Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #4: nation 143
vented, the laws he had prescribed, the customs he had initiated—all these
live after him. No doubt the customs, laws, and institutions have quite forgotten
the spirit that informed their youth; they survive in dishonored old
age, every day more sapless and rotten. But so long as even their shadows
remain, the building stands, the body seems to have a soul, the pale ghost
walks. When the original impulse has worked itself out, the last word has
been said. Nothing remains; the civilization is dead.
I think I now have all the data necessary for grappling with the problem
of the life and death of nations; and I can say positively that a people will
never die, if it remains eternally composed of the same national elements.
If the empire of Darius had, at the battle of Arbela, been able to fi ll its ranks
with Persians, that is to say with real Aryans; if the Romans of the later Empire
had had a Senate and an army of the same stock as that which existed at
the time of the Fabii, their dominion would never have come to an end. So
long as they kept the same purity of blood, the Persians and Romans would
have lived and reigned [. . .].
But if, like the Greeks, and the Romans of the later Empire, the people has
been absolutely drained of its original blood, and the qualities conferred by
the blood, then the day of its defeat will be the day of its death. It has used up
the time that heaven granted at its birth, for it has completely changed its
race, and with its race its nature. It is therefore degenerate [. . .].
I have now given a meaning to the word degeneration; and so have been
able to attack the problem of a nation’s vitality. I must next proceed to
prove what for the sake of clearness I have had to put forward as a mere
hypothesis: namely, that there are real differences in the relative value of
human races [. . .].
Louis Pérez, ON BECOMING CUBAN 8
This is a study of the Cuban–North American connection, not in the form
of these relations, but as a relationship: its multiple and multifaceted aspects
examined as one vast, interrelated constellation of factors and forces.
The particular focus of the book is the Cuban encounter with the United
States and the ways that this encounter infl uenced the context in which
Cuban identity and nationality acquired recognizable forms. What Cubans
derived from this experience shaped how they came to understand their
relations with North Americans, no less than the relations among themselves.
Attention is given to the diverse circumstances under which Cubans
sustained contact with North Americans and came to know them, how that
familiarity contributed to the assumptions by which Cubans presumed to