LIVING

To the members of the company, the audiences watching night after night and, apparently, many of those who saw this image around them, there was nothing objectionable about it. The director of the show, Jordi Milán, told Metropolitan that he could see nothing wrong with it, that it was a “modern concept”, and he was shocked and angered at the suggestion that it might be offensive.

“It would be a lie to say that Spain isn’t racist, but it’s not this,” he said, questioning why North Americans and Britons should expect other countries to be the same as theirs when it comes to such matters. “The problem isn’t with us, it’s with you.”

Milán said that black people had been to see the show and not had a problem with it (indeed, there is a black person performing in it, taking a role that in the original version was played by a white person with a blacked-up face). However, he also admitted that when the show started he received a letter from a black American woman saying that she felt insulted by La Cubana’s poster.

Concern was also voiced by Ana María Arango, an anthropologist from Colombia who has lived in Barcelona for three years. She wrote in her blog in November 2007 that the image is a characterisation that ridicules the African aesthetic, done by a company that isn’t African. She told Metropolitan, people in Spain don’t think in these terms. “Here, there doesn’t yet exist consciousness about the damage that stereotypes can do in the day-to-day life of people of African descent.”

What has caused this divergence in attitudes? How can certain portrayals of black people be blatant racism in one country and totally matter-of-fact in another? This gulf is something that foreign residents from places including the UK or North America quickly become familiar with in Spain, finding themselves confronted with images that have been socially unacceptable in their home countries for many years. A visit to the local supermarket, for example, brings one face-to-face with tubs of Cola Cao chocolate powder, illustrated by two smiling black people collecting cocoa pods. In the next aisle is the chocolate Conguitos, with a logo of a dark brown pygmy-like character with a perfectly round head, equally round body and (on some products) disproportionately large red lips.