The Maní Is Dead. Are Cuba’s Boxing Champions Its Heirs?

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The maní reveals a third regime of erasure of Black practices — neither persecution nor silence: the victorious competition of a neighbouring practice. And it illustrates the field’s epistemic discipline: a hypothesis is presented here as such, with its exact status.

What the maní was

Who made the maní disappear, and what remains of it? Before answering, one must establish what it was. And its claim to belong to the family is complete: the now-vanished Cuban wrestling “possessed the whole of the structural foundations of the Black combat arts: dissymmetry of the balance of force, invitation to rupture, continuous flow of the wrestlers, cooperation-opposition continuum (to a lesser degree), and the vertical (negative imbalance) and horizontal (touch) dimensions of the duel.” Technically, the maní “associated punches and kicks.” Its game psychology was that of the whole family: as in capoeira, “the protagonists are permanently in a double psychological state of relaxation and tension” — awaiting the moment when the game “will without doubt tip into the duel.”

One trait set it apart within the family itself. Unlike the bènaden, the tolona and the batuque, the maní rested — like capoeira — “on both horizontality and verticality”: the blow struck and the fall provoked. Only two other members share this double dimension: the Martinican danmyé and the Réunion moring. The maní thus belonged to the most complete circle of the family.

A critical precaution is needed on the major source: Fernando Ortiz’s description “concerned the old way of practising this game. In his time, blows were no longer really struck and the fighters wore gloves.” Ortiz was already describing a softened maní, in the course of transformation. The erasure was underway before science even bent over it.

Death without persecution

Who killed the maní? No colonial decree. No campaign of repression. No police. “The success of English boxing no doubt got the better of the traditional form of the maní. And was certainly one of the reasons for its disappearance. For the proximity of the noble art to Cuban pugilism led many of them to turn toward the English fist, more attractive and more modern.”

The very proximity of the two practices proved fatal to the older. Bodies formed in the maní found in boxing a familiar terrain — globalised, institutionalised, endowed with titles and careers. They crossed over. This mechanism deserves a name, for it completes the typology of erasures the corpus has brought to light. Carioca capoeiragem was erased by persecution, then by overlay. Mayolè dies in the silence of indifference. The maní died of victorious competition — disappearance by substitution, where the neighbouring practice absorbs the bodies and vocations without any violence being necessary. It is the third regime of erasure of the Black combat arts. And no doubt the most insidious: it leaves neither martyrs nor culprits.

The hypothesis

Then comes the hypothesis — and it must be presented with the rigour the sources themselves apply to it. “This old culture of fist-fighting perhaps explains why the country counts in English boxing such a great number of world champions and Olympic medallists.”

The “perhaps” is no stylistic precaution. It fixes the exact status of the statement: a line of research, not a result. The interrogative title of this article takes note. But measure what the hypothesis, were it verified, would imply. Cuban pugilistic power — that enigma of an island dominating the world podiums of the noble art — would have as its substrate the centuries-old culture of the fist forged in the maní. The practice would be dead; the bodily competence, the culture of fist-fighting, the intelligence of the duel would have migrated into the very sport that killed it. The armed archive would have changed its support.

If the hypothesis is right, then the gold medals of Havana are, without knowing it, trophies of the maní. And the study of vanished Black combat arts is not an archaeology. It is the genealogy of the present.

SOURCES

Ortiz, F. (description of the maní). — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, sections B.2–B.3.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World

→ How to Save a Dying Art Without Killing What Keeps It Alive

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Maní Is Dead. Are Cuba’s Boxing Champions Its Heirs?. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 21. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-mani-is-dead-are-cubas-boxing-champions-its-heirs. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.