“Years ago I heard some songs from La Tumba Francesa related to the massacre of the Independientes de Color and we were motivated to rescue those three songs that only the teacher Bertha Armiñán Linares knows,” comments the young filmmaker Yasmani Castro Caballero (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba) via WhatsApp. 1992), about his most recent work inspired by the tragic events of the summer of 1912, a horrendous page of Cuban history.
“In the republic—according to the Cuban essayist Fernando Martínez Heredia—blacks and mulattoes continued to suffer from the very disadvantaged social situation in which slavery and the colonialist system left them, plus the harsh mark of racism.” In August 1908 a political group was founded, soon converted into the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) that set out to organize the fight for effective equality and specific rights. Its main leaders were the veteran Evaristo Estenoz, Colonel Pedro Ivonnet, Gregorio Surín, Eugenio Lacoste, among others. Harassed and prevented from using the electoral route, they finally chose to launch an armed protest on May 20, 1912. During June and July of that year, Estenoz, Ivonnet and some three thousand non-white Cubans were assassinated, most of them in the province. from the East,” wrote Martínez Heredia.
To make the video clip, Castro Caballero and his team left from Pinares de Micara (Holguín) where they killed Evaristo Estenoz, passing through La Maya (Santiago de Cuba), where they killed Pedro Ivonnet.
“In addition to meeting Arquímedes Hodelín, son of Francisco Hodelín Montalvo—one of the members of the Partido Independientes de Color who died from a gunshot during the events of 1912—we ended up at the tomb of Pedro Ivonnet in the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery.
In this 2022 it will be 110 years since the events of the War of the Independents of Color and its subsequent massacre, that is why we are making this audiovisual to remember that tragic event in national history”, tells us Castro Caballero, Bachelor of Education and student Audiovisual Communication, as well as director of Massamba Productions. During these years the young filmmaker has dedicated himself to investigating anthropological issues of artistic and literary culture, as well as issues of identity and gender.
“Cantos de Tumba Francesa a los Independientes de Color” will premiere on May 20 in eastern Santiago de Cuba and will later be exhibited at the II International Colloquium on Afro-American Studies, to be held between June 15 and 18 this year within the framework of the “International Decade for People of African Descent: recognition, justice and development”, declared by the United Nations General Assembly.
