Black Legend

"A few writers evoke Raúl's connection to the commonplaces of the city's African past: slavery, the neighborhood of Montserrat and its percussive candombe rhythms, the dance troupes of carnival. But they struggle to narrate the passage of time between these hazy, distant memories and Raúl's tangible twentieth-century presence. Some surmise (without accounting for the generations that separated Raúl from slavery) that he was the son of enslaved parents who "had adopted the surname of the family they had served."4 Others find it easier simply to have him materialize. "He appeared one day in one of the city's many holes," storytellers declared, "airs of a forgotten Congo ruffling his wooly hair, the winds from Montserrat carrying the sounds of their candombes."5 Or, "He appeared on the city's streets like a jet-black doll"-a lifeless object-"dropped by a carnival troupe."6 The main character of these stories has no verifiable history; he "appears" fully formed, sometime in the early 1900s, as "el negro Raúl.""--