"Raíces de mi corazon" ("Roots of my heart"), an independently produced short feature film, deals for the first time in Cuban media with the 1912 massacre of thousands of members of the Independents of Color, the hemisphere's first black political party outside Haiti.
The Independents of Color were largely made up of veterans of the Mambi Army, the Cuban Army of Liberation that defeated the Spanish in two Wars of Liberation (1868-1878 and 1895 - 1898). Recent research in Cuba has established that this army was overwhelmingly made up of Cubans of African descent (80% and perhaps as high as 90%): it was thus one of the largest slave revolts in the hemisphere. When the Mambises had all but ejected the Spaniards from Cuba, the plantocracy allied themselves with the Americans to bring about the American intervention known as the Spanish American War in 1898. See the Mambi photo Gallery - these photos are part of the rarely seen historical stock used in the film.
Evaristo Estenoz founded the Independents of Color in 1908 in order to secure a rightful share for AfroCubans in a Cuba which had successfully marginalized them. He was murdered by Cuban troops in 1912 along with over 6,000 other AfroCubans, mostly fellow party members, after an intense media campaign carried out by the plantocracy to demonize the party. As famed sonero Arsenio Rodriguez says: "Hay que adorarlos como a Martí!", "We have to revere them as we do Marti!" Historian Aline Helg does an excellent job reporting all of this in her book, Our Rightful Share, published in 1995.
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