Aprender la historia de Cuba: los recuerdos de un esclavo centenario

Abstract

Miguel Barnet's Biografía de un cimarrón is a paradigmatic example of mediate testimonial discourse aiming to rescue the voice of the oppressed and to be the conscience of a new cultural identity supported by the voice of Esteban Montejo. If on one hand testimony helps establish a memory that can not be consoled with the ambiguities of novelistic fiction, on the other, Barnet 'the manager' organized a narrative that aligns the past to present. Education on slavery, the story and its subjective nature have to structure a social identity which in turn is enclosed within a historical continuity that gives it a sense, that is a content and a direction. So the reader may be recognized in the "puesta en sentido" of the story of a life and of all that this story can offer to the reader: an autobiographical pact whose uniqueness lies in its performative character, intersubjective, in which the manager captures the reader.

Keywords

• Testimony-novel
• slavery
• autobiography
• past-present
• Revolutionary Cuba