2 ?b90

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artists, dancers, musicians and designers, including Picasso. His influence
on European culture was very far-reaching. What possible significance could
this have for a minor Cuban diplomat and his family, we may ask? It seems
to me that the ballerina's love for Diaghilev is equivalent to a love of her
artistic vocation. The passion of the great artistic entrepreneur for the
Cuban is actually the desire to learn from and integrate Carribean culture,
its musical rhythms and Negro dances. In this context, Fronesis senior re-
jects the proposed marriage of cultures because he fears a loss of identity
amidst the richness of ancient European artistic values. Instead he takes
to his heart that aspect of European culture which he is able to control,
breeding and morality, in the shape of Maria Teresa. She is worthy but de -
cidedly uncreative, . barren. She exists on his terms; she is the little
piece of Europe which he has captured and borne homewards, where she is now
stifled in a parochial atmosphere ("su hastio de Santa Clara"; 1,401). He
has not broken with the past in order to create something new and vital.
His only moment of creativity is the conception of his son in the spirit of
chaos. It will be up to Fronesis junior to resolve this terrible irony.
The benevolent father archetype is not embodied in the ethical, reserved
half of the character which is earthly and potentially negative, but in the
irresistible attraction of the creative powers of Chaos. Although Fronesis'
real father gives him a sense of right and wrong, his powers of reason and
his ethical approach of life, there is a danger of these qualities holding
the hero back from innovation and change,. because "what distinguishes the
hero is an active incest, the deliberate conscious exposure of himself to
52
the dangerous influence of the female,... Fronesis' father (in the
physical sense) has deliberately vaithdrawn from the ultimate challenge of
the chaotic Unconscious and so no new culture has been created. He has re-
mained part of the status quo which the son will challenge after apparently
succeeding in the first stage of the dragon fight, which must be examined
very carefully in order to determine Fronesis' fate, hero or fool.