In his article, Ortiz focusses on the concept of transculturation in the context of Cuba’s political, economic and social history.

Cuban history is a history of ‘intermeshed transculturations’. All immigrants that arrived in Cuba were of diverse origins – Spaniards, Africans (Senegal, Guinea, Congo, Mozambique – each with from own cultures and social groups), Indians from the mainland, Mongolians, French, North Americans, Jews, etc – each torn and uprooted from their own cultures and native lands and transplanted to a New World, where everything, from nature, to people to customs, were new and where they had to readjust themselves to a ‘new syncretism of cultures’. Ortiz describes how almost every race/culture of origin paid a price for immigrating, but the price paid by the Africans far supersedes the others’. When the Indians of America “collided head-on” with the white Europeans, they got wiped off “as though struck by lightning”, but they died their native land, believing that they were passing over to the invisible regions of their own Cuba. However, the Africans were brought across the oceans against their will, by brutal force, and they “arrived deracinated, wounded, shattered, like the cane of the fields, and like it, they were ground and crushed to extract the juice of their labour”. Even in death, they bore the agony of separation from their ancestors and ancestral lands.

He then proposes that the word ‘acculturation’, defined as transition from one culture to another and the associated social consequences, does not adequately describe the process of transition that takes place in Cuba. In Cuba, the different populations not only acquired a new culture but were abruptly uprooted from and lost their previous culture (not a gradual transition). Therefore, the term ‘transculturation’ is more fitting. I agree with Ortiz here; the kind of cultural transition that took place in Cuba (accompanied by upheaval, violence, and subordination) is very different than the type of cultural transition that immigrants today go through in Canada/USA (gradual loss of native traditions and slow, peaceful assimilation into North American culture). Therefore, a distinction must be drawn between the two processes.

In response to Ortiz and other writers, Millington suggests that the term ‘transculturation’ needs to be more closely examined due to the recent overuse. According to Millington, any term that is overused “[degenerates]  into orthodoxy and so [produces] a devaluation, which may be but one step away from obsolescence. He dislikes the word hybridisation because of the ambiguity attached to the term (lacks a precise definition, carries the implication that “what went into the cultural mixing was in some way pure (or not already mixed)”, etc).

The reasons he doesn’t like the term ‘transculturation’ is because Ortiz bunched the terms ‘deculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ under one master term which lends further to the confusion regarding the precise definition of the term ‘transculturation’. His explanation of the term makes no mention of   ‘neoculturation’ (creation of new culture), and therefore no longer seems to to replace ‘acculturation’ but subsume it.

The most interesting point raised by Millington (quoting Beverly), however, is whether “the idea of transculturation expresses in both Ortiz and Rama a fantasy of class, gender and racial reconciliation”. I’m not sure how true this is, given that Ortiz does point out the violent history of how the transculturation process came out to be, making it seem no more than a ‘survival technique’. The natives that were perished and the Africans who were enslaved as a result of cultural collision likely do not see it “embracing” different cultures.