Try to define the Cuban essence. Look around you and search among your countrymen or inside yourself those features that distinguish us. The literature is plentiful where this topic, the Cubaness, has been the inspiration source.  Alma Mater, in her previous edition opened a discussion in order to think over us. With the purpose of vivifying the polemic we include now in central pages a sketch of us, the Cubans.   Anything conclusive, because it leaves several questions to be responded by all of us together: how have the outsiders seen us and how do we see each other, how do we want to be and how are we in fact?

Since a lot of time ago the alternative is outlined. The own country’s toponymy evidences it. Not even the double as much Spanish baptism to the Island: Juana and Fernandina, was able to pull up it aboriginal name: Cuba.  However, it took a time to appear in the gentile one that we use. It was in the first half of the XIX century when it began to denominate the children of this country in this way. The word connotated certain differences among Creoles and peninsulars: the foods, the way of dressing, and the colours with which they painted their houses, the character, the hygienic habits, the musicality and the rhythm…

The Spanish geographer Miguel Rodriguez Ferrer explained in the newspaper The Artist, in1848, the origin of those customs: «Three different races have inhabited this soil: the native, the Spaniard and the African…All them have left over us certain prints in the moral part of their group, in that sensitive and not palpable part that we will be able to call the feeling of a people…»

From those origins there are multiple reasons that root us; some of them are very intimate, familiar, carnal ones; others are in the air that we breathe, in the climate, in the insularity, in the surrounding sea, in what were our predecessors and in what we are or we aspire to be.
The resistance, that thoroughly insists to reach a purpose and the trust in one or in another sense, they have been reinforced in the course of the time. The nature and the circumstance, two indispensable mothers that Jose Marti attributed us, they have modelled the Cuban women and men.  

To know us, with our greatness and our imperfections is a good compass to guide us in the global village and also deep inside doors, because it is very necessary to order, to change and to save a lot of things at home.