CARIBE POP MANIFESTO
The Caribbean is the magnification of the verb to be. It is catastrophic. It is the calamity of unsustainable chances. It is putting up with reality and enjoying it to its last molecule. It is the blue line that wraps around the island like a promise. It is dealing with the persistent desire to leave the country because it is corrupt and corrupts.
Being Caribbean is to deal with the deliciousness, the All-Inclusive mentality, the atrocious. This means that we are addicted to rice, to pork, to grease, and to snort.
Caribeing is to be Caribe. To endure in some way or another but always with a smile. To survive the unused, the imported, the external, the exogenous. To own our darkness. To be Caribe. Left unseen. It is no coincidence that in our islands, the Masons have so much power, the Rosicrucians, the Opus Dei, the Yoruba, the Narcos, the Evangelicals, and old fashioned revolutionaries.
Caribeing is an experiment in suffering for the benefit of forgetfulness. It is the advantage of belonging nowhere, of not having memories. Howling, and fasting. To transvestite into a thousand unrealizable fantasies. To be Caribe is to learn English in constant transformance. To see on television the things that you will never have. It is like waking up on the other side of the North’s worst nightmare. To be the mask that dances and welcomes visitors to the paradise of the floating islands.
Being Caribbean is knowing that your cousin is wasting his life away, trying to pay back the few pennies he owes. He knows there’s a big guy with gold chains running a whorehouse, and he can end up working there. Bad, naughty nights. Caribe, you dance and don’t bounce, but whatever happens, we will be destroying the ballot box in a strange symbiosis of time, convention, and cataclysm. Being Caribbean is understanding the future of installments.
To be Caribbean is to be coming and going while remaining in the same place. It is crying every night until your roots hurt. Wanting to be the best version on celluloid. Understanding the value of the deformed. A Judeo-Christian moral that can rob you of every home. It is the thundering act of resisting the etiquette of the parasite.
Caribeing is the retort to academics who proclaim the hard beating of an inert Latin American heart.
Always incomprehensible Caribbean, translated from thousands of codes rescued from ashes, blood, sugar, and corn. A Caribbean obliterated of memories. The offspring of mistreatment, always near- sacrifice, altruism, ritual, pain, and danger.
To be Caribbean is to find oneself again and shine, to hope that chance bears fruit, to find dollars, to do the shopping, to keep mother placed on her altar, which is sacred. The father always behind a mask gesticulating concepts of Machomask and Maskulinites. To experience paternal abandonment and yet write a fake glowing encyclopedia on paternalism. Being Caribbean. To lack sustenance, overcome bad options, and choose reading as a way of escaping everything. To be born waiting for a visa. To be Caribbean is to be an expert on matters of migration. To be Caribbean is to put on music to forget bad moments, abortions, aggressions, stabbings. The key is to look vertically at the horizon and wink just for a blink.
Caribeing is to beat through the bitter cocoa of past tenses. To fight consciously knowing that it is always someone else who gets to distribute the bounty. To be the scourge of the firmament. To reinvent Spanish in every phase, to cut words, to elongate the l’s, and to swallow the s’s. To be Caribbean is to rattle on in a language dreamed in jail. To be Caribbean is to be summarized in short, to learn how to enjoy the masochism of failure, to be the best at administering pleasure in moderate doses. To be Caribbean is to be love in our times. It is the use of anglicisms because we overflow from a language that leaves us short, rebated in the equation dominato/resistance=negotiator. To dream of a tropical sun in New York in the winter. To use the metric system by eye instead of the imperial system. To assume an impertinent faith as a key to survival.
To play the lottery as a way out of poverty. To be left and marginalized right in the center. We believe in telenovelas as a formative system. We believe in a color that comes to us in the fury of machetes shining in alleyways. In the savage sound, that is simultaneously called love and war. We do not forget that those machetes that cut sugar cane also deformed a youth of labor unions and possibilities. The blades were exchanged for Glocks, and here we are. Without fear of being shameless, we admit we are the children of the conflict and trafficking that enable us. We are not afraid to admit that our colors are green chartreuse, turquoise and pastel rose. Open shirted from Jamaica to Miami Vice. To be Caribbean is to drift, it is one-way tickets, gulfs, drugs, and continents.
With this being said, we begin our ritual of initiation. We were born blighted, debauched, tormented under the picture of pleasure of the Caribbean narco-state. Our art is mash-up and re-mix. We choose reciprocity and mutual retronourishment. Our dream is our nightmare, and our defeat is our goal: the charade of new vocabulary. Meteorologists will use our hieroglyphics to name hurricanes in the toughest times. Boys and girls will use our composition to fight, to hurt, to play, and to fall in love. We love violence and believe in the power of the question. Our lost tropical innocence will persuade you because we are Caribbean, and the pull of the tide itself will fall in love with us. We are Caribe. We are Caribe Pop.
