67 Daisy Rubiera Castillo‟s Reyita: “Mujer Negra” From Objectified Symbol to Empowered Subject 1 Karen Ruth Kornweibel East Tennessee State University I. In her 1979 poem “Mujer negra,” Nancy Morejón re-imagines and re-narrates the history of the island of Cuba from the slave trade to the triumph of the Revolution using the perspective of an Afro-Cuban woman. The poem powerfully chronicles the abuses and injustices of slavery and colonial subjugation, but its most striking aspect is the strength and perseverance of the woman. Morejón‟s poem is a powerful depiction of the Afro-Cuban woman as the subject of history rather than an object upon which history acts. This can be seen most clearly through the series of one-line stanzas that punctuate the poem. In these stanzas the mujer negra is an active agent who states “Me rebelé…Anduve…Me sublevé…Trabajé mucho más…Me fui al monte…bajé de la Sierra” (Morejón, “Mujer negra” lines 11, 16, 23, 29, 32, 38). The power of the female narrator, and of the poem itself, makes it seem natural that the mujer negra is at the center of Cuban history and the voice of the Cuban people. She is one whose strength and efforts built the country while she simultaneously fought to free the island first from colonial rule and then from the oppression of the dictatorships that ended when the revolutionaries “came down from the Sierra” during the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Nancy Morejón‟s poem stands in stark contrast to another tradition, that which uses the Afro-Cuban woman as an objectified other against which definitions of national identity could be posited. Vera Kutzinski describes part of this tradition in her groundbreaking work Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. As Kutzinski explains, the figure of the mulata became an important nexus for the discussion of national identity in the nineteenth century. The particular versions of national identity surrounding the mulata were based on a desire for mestizaje that had its roots in positivist understandings of the superiority of whiteness. For Kutzinski, the figure of the mulata found in Cuban culture came about as an embodiment of white male desire. This was a two-fold desire for both sex and power. Kutzinski demonstrates that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the figure of the mulata in Cuban culture served as an expression of a version of mestizaje that appeared to celebrate diversity, but ultimately created a vision of national identity that subsumed difference and disempowered those very persons who shared an identity with the symbol (4-7). Thus unlike Morejón‟s mujer negra, this figure served to reinforce the status of Afro-Cubans—and specifically Afro-Cuban women— as objects rather than subjects. Although Morejón‟s “Mujer Negra,” written at the end of the 1970s, is narrated from the first-person point of view of a symbolic Afro-Cuban woman, the tradition of texts placing the Afro-Cuban at the center of definitions of national identity begins much earlier and includes a number of non-fiction life histories. One text that records the voice and life story of an actual Afro-Cuban woman is Daisy Rubiera Castillo‟s 1997 Reyita, sencillamente: testimonio de una