The Whitewash of Blackface in Fernando Pérez’s José Martí: El ojo del Canario (2010)

Abstract:Fernando Pérez’s José Martí: El ojo del canario (2010) is a foray into Martí’s childhood and adolescence on the big screen that perpetuates the hagiographic narrative of José Martí as white savior for what is ostensibly a self-fashioned mestizo national ideal. To that end, Fernando Pérez minimizes Afro-Cuban agency and offers a whitewashed version of the revolutionary milieu in which Martí came of age. Through the analysis of black representation, historical revisionism, and symbolism, I show how the story of Martí and colonial Cuba envisioned by Fernando Pérez enshrines the notion that the burgeoning nationalism and radical politics of mid-nineteenth-century Cuba were a whites-only enterprise, a move that turns the film into a Cuban minstrel show for the new millennium.