Ever Faithful

Front matter

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Contents

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Preface « vii Acknowledgments + xv

INTRODUCTION A Faithful Account of Colonial Racial Politics + 1

Preface

CSO)

To visit the Palace of the Captain General on Havana’s Plaza de Armas today is to witness the most prominent stone-and mortar monument to the enduring history of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. Built in the eighteenth century, the palace has served many purposes: as the home of the captain general, the highest-ranking Spanish official on the island; with Cuban independence, the home of the U.S. military governor after 1899; the home of the Cuban president until 1920; as the city hall, municipal archive, and finally a museum.! Long since national independence in 1898, Cubans have resisted the influence of foreign powers, but the empire that built the palace as its nerve center has become, with each successive transition, a less commanding symbol of imperial domination. Cubans have confronted problems that had their origins in slavery—economic dependency and racial inequalities among them. The palace itself, though, is now associated with the treasures of a bygone era. Walking through the palace today, it’s easy to underestimate the heft of an empire that for almost four centuries variously inspired fear, resentment, and affection from its subjects.’

Fernando Ortiz, the foremost scholar of Cuba’s African dimension, knew this palace well. It was here that the lawyer and anthropologist learned lasting lessons about the meaning of colonial rule to Cuba’s multiracial population. Ortiz spent his formative years in the Canary Islands before returning to Cuba when he was fourteen, just months before the final war for independence erupted in February 1895. Within days of his arrival in Havana, his grandfather took him to the palace to catch a glimpse of Arsenio Martinez Campos, the once and future reform-minded captain general known for negotiating with rebels over the course of a three-decade insurgency. Such conciliation provoked nothing but contempt in the grandfather, a staunchly conservative supporter of Spain. When Martinez Campos entered the room, the grandfather whispered into young Fernando’s ear, “Look well at his face; he is a mulatto from Guanabacoa” (see figure P.1).*

FIGURE P.1 + Arsenio Martínez Campos, ca. 1870. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Never say never, but it would be surprising if Martínez Campos—who was born in Segovia, Spain, and whose well-documented rise through the ranks of a mostly segregated military led him to high office—was either of African descent or from a marginal Havana suburb.‘ But this was how the elder Ortiz made sense of the openness toward those who fought for national independence, all of whom he assumed to be black or mulatto—“as if being a rebel was proof that one was colored,” his grandson later noted. This episode also illustrates the central topic of this book: the relationships imagined between political allegiance and racial identity.

Fernando Ortiz would eventually dismiss the far-fetched theory as an old man's prejudices, although he still observed that the captain general “looked and he seemed to me somewhat like a light-skinned mulatto.” In the same chamber after Cuban independence, Ortiz recounted this anecdote to Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of the Cuban Republic (see figure P.2). Estrada Palma dismissed with “unforgettable amiability” the story about his colonial predecessor: “Now all that has finished; in Free Cuba we are now all of the same color.” And this was the idea that Ortiz reiterated in a speech delivered in that very same space (in what was now the Municipal Palace) in 1943.

FIGURE P.2 » Palace of the Captain General, Havana, ca. 1895. Courtesy of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Preface + ix

He located the writings of independence leader José Martí at the heart of a vision of the Cuban nation that transcended the racial divisions created under colonial rule. He also acknowledged that many Cubans of color in the nineteenth century found it logical to support a national project that placed being Cuban above blackness or whiteness. This was an idea developed in writing by Martí and others and in practice within a diverse liberation army, and it is a national racial ideology that still today stands as one of the most remarked-upon features of the island—one with analogs in many other areas of Latin America.

Although this book began as a social history of those ideas, early discoveries in Cuban archives shifted attention to another intriguing intersection of race and politics: how ordinary Cubans expressed support not for national independence but for the Spanish colonial government, how that government unevenly cultivated and reciprocated that support, and how African-descended Cubans figured prominently among its adherents. Here was a story of political allegiance running parallel to the narrative of raceless nationalism championed by Martí, Ortiz, and many other people who wove it into the fabric of Cuban history. Once I started to tug at the thread of argument about pro-colonial loyalty, that fabric began to unravel. Basic understandings about the nature of Spanish imperialism, African slavery, colonial racial hierarchies, liberalism, and national citizenship all begged for revision.

How, then, are we to reconcile such divergent forms of political allegiance, or to account for a phenomenon that confounds the anti-imperialist orientations of so many struggles against racial inequality? Scholars have acknowledged that the Spanish government had cultivated that support and extended limited rights and privileges, but they have generally understood it either as exclusive to Cubans of full Spanish ancestry or as false consciousness: a “divide and rule” policy, as Ortiz called it, an “immense social lottery” designed to keep most Cubans of color “distracted and diverted from fundamental grievances.” Ortiz did not dwell on the question of why Cubans of color might have affirmed colonial rule. In his speech of 1943, he briefly explained it as an elite affair. “Doubtless there existed in Cuba that select group of colored people whose personal interests were selfishly interlocked in the high wheels of the colonial government,” he argued, insisting that most of those individuals “were mulattoes with hidden or unconcealed family connections, favored by privileges; mulattoes of blood tinged with blue by amorous relations that placed ebony patches on the noble Castilian heraldry; and mulattoes of blood turned yellow by the embrace of the dark-colored girl with the man who was the color of his gold coins.” Like his grandfather, Ortiz associx » Preface ated political allegiance to one cause or another as being linked to blood, ancestry, and color: the key concepts that gave meaning to the idea of race in Cuba.

Certainly, Ortiz was on to something when he linked mixed ancestry to the consolidation of empire. Since the earliest years of the Spanish presence in the Americas, strategic marriages to native elites and the Hispanization of mixed peoples helped make Spanish legal and social norms hegemonic.’ Yet it is no more persuasive to assume that support for Spanish rule was limited to Spanish ancestry than to assume that Arsenio Martínez Campos’s concessions to rebels meant that he was a mulatto passing for white. Nor was loyalty to Spain limited to those who derived economic privileges from colonial rule. Indeed, many wealthy Cubans preferred the stability of Spanish rule to the uncertainties of independence, but so did many other Cubans, and for a wide variety of reasons. Neither economic opportunity nor Spanish descent fully explains popular support for a colonial government that survived mainland Spanish American independence by many decades.

This book argues that alongside persistent associations of pro-colonial sentiment with Cuba's white population lay a conception of race and loyalty that allowed Cubans of African descent—slave and free—to be included in colonial politics as faithful, if unequal, subjects. Reconstructing this history requires looking beyond the dramas that unfolded in the captain general's palace and the imposing mansions of Cubans whose wealth derived from the island’s sugar economy, which was built on slave labor. The history of race and loyalty is also to be found in bustling meeting halls and public squares across the island, on plantations transformed into battlefields, and in the barracks of militia soldiers and wartime recruits. These spaces became the staging grounds for mutual and reciprocal interests articulated by the Spanish government and its subjects. Although the focus of the book is primarily on people of African descent, it is more than a social history of those black and mulatto Cubans who explicitly supported the continuation of Spanish rule; it asks broader questions about the centrality of race to the maintenance of the Spanish empire in its final decades in the Americas. In doing so, it questions the neat divide commonly drawn between colonial and national racial ideologies in Cuba and, by extension, political strategies of African-descended Cubans based on identifications as subjects of an empire or as citizens of a liberal nation-state. Chronicling individuals caught between competing racial identities, colonial identity as subjects of the Spanish empire, and race-transcendent national identity, this book explains how Cubans of many different backgrounds shaped the politics of Spain’s “ever-faithful isle.”

Preface + xi

I follow the history of race and loyalty along two principal axes. Military service represented one of the most conspicuous opportunities to demonstrate loyalty in colonial Cuba. Free men of African descent had served the Spanish empire in militias since the sixteenth century, and membership conferred social status and legal privileges recognized by colonials of all backgrounds. Yet militias encountered patchy support by Spanish officials and free people of color alike in the early nineteenth century. After the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and independence wars in mainland Latin America, for example, colonial officials doubted more than ever the wisdom of arming potentially rebellious groups. It was not until the outbreak of the first major anticolonial insurrection, the Ten Years” War (1868-1878), that military service regained its earlier importance to defining loyalty, and some free men mobilized to defend Spain against the rebels. The Spanish government also offered slaves an incentive to support the empire as it initiated the gradual process of slave emancipation: those who fought for the Spanish in the insurrection could receive their freedom. Field interrogations of slave-soldiers juxtaposed popular and official understandings of loyalty that determined whether or not a slave would be freed, uncovering, in the process, assumptions about the will and ability of slaves to be loyal subjects.

As a result of the political reforms that followed the Ten Years’ War, many more African-descended Cubans asserted their allegiance to Spanish rule, in part because they encountered new opportunities for doing so. The second axis on which I plot race and loyalty tracks the spaces of their public articulation, which expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. The Spanish state sanctioned the formation of political parties, and it loosened restrictions on press and association. Cubans of color quickly asserted their presence in this burgeoning public sphere by invoking their loyalty to the government that made it possible. Since 1812, when a constitution drafted by the besieged Spanish government radically expanded the citizenship rights of select Spanish American men, colonial and metropolitan liberals had struggled to contain the demands of African-descended and indigenous people within the Spanish system—notably through censorship and control of public spaces. Reforms after the Ten Years’ War represented a turning point. Thus, the book moves from the hot, crowded theaters in small towns that hosted political party meetings to the ceremonious patriotic clubs in Havana where Cubans of color delivered florid speeches, attended by colonial officials, that called for slave emancipation and clearer voting rights. In the late 1880s, the slow steps toward an integrated postemancipation society provoked frustration among many African-descended Cubans who had deferred xii e Preface protest in good faith. Spanish political concessions buckled under social pressure for wider inclusion, and by the War of Independence between 1895 and 1898, the separatist movement's explicit commitment to antiracism had done much to displace popular loyalty to Spain, particularly among Cubans of color.

This is a book about the ideological foundations of empire, about reexamining the central themes of Cuban history, and about a prominent but underexplored phenomenon in the political history of the African diaspora. At the heart of the history of race and imperial loyalty is the interplay between an early iteration of Spanish national citizenship and an older form of subjectivity as a loyal vassal of the monarch. This is a story of their conflict, but also of their interdependence.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Conducting research and writing a book can be isolating endeavors. But what immediately comes to mind when I think about the process are the good conversations, good ideas, and good laughs shared with friends and colleagues. Thanking all of them as I wrap up this project has an unfortunate air of finality about it, so I acknowledge their support with the proviso that they aren't off the hook just yet.

Dedicated and inspiring teachers guided me on the journey that led to this book. It emerged from my doctoral dissertation, so first and foremost I heartily thank my advisor, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., for his encouragement, advice, and above all for his patience. Perhaps as no one else can, he taught me a great deal about Cuba and, just as important, he taught me about the act of writing and about the ethical responsibilities of belonging to an intellectual community that spans the U.S.-Cuba divide. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee—Kathryn Burns, John French, John Chasteen, and Jerma Jackson— whose gifts as writers, teachers, and people continue to serve as examples. Leon Fink and Judith Bennett also provided wisdom and perspective along the way. I became hooked on Latin American history during my first semester in college, and I am grateful to Franklin Knight, Alida Metcalf, Linda Salvucci, Richard Salvucci, and Aline Helg for sparking my curiosity and monitoring my wobbly first steps as a historian.

Over many years, the Instituto de Historia de Cuba in Havana has supported my research in countless ways. Along with the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), it has sponsored research visas, facilitated access to archives and libraries, and included me in its conferences and seminars. I thank Belkis Quesada y Guerra and Amparo Hernandez for their strenuous efforts to make all of this happen. I also thank the instituto for the opportunities to become acquainted with Cuban scholars who have made room for me next to them in the archives; fielded my oddball questions; and shared thoughts, writing, and suggestions. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Carmen Almodovar, Manuel Barcia Paz, Barbara Danzie León, Yolanda Diaz Martinez, Mitzi Espinosa Luis,

Leida Fernández Prieto, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Gloria García Rodriguez, Julio César González Pagés, Silvia Gutiérrez, Oilda Hevia Lanier, Fe Iglesias García, Patricia Cok, Jorge Macle Cruz, María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, Blancamar León Rosabal, Adrian López Denis, Fernando Martínez Heredia, Aisnara Perera Díaz, Carlos Venegas Fornias, and Oscar Zanetti Lecuona. A few colleagues deserve special mention for years of ongoing exchanges and warm friendship: Marial Iglesias Utset, Tomás Fernández Robaina, the late Francisco Pérez Guzmán, Abel Sierra Madero, and Orlando García Martínez, the open-hearted and open-minded former director ofthe provincial archive in Cienfuegos and president of the UNEAC branch there. I learned some life lessons in Cuba from Marél Suzarte, Gladys Marél García, Berta Linares, Oscar Montoto, Cecilio, Loly, and some guy named Carlos.

Archivists and librarians at the research institutions I visited went out of their way to help me navigate their collections. I want to thank the staffs of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, the Biblioteca Nacional José Marti, and the library of the Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística in Havana; the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cienfuegos and Biblioteca Provincial de Cienfuegos; and the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba. In Spain, I am grateful to specialists at the Biblioteca Nacional, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Servicio Histórico Militar, and Real Academia de Historia in Madrid; and at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. In the United States, I benefited from help at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the U.S. National Archives, the Huntington Library, and the Latin American Collection of the University of Florida's Smathers Library, particularly from its director, Richard Phillips, and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt. Most of all, I thank the good people at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, who for years have provided a calm place to write and more books than I could ever read.

A special bond develops among historians who visit Cuba and overlap in the course of research and conference going. These colleagues have graciously shared leads, advice, and a sense of collective endeavor, I thank Sandra Bronfman, Matt Childs, Camillia Cowling, Alejandro de la Fuente, Ada Ferrer, Jorge Giovannetti, Lillian Guerra, Frank Guridy, Jane Landers, Kathy López, Gillian McGillivray, Jill Lane, Melina Pappademos, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Reinaldo Román, and Michael Zeuske. Early discussions with Rebecca J. Scott helped me formulate some of the central questions guiding this project. Marikay McCabe and I spent a lot of time together in nineteenth-century Cuba; I thank her for making the voyages with me. Her friendship is inseparable from this project but I am grateful that it extends so far beyond it.

xvi + Acknowledgments

At the University of North Carolina and Duke University, colleagues and friends provided critical engagement and distraction. It was a privilege to learn alongside my Latin Americanist compañeros Adriana Brodsky, Vince Brown, Mariola Espinosa, Amy Ferlazzo, Mark Healey, Jan Hoffman French, Lupe Garcia, Jane Mangan, Josh Nadel, Rachel O’ Toole, Jody Pavilack, Tom Rogers, Devyn Spence Benson, Ivonne Wallace-Fuentes, and Bill Van Norman. Many other fellow graduate students were there for first response and last call: Anastasia Crosswhite, Will Jones, Michael Kramer, Ethan Kytle, Susan Pearson, Erik Riker-Coleman, Blain Roberts, Michele Strong, and Adam Tuchinsky all deserve a nod. Three individuals in particular have helped hold everything together: Sarah Thuesen, my intrepid writing partner; Bianca Premo, whose ideas may have shaped this project more than my own (although any errors are mine alone); and Jolie Olcott, whose support and friendship, and intellectual and political commitments, humble and inspire me. This book feels like the product of many-year-long conversations with these friends, which makes it all the more meaningful.

Through a Latin American history reading group in Los Angeles I became close colleagues and even better friends with Robin Derby, Maria Elena Martinez, and Micol Seigel. As this project became a book, their humor, encouragement, and whip-smart insights have been invaluable. Other generous colleagues—M. Jacqui Alexander, Andy Apter, Ben Cowan, Lessie Jo Frazier, Jim Green, Ramon Gutiérrez, Pete Sigal, John Tutino, and Ben Vinson—have sharpened my thinking and made enjoyable the hard work that goes into our professional labors. For their comments on parts or all of the manuscript I thank Herman Bennett, Kathryn Burns, Ada Ferrer, John French, Clare Lyons, Jolie Olcott, Bianca Premo, Karin Rosemblatt, Leslie Rowland, Rebecca Scott, and especially Sarah Chambers. Thanks to kind invitations to share my work, my ideas benefited from perceptive audiences at Brown University, the Latin American Labor History Conference at Duke University, Georgetown University, Indiana University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Tulane University, the University of Chicago, the University of Redlands, the University of Southern California, and the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro in Nova Iguacu, Brazil. I want to make special mention of the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, founded by Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young. I have never found a more encouraging and exhilarating forum for experimenting with ideas as this annual gathering. I thank its many participants over the years and in particular the other members of the organizing collective. I met my good friends David Kazanjian and Josie

Acknowledgments + xvii

Saldaña in Tepoz. I am buoyed by their support and collaboration and astounded by their generosity.

I thank the staff and faculty of the University of Maryland Department of History for their collective energies on behalf of this book. Mil gracias e muito obrigado to my Latin Americanist colleagues—Mary Kay Vaughan, Alejandro Cañeque, Karin Rosemblatt, Barbara Weinstein (ever so briefly), and Daryle Williams—and to a great group of graduate students, for keeping the day-to-day and the big picture in proper perspective. Elsa Barkley Brown, Ira Berlin, Jim Gilbert, Julie Greene, Hilary Jones, Clare Lyons, Mike Ross, and Leslie Rowland have aided this project in ways large and small. Both intellectually and personally, Christina Hanhardt, Jerry Passannante, and Sangeeta Ray helped me keep the world beyond my work in view.

The financial support of many institutions facilitated the research and writing of this book. I carried out most of my research in Cuba and Spain through the generosity of the Conference on Latin American History’s Lydia Cabrera Award, The Johns Hopkins University’s Cuba Exchange Program, and the Department of History, the Institute of Latin American Studies (now the Institute for the Study of the Americas), and the Graduate School at University of North Carolina. A fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society and a Library Travel Research Grant from the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies helped identify crucial sources in the United States. Faculty research grants from Whittier College and the University of Maryland provided additional travel opportunities. The Paul Hardin Fellowship of the Royster Society of Fellows at the University of North Carolina allowed me to complete the dissertation, and I am especially grateful to the University of Maryland’s Latin American Studies Center for a postdoctoral fellowship that gave me the time and space to widen the frame of this project.

This book simply would not exist without Valerie Millholland. I can never repay her efforts on my behalf. With superhuman patience, she and Gisela Fosado have gone above and beyond the call of any editor’s duty. Compassion is not a job requirement for editors, but they have extended theirs to me, and to the pages that follow, in countless ways. I thank them and the whole production team at Duke University Press, as well as the extremely thoughtful and helpful anonymous readers who improved this project greatly.

Some of those people mentioned in this exhausting, and certainly not exhaustive, list are like family—one of the great results of undertaking this project. There are many families that have supported me over the years, and two in particular learned more about Cuba than they had ever planned to and have taught me more about loyalty than the research and writing of this xviii e Acknowledgments book. Long ago my brother and I decided to take a class together on Caribbean history, and one of us received the higher grade; my late father, a teacher, and my mother, whose passion for learning continues to lead her in new directions, have always given me the space to follow my curiosity. So, too, has a group of childhood friends (and their hangers-on) who still know me best and tolerate me anyway. I thank all of them, in order of having met them beginning at age six: Sarah, Marla, Andy, Phuc, Chris, Kim, Courtney, Brandon, Dan, and Ken. I dedicate this book to all of these loved ones as meager compensation for everything they have dedicated to me.

Acknowledgments « xix