We Cubans will never need a specific day of the year to honor Africa. Hundreds of years of pain, love and passion bind us to this continent.
An example of this is this beautiful island of Bioko, nestled in the Gulf of Guinea, which in the 18th and 19th centuries and then called Fernando Poo Island, was converted by Spain into a prison enclave.
This happened after a contest to find “means to colonize and make useful the Spanish islands in Africa of Fernando Poo and Annobón”, won the project that proposed “destining the islands as a place of deportation for those who were commuted from sentence of death”. death or other sentences¨.
Thus, from as early as 1812, with the Aponte Conspiracy in Cuba, hundreds of Africans and their Creole descendants who were fighting against the Spanish slave regime in Cuba were exiled to Fernando Poo.
When the 10-year war began, deportations were regularized and many independentist patriots would be included in these groups.
Before the start of the Necessary War of 1895, the colonial authorities raided and hundreds of Cuban revolutionaries were sent to Fernando Poo.
There are books by some of those expatriates, which narrate the abuses and horrors of that Dantesque odyssey on Prison Island, where many children of Cuba met their death. ¨The confined to Fernando Poo and impressions of a trip to Guinea¨ by Francisco Javier Balmaseda is one of the best known.
Black Africans residing in Cuba and their children also came to Fernando Poo who, although they were not linked to the revolution, were victims of those monstrous programs to “whiten Cuban society” in fear of a colored revolt.
Members of the secret Abakuás societies of Cuba, captured by the Spanish authorities, also crossed the Atlantic with the same fate, which allowed some of their structures to settle on Guinean soil.
One of the objectives of the deportation, in addition to getting rid of rioters and political opponents and “whitening” the population, was also to populate the colonial possessions, which were in need of inhabitants.
However, the subhuman conditions of Fernando Poo did not allow the deportees to be inserted into a non-existent society, so on occasions they were set free and allowed to roam the island knowing that they had very little chance of survival. Some were placed on a key more than a kilometer from the island where they starved for fear of swimming back into shark waters.
There are records that until the 1930s deportees were arriving on the island, which went down in history as a prison without walls or bars.
The deported Cubans mixed with the native Bubi and Fang population, who also suffered the cruelty of the colonial regime, producing a transculturation that continues to this day.
Linguistic studies in the lexicon of Equatorial Guinean Spanish have shown the connections that exist with the Spanish spoken in Cuba in the 19th century, where words such as; avocado, banana, liana, cayuco, ceiba, national tree in Equatorial Guinea, cocada, termite, midge, macaque, malanga, mamarracho, yam, and others.
Time has passed and both nations have thrown off the colonial yoke.
That same Island that today is called Bioko and that hosts the capital of the Republic, is home to hundreds of Cuban aid workers from various fields of knowledge, but mainly in health and education, who for 50 years have been developing collaboration programs with the brother Equatorial Guinean people for the benefit of both countries.
The majestic presence of the Basilé peak, three thousand 11 meters high, the highest on the island, which inexorably must have been admired from nostalgia by hundreds of Cubans torn from their homeland in times of colonialism, today is observed by our collaborators from hospitals , schools, universities, health centers and social works built by the Equatoguinean Government for its people.
For those Cubans whose souls, mixed with those of the inhabitants of this island who also suffered the abominable slavery, are part of the spirit of this nation, we always want to pay tribute. The plaque that stands in the historic center of Malabo honors his memory.
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