| Chapter I: | Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality |
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designated multiracial, and in this mixture African genes were always given consideration. Batista's phenotype was by no means European. More than one observer or biographer has listed Batista's racial background as including European, African, Indian, and Chinese ancestors. Given the racial composition of Cuba as a nation, this fact would make him 100% Cuban. Yet not even as president of the nation could Batista acquire membership in the racially elitist Havana Yacht Club, due to the miniscule amount of his European (viz. Spanish) genetic makeup. Closer to 2010, Hugo Chávez, another South American president, has found stiff opposition to his governance by the Caucasoid-appearing upper- and upper-middle-class individuals of his country. Politically, opposition to the president's policies is blamed on his alleged socialist agenda. In addition, some have received quite negatively the president's multiracial appearance and his declared acceptance of mixed-race roots. In a revealing paper prepared by Ana Chalá for the Commission on Human Rights and read at the Ninth Session of the Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Working Group on Minorities, she unabashedly asserted that “Hugo Chavez is the first multiracial president of Venezuela and is called ‘Negro’ (N … r) [a racial epithet] by his detractors because of his African-Indigenous features.” The author affirms in her study that the cultural presence of an African background is still felt in Venezuela's approach to spoken Spanish and its popularly observed religious activities (Chalá32).
The denigration of groups and individuals in the attempt to negate an Afro Latin reality in Latin America is an issue that creates constant conflict in the broad socioethnic perspective of the area. Some countries, such as Argentina, have attempted to erase from national memory all indictments of having cooperated with the slave trade. What validity would an Argentine national find in a title entry such as: “The first genocide in Argentina and why the colored nation disappeared. In the XIXth century between 1850 and 1870, there was a culture of negritude”? How relevant to the concept of contemporary race relations in Argentina and