glimpse of the densely woven fabric of heterogeneous multiplicities from which humanly meaningful (and socially consequential!) singularities – ‘races’, individuals, even microbiotic entities – are cut.

Based on a course that Ortiz taught at the University of Habana in 1944 (but anticipated in earlier publications, see below), El engaño de la razas followed on the heels of some of Ortiz’s most extensively referenced mid-career publications: Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar) (1940), and the essays ‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad’ (The Human Factors of Cubanness) (1940) and ‘Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros’ (For the Cuban Integration of Blacks and Whites) (1943). The book’s declared purpose was humble enough. Writes don Fernando:

This book only aims to contribute to a clarification of the ideas and forms of consciousness pertaining to the races by expounding the conclusions of contemporary science pertaining to them.… We have written this book principally for our compatriots, among whom races and racism are also topics of debate.

The Revolutionary Cuban government, too, does not seem to have made all that much of El engaño. While it republished the book along with the better part of Ortiz’s oeuvre in 1975, the preface by Mariano Rodríguez Solvera included the following damning praise:

With his characteristic method, the Cuban polygraph accumulated an enormous amount of informational material, classified it, compared it, analyzed it in its internal relations and with his great talent obtained conclusions of the most valid sort. Yet how far would don Fernando’s work have reached in its strictly scientific dimension had he been in possession of dialectical and historical materialism as his philosophy and method? Without this limitation, his capacities to interpret the enormous mass of facts and ideas he handled would have increased a hundred-fold, and, particularly as a sociologist, he would have reached the exactitude, profundity, and coherence which only Marxist-Leninism offers. (Rodríguez Solvera in Ortiz, 1975: 25)

In short, it is safe to say that, different from Ortiz’s other writings, El engaño was not much heralded either at home or abroad. ² By 1975 it seemed to have turned into a period piece worth republication more as an indigenously Cuban antiracist document than for its intellectual merits. A footnote, perhaps, to El Apostol, José Martí’s copious antiracist writings, and proof that don Fernando had his heart on the right – that is, left – side.

Nor has El engaño engendered much of a secondary literature. In fact, the only essay-length publication devoted to El engaño that various online searches generated for me is a very perceptive 2008 article by the intellectual historian Gilles Lastra de Matías. ³ In what follows, I have taken to heart Lastra’s suggestion to read El engaño against Contrapunteo and ‘Los factores humanos’. For the better part of this essay, however, I will steer my argument in a direction that I have tried to adumbrate in my book The Cooking of History (Palmié, 2013), that is, less towards the history of the formation of don Fernando’s thought and more towards its implications for contemporary social theory.

To begin to clarify my position, let me briefly explain the decidedly frivolous and illegitimate title of this essay. Frivolous and illegitimate because I stole it from one of my former students, João Felipe Gonçalves, who, together with Duff Morton, has produced the first English translation of Ortiz’s signature essay, ‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad’ (Ortiz, 2014). At one point, João phoned me to see if I could help clarify something in the text and he misspoke, calling it: ‘Los factores cubanos de la humanidad’. We both had a hearty laugh. But then it struck me: ‘Los factores’ certainly represents a brilliant characterization of ‘la condición cubana’ based on a refutation of determinist metaphorics that yoke 19th-century European linguistic and ethno-racialist ideologies and their 20th-century North American permutations to the evaluation of New World national being and becoming. ⁴ But might not El engaño, perhaps, be read in an analogous fashion as – we might say with Latour (1993) or David Bloor (1991), if you prefer – a final symmetrical subsumption of the original argument in ‘Los factores humanos’ (Palmié, 2013: 78–112; Gonçalvez, 2014)?

In other words, Cuba and other Latin American nation states’ alleged heterogeneity and hybrid nature is not an anomaly that needs to be defended against racist detractors; rather, this very state of apparent anomaly is the product of what, with Latour, we might call a peculiarly modernist project of purification. If so, might not the entire ideological edifice of ethnolinguistic homogeneity supporting the mirage of asymmetric national formation (rendering Europe and the segregationist United States the norm and the rest of the Americas a problematic deviation) stand and fall on the basis of an examination of the biologistic theories that seemed to naturalize it? If biology, as Marx had already recognized, developed in correspondence with bourgeois notions of human sociality (cf. Rose et al., 1984), then might it not be worth our while, or so Ortiz argues, to examine ‘nature’ – and so: human nature – as a sociogenic phenomenon?

Certain elements of Ortiz’s argumentation in El engaño made their first appearance in a collection of polemical essays that he published under the title La reconquista de América: Reflexiones sobre el pan-hispanismo (The Reconquest of America: Reflections on Panhispanism) in 1911. ⁵ Ortiz’s main target, then, were attempts on the part of Spanish intellectuals to ideologically recuperate a lost empire by expressing historically contingent linguistic and cultural relations between Spain and its lost colonies in an essentializing idiom of Panhispanic ‘racial affinity’. In attacking the romantic idealist foundations ⁶ of such post-imperial translation of an imagined supranational linguistic community into an ethnic or even crypto-biotic one, Ortiz found some unlikely allies. These included sociologists such as Ludwig Gumplowicz (1892) or Iakov Alexandr Novikov (1910), ⁷ whose theories of ‘racial strife’ went beyond the simplistic conflations of the social and biological that were the order of the day at the turn of the 20th century (Rojas, 2008). As don Fernando put it then:

Thus Gumplowicz can define race by saying that it is a product of the historical process, the result of multiple and varied causes,… which is characterized by the existence of ‘principally intellectual’ factors and by a ‘sentiment’ of unity and solidarity among the individuals and groups that constitute it, in such a way that, in the course of time, the ‘illusion’ of an anthropological [i.e. biological] unity [and so of] common origins is produced. One sees how Gumplowicz, despite his racist theories, reduces the concept of anthropological race to a pure illusion. (Ortiz, 1911: 18)

Here we arrive at the core of what Ortiz would come to argue more than four decades later:

The idea of race, like that of species and genus does not exceed being a simple criterion of scientific division and grouping of animals within the entire zoological spectrum, instead of [being] an ‘entity’, as the metaphysicians would say, of proper and substantive existence, like the individual. Nature does not create races, [just] as it doesn’t create species and genera; humanity invents them for its goals, be they scientific, social, political, religious, etc. (Ortiz 1911: 12)

In El engaño, Ortiz thus no longer recurs to the chauvinistic imagery of transhistorical affinities among the speakers of Cervantes’s language that he had attacked in 1911. Nor does he revisit the ideological presuppositions of a yanqui-style melting pot that he had debunked in ‘Los factores humanos’. His aim has become more radical. As he points out in ‘Los factores humanos’, there are no crucibles in Cuba, only domestic cook pots in which homey stews (ajiacos) bubble away on the hearth of history, absorbing new elements all the while older ones sink and dissolve in a ‘rich and succulent sauce’. Being boiled down in such a fashion makes them no longer perceivable in their ‘rawness’ by any observer’s – necessarily historically situated – palate and conceptual apparatus of discrimination. Yet new ingredients always are thrown into the evolving ajiaco, thus driving a process that unceasingly proliferates difference. Emergence, not origins, is the basis of the language game the image of the ajiaco aims to convey. But the crucial move that Ortiz performed in ‘Los factores humanos’ was to argue that the observer’s discriminatory apparatus itself is subject to the moment he classified as cocedura (the process of cooking). There is no way to perceive a (national or other) ‘synthesis’ except from a vantage point that, in itself, must always already be indefinitely preliminary, always on its way to a novel predication potentially productive of novel perspectives.

History, as I have tried to point out (Palmié, 2013), thus cooks us all – subjects and objects of observation and whatever opportunities of ‘tasting’ and evaluating our own or others’ lifeworlds it may afford us. What is more, it does so dialectically: in don Fernando’s vision subjects and objects of observation dance around each other across time in a spiraling progression, only ever assuming momentary states of mutually constitutive recognition, before phasing on into new states of being and becoming that demand novel forms of identification – and analysis. Every classificatory act, in that sense, is a move in an endless game whose rules get rewritten by the – seemingly aleatory – cumulation of such moves. There is no teleology in history. Only the incessant bubbling away of the stews in which we happen to find – or choose to situate – ourselves. ⁹

If these are conclusions one might legitimately draw from the earlier essay, then how much more fitting that Ortiz now delves all the way down into what, after Gregor Mendel’s peas and Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fruit flies, ought to have been biological common sense in 1946: the facts of sexual reproduction. ¹⁰ Using the language of ‘Los factores humanos’, we might say that what comes first is the sauce, not the ingredients. Heterozygosity being the name of the game, every human being is, as he puts it (almost half a century before Marilyn Strathern (1992), and with no knowledge of genomics), a ‘mestizo’. It is the belated labor of social sorting and taxonomizing that creates collective ‘identities’ where there – biologically speaking – are nothing but contextual relationalities between individuals of indefinitely varying constitution. In good Darwinian terms, the basis of evolution consists in individual singularities – biotic events – rather than predictable sequences. The latter might be inferred post-hoc, but never projected into a thoroughly open future. All we can know, at any one point, is how such individualities cohere relationally: just like ‘langue’ is empirically inaccessible to us in the absence of ‘parole’, so (at least before the advent of genomics) ‘phenotype’ logically had to constitute the empirical basis for inferring – hypothesizing, really – the relationalities expressed in the construct of ‘genotype’.

To be sure, among a reflexively (rather than merely reproductively) self-defining and self-delimiting species as homo sapiens such fundamental relationalities can become obscured by their taxonomic fracture. Given unlimited human interfertility, perhaps such relationalities must be broken up, even if only to become operationalizable in the form of ideologies of kinship and descent. ¹¹ But the divisions resulting from such conceptual separations (such as between kin and non-kin) are the functional fictions of historical sociological orders, and if they can have biological consequences in producing ‘phenotypical semblances’ in reproductively isolated populations – which Melville Herskovits and Eugen Fischer had shown – then these are not the products of Darwinian evolution but the artifices of the politics of human autodomestication. Since neither the ‘Rehobother Bastards’ (Fischer, 1913) nor the ‘American Negro’ (Herskovits, 1928) were biologically distinct let alone stable units, but instead the product of legal systems restricting mating patterns and policing social boundaries, ‘race’ – for Ortiz – is all hechura (i.e. artifice) and no natura at all. ¹² The artifice of race is just that: an artefact. Made, rather than extant, and it is discovered by means of – socially imagined, and politically implemented – invidious distinctions, rather than found out there in the world. ¹³

It is the work of the term ‘race’ – an ill-begotten word that leads an evil life, as don Fernando says many times – that washes to some shores an evil and fundamentally inessential foam generated by larger undercurrents of hostility and anxiety, perhaps especially when kinship is thought to be reckoned bilaterally. But this is so for historically, not biologically, explicable reasons. Such ‘foam’, if I may say so, is of a fundamentally linguistic nature. Don Fernando thinks so, too, and he spends the first chapter of El engaño going after etymological issues. But for both of us the ultimate etymological roots of ‘raza’, whether in the Latin radix or the Arabic ra’s, are less important than the discriminatory work such words-turned-concepts do in cutting what Strathern (1996), in her important critique of Actor Network Theory, calls ‘the network’ of potentially endlessly ramifying relationalities.

But if language is the root of all evil as an instrument capable of simultaneously producing both knowledge and ignorance, why then should language not also be the solution? Legally trained polymath that he was, Ortiz never bothered to spell out a coherent theory of language use. ¹⁴ Yet if the social taxonomies of dead generations rest like a nightmare on the brains of the living, then might not a new set of semantic transfers from unexpected domains arouse us from our slumber? Don Fernando certainly thought so, and Lastra de Matías (2008: 261) is right when he posits that for Ortiz the poetics and ethics of metaphor were one and the same thing. To be sure, Ortiz was not the only one who thought so at the time. But he was different from other mid-20th-century anti-racists in his unique insistence on the politics of language. Take his response to a rare gem of Anglophone culinary metaphorics, Ashley Montague’s (1942: 31ff.) characterization of the results of statistical extrapolation from individual phenotypical measurements to ‘racial types’ as a ‘race omelette’ [sic]. Here we have an intriguing – if perhaps Eurocentric – parallel to the epistemologically much more challenging metaphoric vehicle of don Fernando’s ‘ajiaco’. Nothing like an omelette is found in nature, says Montague (1942: 31–2):

The process of averaging the characteristic of a given group, of knocking the individuals together, giving them a good stirring, and then serving the resulting omelette as a ‘race’ is essentially the anthropological process of race-making. It may be good cooking, but it is not science, since it serves to confuse rather than to clarify. When an omelette is done, it has a fairly uniform character, though the ingredients which have entered into its making have been varied. So it is with the anthropological conception of ‘race’.… The omelette called ‘race’ has no existence outside the frying pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination.

But the difference is best illustrated by a turn to don Fernando’s genetics – a science, one should add, that had barely existed in its post Mendelian-Morganite state for more than a generation by the time that he wrote El engaño. I have already mentioned that Ortiz’s understanding of heterozygosis in sexual reproduction led him – and could only lead – to the conclusion that every human being was par force a ‘mestizo’, a novel hybrid individuality, in both the biological and historical sense. But how to conceive of the fusion of heterogeneous gametes in necessarily binary, relatively speaking aleatory, and therefore, Ortiz says, ‘dilemmatic’ processes of procreation? Homey culinary imagery once more is not hard to come by, though it presents its own problems. A café con leche (coffee and milk) metaphorics is thus quickly discarded – and simply because the biochemical forces at work in the fusion of gametes are neither based on a quantitative logic nor result in the homogenization of previously disparate individual genetic configurations. Forget the strained calculi of admixture by which colonial Latin American casta systems tried to police degrees of deviation from a norm of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). Forget also the blood quanta institutionalized in North American systems of hypodescent. But what about arroz con frijoles (rice and beans)?

It has been thought that a good metaphor might be that of black beans and white rice stirred together in a serving dish, for in this case the color that prevails on the surface will make the [dish] appear externally mixed, more white or black depending on the chance distribution of the grains.… Nevertheless, though better than previous ones, this metaphor is also imperfect. In the dish of beans and rice, the grains, even though irregularly mixed and of diverse appearance, present the sight of a discontinuous coloration, except at a distance when the images of the colors superimpose themselves upon each other and appear fused. One could extend the metaphor supposing that the rice and beans are cooked together (congrí), and so, once the pigments blend into each other, give the dish a mulato-like coloration. But even this metaphor becomes invalid once one considers that, once prepared, the rice and beans can no longer recombine themselves in a new process of cooking. (Ortiz, 1975: 157)

Here, then, is yet another historicizing factor: genotypes as well as the phenotypes they come to express are subject to variation over time, but at rates of variability that cannot easily be calibrated, let alone predicted. ¹⁷ Nor is the process necessarily continuous. ‘Sometimes’, writes Ortiz (1975: 174), ‘there is a certain dissoluteness in the life of genes, certain embarrassing moments in their coupling’. Such ‘ultramicroscopic love affairs’ that disrupt orderly descent with variation, result in ‘militant genes’ that experienced change ‘during their confinement in genital barracks so that when they rush out to the battle field of reproduction, they will no longer be what they were’ and ‘if they succeed in imposing themselves in the creation of another human individuality, a new type will manifest in it’ (1975: 174). ‘One might say’, Ortiz (1975: 176) argues, ‘that mutation introduces freedom into genetics; a freedom which is not a metaphysical concept, but the perennial possibility of genuine individuation’. Such potentiality – freedom as radically historical contingency – relates, as Ortiz already had already underlined in his earlier essays, to the ongoing ‘colloquy’ between what he now calls ‘don Ambiente’ (Sir Environment) and ‘doña Natura’ (Lady Nature) (Ortiz, 1975: 296):

Already in genetic phenomena, the specific function [acción] of each gene is influenced by the proximity of its companions in the same chromosomic formation. Each gene experiences the environmental functions of the other genes of the same chromosome, just as each chromosome experiences those of the others comprised in the same nucleus. (1975: 299)

Much as Marx and Engels had realized, the very concept of nature, as it arose in bourgeois societies in the 19th century, fundamentally referenced something other than an ultimate bedrock of biotic being. What it spoke to was a self-conscious recension thereof, based in what they aptly called humanity’s self-produced and self-limiting ‘second nature’. Humanity’s second nature thus pertains to a state of becoming no longer tied to the rigors of a blind biotic process of physiological descent with modification. Instead, it comprises forms of fundamentally artificial selection based on conscious social action and reflection (and their biotic consequences, whether intended or not). ¹⁸ To this picture, Ortiz wants to add at least a third nature: society and language – the necessarily historical outcome as well as necessary determinant of yet another dimension of humanity’s being and becoming.

It is this postulate of a third nature that necessarily raises the question of Ortiz’s (however implicit) metalinguistic – or better: metapragmatic – positionality vis-a-vis language and representation. For how attractive is the possibility of assimilating such a third nature to Peirce’s concept of ‘Thirdness’ as the moment connecting language to thought and reality! ¹⁹ To be sure, there is not a shred of evidence that Ortiz ever read Peirce. But is not the better part of El engaño dedicated to exposing the pernicious semiotic (not just semantic) intertraffic between zoological and anthropological fields of significance? Is not the very term ‘race’, as it has come down to us across centuries of iniquitous usage, an invitation to engineer invidious slippages between indexical and iconic registers? ²⁰

No need here to go into Ortiz’s lengthy explorations of ‘scientific’ or other attempts to construe longstanding icons of social ‘otherness’ into indexes of ‘animality’. Take instead, as a final case in point, don Fernando’s remarks on the pseudo-totemic logic of ‘racial difference’ as it took shape among Nazi scientists only a few years before his writing. He calls it a ‘curious example’:

The Bakongo blacks divide humans into four groups which we could now call races: the whites, the Portuguese, the bangundu, i.e. the crocodiles, and themselves, that is, the blacks. The whites are the Europeans without authority with whom the Bakongo have social relations; the Portuguese are those Europeans who dominate them; the crocodiles are those human beings who by virtue of special magical abilities, in their view, transform themselves into such beasts, and the blacks are they, themselves, that is, the classifiers. (1975: 36, emphasis in the original)

How unsurprising, then, that – as it turns out – Ortiz’s ‘humble proposal’ of a ‘mere’ compilation, in accessible language, of contemporary scientific knowledge concerning ‘race’ is undercut by a fight against language itself. It is about demolishing the metapragmatics that gave race – an ‘ill-begotten word with an evil history’ – its lease on life in the first place. As is typical of Ortiz, his attention is focused not just on the zoological realm that gave rise to the luxuriously animalistic lexicon of Latin American ‘mestizaje’ (cf. Stephens, 1999); what concerns him is the question of what, in a world that was soon to learn about the extent and logic of the Nazi holocaust, the Enlightenment project might possibly look like from an eccentric – Cuban, Latin American – point of view.

How can we – ought we – speak of difference? What languages might we use? What metaphorics do we have at our disposal that can help us to think of a world that might, analytically, be cut up at joints we have barely begun to imagine – or, alternatively, a metaphorics that could afford a principled refusal to even contemplate doing so? Might there be a metapragmatics that will not implicate us in the genocidal logics of Euro-American modernity that inevitably shaped the conditions of possibility of peripheral nationhood, without falling into the trap of a merely oppositional discourse prescriptive of creoledom or mestizaje? Given that the coloniality of power reproduces itself in the classifying work of language, might not the key to interrupting its operation lie in the linguistic realm as well?

It is in this dimension that we need to locate Ortiz’s vision of the ‘specter of race’. It is a specter ‘agitated by the conjurations of the living’: the language that perpetuates the ‘ill-begotten and evil life’ of the very word ‘race’. Such language casts its spell upon our minds like ‘a terrible idol that drinks human blood and demands holocausts, that enslaves persons and peoples, blinds their conscience and poisons their lives’. In sum, since the ontology of ‘race’ is social and linguistic, ‘Human society which created the races will have to suppress them’ (Ortiz, 1975: 402). If so, then from what better vantage point to begin the work of exorcizing the phantasm of race than from an American one? ‘All of America is an immense seething and boiling of races. Neither has this ebullience ended, nor will it cease soon’ (1975: 31). This is so because:

America, all of America is mestizo. ‘It is impossible to ascertain to which human family we belong’ said Bolívar in his famous address at Angostura in 1829 [sic]; and one could understand that expression as much in South America as in Central and North America, and on the continent as well as on the islands.… It is impossible to study whatever aspect of the American peoples without immediately becoming aware of their profound mestizaje, and in some of them, specifically of their mulatez. ²² (1975: 31–2)

But Cuba’s entirely invasive and historically complexly constituted human population does not admit such a definition of unproblematic nativeness. Its Cubanness, if I may now be allowed to blur Ortiz’s important distinction in the service of Anglophony, represents a conscious, self-reflexive, and so ultimately social, achievement that has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of its – as the current genomic euphemism goes – biogeographical ancestry or present habitat. The very notions of ‘mestizaje’ and ‘mixtión’ are nothing but a ‘mixtificación’! Understanding ‘las Américas’ and their supposedly ‘racial’ history is, for don Fernando – and for me, too – to understand the fundamentals of the human condition.

Ortiz chose not to elaborate on the issue of what we might call ‘heteronormative’ standards of national viability, avoiding the polemical barbs he directed at ‘El Norte’ (i.e. the USA) in the earlier essay, or later publications (Ortiz, 1998). But I think it is sufficiently clear that ‘los factores humanos de la cubanidad’ and ‘los factores cubanos de la humanidad’ are, ultimately, cut from the same cloth. How else, then, can we interpret his call for the exorcism of the phantasm of ‘race’? To say ‘We have never been racial’ would be trivial. But we might do well to think with don Fernando in considering whether our sense of ‘humanidad’ as a species (in all its heterogeneity) ought not be complemented by efforts to achieve a common ‘humanía’: unmarked and unquestionable as both an ethical disposition towards the other, and as an analytic that places contingency and emergence at the core of our being and becoming human. This is a page that we, as anthropologists, can – and ought to – take from his book, however belatedly. And we should do so with the retrospective insight into the history that has cooked our common interest in the ‘human condition’ to the point in time at which I end this essay.