The former Cerro del Cardenillo where the Monument to the Cimarron (bronze and other materials, 9.60 m) is housed since 1997 in Loma de los Chivos, Minas del Cobre, Santiago de Cuba, is considered a center of antislavery permanent rebellion. The historic documents attest it.
Around 1540 Santiago del Prado began to become a village. Its roots stem from when a Spanish built a foundry house and the huts where the black slaves who would work in the mines lived. The business failed, and the African captives that Luis Espinosa left there started small crops around the Cerro de Cardenillo to survive. After several attempts to revive the foundry, the mines were completely abandoned in 1637.
The governor of Santiago de Cuba, in mid-1677, set out to the villagers who were free to sell them as slaves to the owners of sugar plantations in the region, and more than a hundred armed men and women went to the mountains willing to die fighting before being enslaved. Gathered in fences, the cimarrons could outwit the colonial forces thrown at them and sent a delegation to present their claims before a commissioner, who on behalf of the king promised that they would respect their freedom. Over time the measures taken in favor of the residents of Cobre were again flouted who, like their parents and grandparents, were determined to die rather than be reduced to slaves.
In April 17, 1800 a charter issued in Aranjuez by the King of Spain recognized the condition of free men to coppersmith who worked on this hill, sixty eight years before it was decreed the abolition of slavery by the Independence Revolution and eighty years before the Spanish official decree abolished slavery on the island. The royal decree of Aranjuez was released in April 1801.
There was a continuous process of rebellion in Santiago del Prado that began in the seventeenth century and spread to the nineteenth. The most recognized uprisings that historiography collects took place in 1677, 1731, 1795 and 1800. The most important one was in July 24, 1731.
These attempts of resistance to Spanish colonialism were not only accompanied by acts of armed rebellion. There was a complex strategy that took several forms from everyday life, the occupation, the structures of families, buying freedom and solidarity between them. They tried to consolidate an identity. The report of Bishop Morales Santa Cruz which was written product of these events is considered by many researchers a document that signals of the emergence of the Cuban, of the Creole.
Monument to the Cimarron was commissioned by the Caribbean House in an universal tribute to cimarron, original idea of artist Alberto Lescay, sponsored by the Division of Cultural Projects of Unesco, the Caguayo Foundation and the government of the province of Santiago de Cuba, to be opened in the XVII edition of the Caribbean Festival. A monument to the anti-slavery rebellion enrolled in La Ruta del Esclavo project, with the objective that the issue of transatlantic slavery be an interest in international study that permits a historical consciousness of truth, unseen by silence and ignorance of this tragedy, to dignify the man and his culture.
Among the monumental works of Alberto Lescay, this takes on a special meaning. His professional value is to have found a way to address the issue identified with his creative project.
Codes, forms, appropriations are high contemporary aesthetic values. The elements of abstraction foster a subjective environment. His approach responds to a major break, a living work, constantly renewed in the natural context of Cobre in its own aesthetic discourse with the epic, historic, cultural, and social landscape.
Core symbol of this monument is the boiler that was initially owned by a colonial sugar mill in the eighteenth century. With its location in the rocks like a mountain top, it incorporates a new vision that aims to replace the traditional base of monumentality, allowing a natural connection with the earth's cauldron. In its conceptualization the ritual Nganga, where the spirits of the ancestors lived, the Afro-Cuban magic-religious theme is addressed in codes of modernity, prioritizing the anthropological approach: man. The relationship he has with his sociocultural environment is center of artistic interest. Alberto Lescay appropriated the cauldron as sculptural form to connote it with concept, object that he recontextualizes by giving a new symbolic function. As an element brought from Africa, this pot has remained true as a symbol of Cuban culture.
The Nganga, as force of their past, protected them. From that force the spirit and the form of bronze emerge as the rebellion of Cimarrons contained in the cauldron. In the multiplicity of faces the phallic reproductive element is highlighted. At this possibility the suggestion of Gender refers to both sexes. Apart from the phallus-snake the figure can be metamorphosed into the world of wildlife. Turning around there are angles in which it appears feminine and in others very masculine. In his symbolic-mythological character Lescay transmutes to the " Mascodogún form. The dogún are tribes in Africa who know the stars, the cosmos, who speak of the creation of the universe and the earth, who speak of the Arco del Humo "1 This dogún cosmogony warns the presence of the tradition of African culture in its universality.
The symbol, as the monument support becomes participatory event where offerings are deposited and interacting man-rite-nature in flight to spirituality. The artist incorporates feelings alluding to the root of indigenous cultural elements, referring to the foundational fact of our nation, simultaneously reproducing states of the evolution of forms in its historical time.
To carry out the sculptural project Lescay started from essential motivations: from the work Nganga viva (iron and bronze, 40 cm x 35 cm x 30 cm, 1990) and the Catholic legend about the appearance in the Bay of Nipe of the Virgin of Charity, image that is currently in the Church of El Cobre in a visual approach to constant monument in space, inextricably linked to the process of formation of the Cuban nationality.
Spirituality in the seventeenth century, expressed through religious symbolizations, began to respond to a new symbol. The most significant case was that of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre; cults to a foreign iconography existed.
In 1612 she was found in the Bay of Nipe. According to the literature, she probably belonged to a sunken ship.
Alberto Lescay reflected on the legend. Historian Olga Portuondo Zúñiga makes a research on the topic published in the text The Virgin of Charity: symbol of Cuban identity. When referring to Juan Moreno he states:
On the discovery of the image of the Virgin of Charity: of the four men who discover her there are two Indians and two black men, the latter is assumed that one was named Juan, but his last name is not remembered.
The image of Juan Moreno was perpetuated in the legendary episode of the Bay of Nipe.
With all historical reason is undeniable, in the present, the participation of Juan Moreno in the story of the discovery of the image of the Virgen del Cobre, because it means the link of cultural continuity between aboriginal and Creole.
In the sculpture, the head of a bird becomes horse at a pace contrasted by the diversity of forms. The position of the hand is not contemplative, it does not implores. The gesture is contained in the form, in the intention of going up look at its center, at the same time it is interposed to the universe. It looks out to find the way trying to read the hand as a symbol of the earthly, where it discovers the star that guides it to freedom.
The hand is the image between the earthly and the universal, the brand, a timeless look between the Cimarrons and the Virgin of Charity, Patroness of Cuba, where it humanizes in the consistent approach of man to the emancipation out of his nganga as force vibrating the total space.
