In this continuous movement, between emergence and disappearance, the sea becomes cyclical memory: it brings fragments back to shore, smooths them, disperses them again. Nothing is ever truly lost; everything returns transformed. So too the stories of the island, Taíno, African, Haitian, Dominican, are not erased, but rewritten in a rhythm that is not linear, but circular. Like the waves, advancing and retreating without ever ceasing, history persists. And in their coming and going, they hold what has been, what is, and what has yet to emerge.
These practices were serious enough for the newly independent African nation of Ghana to lodge a legal complaint against Portugal before the International Labour Organisation in 1962, helping to expose the fallacy of Portuguese benevolence towards its black population (Wolfson et al., 2009). As such, Eusébio, falsely made into a symbol of a non-racist past, functions to soften colonial realities and to silence the everyday racism experienced by African and Afro-Portuguese figures, who could not speak up at the time, in contrast to the anti-racist activism of Vinícius Jr. today.
In this continuous movement, between emergence and disappearance, the sea becomes cyclical memory: it brings fragments back to shore, smooths them, disperses them again. Nothing is ever truly lost; everything returns transformed. So too the stories of the island, Taíno, African, Haitian, Dominican, are not erased, but rewritten in a rhythm that is not linear, but circular. Like the waves, advancing and retreating without ever ceasing, history persists. And in their coming and going, they hold what has been, what is, and what has yet to emerge. 
These practices were serious enough for the newly independent African nation of Ghana to lodge a legal complaint against Portugal before the International Labour Organisation in 1962, helping to expose the fallacy of Portuguese benevolence towards its black population (Wolfson et al., 2009). As such, Eusébio, falsely made into a symbol of a non-racist past, functions to soften colonial realities and to silence the everyday racism experienced by African and Afro-Portuguese figures, who could not speak up at the time, in contrast to the anti-racist activism of Vinícius Jr. today. 
