When Alejo Carpentier, the most important novelist of our letters and perhaps the most well known Cuban contemporary writer, was asked about the origin of Cuban's inhabitants, he answered: we all descended from boats.

The connquistadors came from Spain, on boats and within a short time, wiped out the island's aborigenes- victims of harquebuses, diseases and slave labor on the riverbanks searching for a gold that never appeared. Then thousands of slaves were brought from the coast of Africa's gulf of Guinea, old calabar and the jungle of Mayombe to substitute native work force and they contributed, under the snaps of the whips, to the development of a sugar plantation economy. By the middle of the 19th century, chinese coolies arrived also by ship and some time before, French colonial settlers, crossing the windward Pass, had arrived in the eastern part of Cuba, fleeting from Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolutionary Haiti.

Later, peasants from the Canary islands also came over by ship, willing to harvest fragraht tabacco and tropical fruits, and so did Arabs and Jews who opened stores in urban areas,enterprising Spaniards who married into the local population, giving way to crossbreeding, and also indians from Yucatan, teachers and soldiers from the recently liberated american lands, and even Japanese, Americans and Swedes, who settled in small agricultural communities.

From this diversity, however, unity emerged as a concept of nation and nationality, defined throughout time and definitely merged in the melting pot of the liberation struggles. Mixed bloods and common aspirations created a unique basis, a singular sensitivity, in other words, our own culture, one of our most eminent scholars, Don Fernando Ortiz, studied this process and labelled it transculturation.

If we were to define the essence of Cuban culture, we would have to assess two main elements: its integrating orientation and its universal calling.One cannot exist without the other. at the onset of the foundation of Cuban nationality, during the first decades of the 19th century, the purest poet of the time, Jose Maria Heredia, enhanced the palm trees, an element that defines our landscapes, but also the majestic feature of teocalli de Cholula, an Aztec precolombian architectural monument, and the impetuous niagara falls, in North America.

It is very fortunate that Cuban culture has assumed this blend legitimately, making it transcend the borders between what is refine and what is populr, of the so called arts and the community flokloric expressions.