Calibán: Roberto Fernández Retamar's American Intelligence

Abstract

On the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar's influential polemic Calibán, this essay revisits the circumstances in which Fernández Retamar wrote the piece and assesses its continuing significance for the Caribbean as a region. Attention is paid to how Fernández Retamar inserts his argument into the long-running debate about Latin American identity but then relocates the central figure of Caliban to the Caribbean, where other writers such as Aimé Césaire and George Lamming had already begun to address the nature of colonialism via the relationship between the Shakespearean figures of Prospero and Caliban. Also underlined is the importance to Calibán of Fernández Retamar's quotations from José Martí and Che Guevara.