Sigmund Freud was more than the father of psychoanalysis; he was also one of the great classical philosophers of history. In Freud's historical thought, we have the framework for an analysis of the past which parallels the formation of neuroses in the life history of the individual. Like psychological man, historical man is the victim of events (trauma) from the past. Etched on the brain of historical man, are memories which endure through time, become part of the “archaic heritage,” and are transmitted from one generation to another. Then, like the “return of the repressed” in neurotic individuals, societies feel the afflictions of the past, which return to haunt them. That Freud stressed the killing of the primeval father by his jealous sons, an event of dubious historical veracity, should not obscure the value of his historical framework. In Freudian thought, the psychic stages of the individual unfold in the collective societies of history.

The well-known ethnologist and investigator, Fernando Ortiz, has recognized that “without the black, Cuba would not be Cuba,” a statement that makes clear the tremendous importance of the African contribution to present-day Cuban culture.

It is a known fact that the aboriginal base of Cuban society was quickly destroyed by the first Spaniards to reach the island, thereby creating the necessity for a new slave population, a new race: that of the blacks of Africa. They came from various regions but primarily from near the mouth of the Niger River.

The cultures which they brought were varied: some elementary and others sufficiently developed, like the Dahomeyan and Yoruba, which manifested a degree of complexity that made them comparable in many aspects to European culture of the Middle Ages. They had agriculture, trade, centralized government, mutual protection social organizations, highly developed oral folkloristic literature (they lacked writing), and a degree of development in certain branches of art—such as music.

In the nineteenth century Cuba was the focus of Spain's overseas commercial involvement. The Cuban sugar boom keep alive an otherwise moribund and truncated empire. Spain's interest in Cuban sugar brought her into a web of trade contacts stretching to the other side of the Atlantic. Sugar production still required the exploitation of black labor; Spain, whose trade in West Africa had been minimal in the eighteenth century, became, through the presence of her slavers, a major presence in the region. The impetus for this involvement came from the community of interests between Cuban planters and Spanish suppliers of labor. Mid-nineteenth Spanish involvement in West Africa can be seen as a curious form of Hispano-Antillean commercial imperialism, in which Africa was seen as the answer to Cuba's demand for black emigration as well as immigration.

ON show throughout the world, Mexico's rural police force, the famous Rurales, nearly always got top billing and an enthusiastic press. For example, after reviewing a contingent of Rurales at the World Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York, an American newspaper reporter wrote that the Rurales were “somewhat similar to the old Texas Rangers, but even tougher than the Rangers. Bred from infancy among the hills and valleys of old Mexico and accustomed not only to the saddle but the most meager rations, well does the robber know that with these troops in pursuit, his game is up. It's due to the Rurales that interior Mexico is so free of crime. Rurales are all over Mexico.”

Conflict between revolution and academia, between the activist and the scholar, is probably inevitable. At times when urgent demands for radical change threaten the very fabric of a society, when popular violence and ideological bitterness question all traditions, a university becomes especially vulnerable. As an institution dedicated to preserving the cultural inheritance of the past, a haven for the calm, deliberate pursuit of truth, the university in the midst of revolution must choose whether to adhere to its traditional role, or to become an active partner of social change, promulgating new ideologies and providing practical training for revolutionary leaders. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the popular image of a university as a refuge for the privileged and wealthy added to a long history of the conscious use of education to promote a prescribed set of values to make the National University particularly controversial. Dedicated only two months before the Revolution erupted, the new institution found itself under immediate pressure to become “revolutionary” in a society that had little patience for scholarly aloofness.