State of Ambiguity

Front matter

STEVEN PALMER, JOSÉ ANTONIO PIQUERAS, and AMPARO SÁNCHEZ COBOS, editors

STATE OF AMBIGUIT Y

CIVIC LIFE and CULTURE in CUBA’S FIRST REPUBLIC

Contents

Introduction: Revisiting Cuba's First Republic | 1

Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sanchez Cobos

1. A Sunken Ship, a Bronze Eagle, and the Politics of Memory: The “Social Life” of the USS Maine in Cuba (1898-1961) | 22 Marial Iglesias Utset

Introduction

SD

Revisiting Cuba’s First Republic

Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sanchez Cobos

On May 20, 1902, the Republic of Cuba was proclaimed in an act transmitting sovereignty from the U.S. occupation authorities to the Cuban people’s elected representatives. A new state was born in the family of American nations. The republic came after three wars of independence in the space of thirty years that had served to express the Cuban will to self-government and erode Spanish colonial dominion, though they had not been sufficient to provide liberty to the island directly. The intervention of the United States in the conflict in 1898 had precipitated the defeat of Spain and reserved for the United States a special role in determining the future of the “Pearl of the Antilles.” Despite the subordination to a new empire implicit in this relationship, the new state of Cuba enjoyed a democratic constitution that had been written by an elected constituent assembly a year earlier. It could build, moreover, on a series of measures adopted by the U.S. occupation government between 1899 and 1902 intended to address the main problems of reconstruction, even if these had also been designed to constrain and channel the country’s political orientation. Cubans had been able to elect new municipal governments in June 1901, and they had gone to the polls on New Year’s Eve that same year to choose congressmen, governors, and provincial councilors as well as the electors who would vote for president, vice president, and senators. On February 24, after the only other candidate for the country’s highest office withdrew from the race, Tomás Estrada Palma was acclaimed president of Cuba. The outcome was popular and legitimate: Estrada Palma had been president of the Republic in

Arms in 1876-77, and during the independence struggle of the late 1890s he had acted as José Marti’s delegate to the Partido Revolucionario Cubano.

That is to say, the Republic of Cuba was born democratic in 1902. It possessed a founding charter that organized political life and enshrined the rights of its citizens, among them freedom of assembly and association, freedom of speech and the press, the right to make petition, habeas corpus, the inviolability of correspondence and dwelling, and freedom of worship. Education was declared obligatory, and while the state was unable to provide it, the burden would fall on the municipalities and the provinces. Political equality was guaranteed, as was universal suffrage for men over twenty-one years of age. Following the U.S. model, the constitution adopted a representative system that authorized wide powers to the presidency even as it promoted administrative decentralization to the provinces, a compromise solution to avoid the frictions of federalism while giving continuity and honoring the federal spirit of the constitutional charters issued by independence forces in 1869 and 1895.1

At the moment it came into the world the Republic of Cuba enjoyed political and economic conditions much more favorable than those that the great majority of Latin American nations had worked through eighty or ninety years earlier at the beginning of their respective republican lives. It is true that the U.S. occupation apparatus and a Cuban creole elite that had devoted itself, between 1878 and 1895, to the cause of Autonomism rather than outright independence were both interested in a conservative regime that denied agency to popular forces.” To that end they brokered a transitional pact that pulled the rug out from under the more radical democratic impulses of the Cuban independence struggle. And it is true that the highest officers of the independence armies would opt to join in that pact to further their own material and political interests in the republic.’ Nevertheless, the country enjoyed a much more fortuitous and truly democratic basis for independent national politics than what had been achieved almost anywhere else in Latin America to that point. This was due to the later era in which Cuban independence was proclaimed, which occurred after the entrée of the masses into institutional politics. It was also, of course, due to the long struggle to achieve national liberation in which the protagonism of Cubans of African ancestry was widely acknowledged as key to the popular mobilization that had taken place and during which the ideals of Marti had united the dispersed national forces.* These formative experiences also proved an immovable impediment to Cuban and U.S. elite designs to engineer annexation of the island to the United States. Perhaps most important, they ensured that the formal embrace of meaningful democratic politics would not be sacrificed to the doctrinaire and authoritarian liberal formulas that dominated the political panorama in the nineteenth century and that persisted in most countries in Latin America and Europe.

Yet neither democracy nor independence would flourish in the first Cuban republic. After a mere four years, amidst a crippling revolt of rival factions opposed to the (constitutionally quite permissible) reelection of Estrada Palma, the threatened president took the fateful step of requesting that the United States intervene to prevent civil war. Cuba would endure a second U.S. military occupation government from 1906 to 1909. Then, starting with the presidency of William H. Taft—ex-secretary of war and interim governor of Cuba in 1906 —the United States would regularly practice “preventive intervention” in the island's affairs. In 1912 the Independent Party of Color (PIC) would revolt, claiming that Afro-Cubans, after playing a predominant role in the independence armies, had been thoroughly marginalized from the political process. Prickly diplomatic statements from the North raised the possibility that the unrest might provoke yet another U.S. intervention. The pic challenge was met by a savage racist backlash from the state and civil militias that left some gaping new wounds in the Cuban body politic, even as it reopened barely healed ones left by a slave society still very much part of living memory, emancipation having only finally become a reality in 1886.° Another liberal rebellion erupted in 1917 in the wake of electoral fraud perpetrated to keep the Conservative Mario Garcia Menocal regime in power, and again the United States intervened to broker results favorable to “stability” (for U.S. investors in particular).

By 1920, despite rivers of gold flowing from Cuba’s sugar plantations thanks to unprecedented prices on the world market, a wide variety of voices began pronouncing Cuba’s republican experiment a failure.* They decried a political culture rotten with clientelism and misappropriation of funds at every level and a sovereignty grossly mocked by the island nation’s acute economic and foreign policy dependence on the United States. By that point the cancer of the Platt Amendment had been diagnosed. When the amendment was passed into U.S. law in 1901 under the direction of Senator Orville Platt, its acceptance by Cuba became the condition for ending the U.S. occupation. The Platt Amendment prevented Cuba from entering into many kinds of international agreements and gave the United States specific rights on the island. These included the right of intervention under certain circumstances and the right to establish a naval “coaling station” on the island (eventually built in Guantanamo Bay as something substantially more than a fuel depot).

Much has been written about the folly and perfidy of the Platt Amendment.’ Suffice it to say that, although in 1901 the constituent assembly had been oftended by the heavy-handed substance and style of the legal imposition, the eventual acquiescence to insertion of the clause in the Cuban constitution was not seen at the time as a fatal blow to the republic's sovereignty. It was the growing tendency of increasingly interventionist U.S. administrations to adopt the most interventionist reading of the amendment that turned it into a symbol of neocolonial affront to sovereignty and international law in an emerging world system of nation-states. And it was the political elites of republican Cuba —important leaders of the independence movement among them—who first invoked the Platt Amendment in order to seek U.S. arbitration of conflicts over political succession. Once the door was opened by Estrada Palma in 1906, the United States began to get a feel for Platt leverage, and so did subsequent Cuban leaders: José Miguel Gomez would use the threat of further U.S. intervention to suppress the PIC revolt in 1912, and Mario Garcia Menocal would use it to keep his faction in power in 1917.

The commercial reciprocity agreement signed with the United States in 1903 was embraced by the majority of Cuba’s principal economic actors and quickly proved a boon for the Cuban sugar industry. Sugar exports, almost all to the United States, grew 40 percent within five years, and Cuba quickly amassed a favorable balance of payments with the United States. Imports and investment from the United States also grew dramatically, with results that did not necessarily favor Cuban sovereignty. The emergence or resurgence of many local industries was curtailed by the presence of cheap manufactured goods from the United States. By 1927 the country was, after Mexico, the second most important destination for U.S. investment in Latin America, and this rapid expansion of U.S. capital in the Cuban economy paved the way for the transfer of an unhealthy proportion of the island’s productive assets into the hands of U.S. financial concerns following the crash of 1920.8

As the sweet cycle went sour after that year, so went the republic. The total collapse of international sugar prices led to economic ruin for many Cuban companies and sugar concerns. U.S. banks were the main beneficiaries, rapidly achieving majority ownership over the island’s agricultural sector. During the shockingly corrupt presidency of Alfredo Zayas in the first half of the 1920s, Enoch H. Crowder, “special envoy” of the president of the United States, exercised unofficial rule over island politics and fiscal policy, first as a sinister proconsul who lived on a U.S. battleship in Havana harbor and later as ambassador.’ In the midst of widespread disenchantment, the demand for the revitalization of Cuban republican democracy was taken up by a new generation. Intellectuals, professionals, workers, and university students confronted the persistent abuses of the political class and the presidency of Gerardo Machado, whose co-optive populist regime slid inexorably into a bloody dictatorship. If this cycle ended in 1933 with a cathartic nationalist revolution that rid the people of one dictator, it only proved that the republic could not shrug off the shackles it had been born into. Another U.S. ambassador was waiting in the wings to turn the screws; another strongman, Fulgencio Batista, was not long in showing himself capable of keeping the house of cards in order. The revolution of 1933 would soon become just another republican opportunity lost, ultimately going down in history as a prologue to the “real” revolution of 1959."

It is easy to see why the Cuban republic has become “el tiempo omitido” (the “time that is left out”), as Marial Iglesias has put it. The fact that the current Cuban state let the centenary of independence pass by without notice in 2002— unprecedented in the history of modern statehood — reveals the derision with which the first republic is dismissed in official Cuban historical culture. In this version, the U.S. intervention of 1898 and subsequent occupation kidnapped Cuba’s history just as the insuperable contradictions of the late colonial period and the patriot blood spilled in the war of independence had put the people on the brink of revolutionary sovereignty. The Platt Amendment is the smoking gun that proves the United States cheated Cuba of its true nation-statehood, replacing it with a “protectorate,” a “pseudorepublic,” or a “neo-colony” where U.S. power was mediated, in thinly disguised fashion, by a former colonial ruling class turned into flunkies of U.S. financial and corporate power." Seen this way, the entire republican experience prior to 1959 is merely the antithesis of the Cuban revolution. It is a fifty-seven-year period of U.S. proxy rule studded with villains and martyrs and punctuated by political upheavals that prefigure the historical absolution of 1959. A main task for revolutionary scholarship has been to recuperate the radical, popular, and epic nationalist character of the independence struggles in the face of the uncomfortable fact that a good proportion of its revolutionary leaders defected, during the occupation and the republic, to the service of a bourgeoisie dependent on U.S. capital.”

In U.S. historical culture the Spanish-American War and the occupation of Cuba pack a kind of “shock and awe” punch— 1898 —a watershed moment for a country en route to its place as preeminent world power. Whether approving or disapproving, a great deal of the historical work done within the U.S. fold picks up the story on the twentieth-century side of the great wall of 1898. The year marks the beginnings of the country's exercise of imperial power over foreign peoples, the unleashing of the foreign policy controversy leading to the Platt Amendment, the start of repeated U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic intervention in Cuban affairs, and of U.S. support for sun-drenched, mob-backed dictatorships that would come back to haunt them after 1959.” A third strong historical culture —that of Spain—takes a proprietary interest in Cuba's past as well and is also fixated on 1898. It is notable that studies of Cuba done in the Spanish scholarly context almost always end abruptly in 1898, mirroring the way that studies done in the United States so often begin there.”

There is no doubt that, as Louis A. Pérez puts it, 1898 “changed everything”: the U.S. occupation and the early republic were times of dramatic interruptions, reorientations, truncations, and inertia. Wars are cataclysms, and wars that result in the death of 10 percent of the population, bring to an end four centuries of rule by the same colonial master, and usher in a fundamentally distinct (and in many ways even more potent) type of foreign oversight must be ruptures marking a “before” and an “after.” There are also a number of studies that range across the divide of 1898 and work to incorporate the republic into the logic of Cuban historical evolution. Principal among them are works by Pérez himself, beautifully crafted studies that stand out for their synthetic vision, ability to convey the perspectives of the United States, Spain, and Cuba in the momentous changes of the independence era, and fresh and provocative location of social and political continuities. Notably, however, Pérez’s vision of Cuba is often framed in terms of an essential liminality. Cuba seems always in the process of becoming something through contradictions that negate that becoming—eternally “between” (reform and revolution, independence and colonialism, being American and being Cuban). The island is ceaselessly entering moments in which things will never be the same even as hopes will remain unrealized, its ruling class always already reduced to an empty shell. Even his boldly original and erudite ventures into long-term patterns in Cuban climate and social behavior focus on the extreme, catastrophic, and self-negating —hurricanes and suicide.

These three nationally based historical views of Cuba show a strong tendency to frame events in terms of what did not happen. Spain failed to find a reformist solution to the colonial question. The United States stopped Cuba from finding a route to national independence and social revolution. Cubans failed to attain clear independence or build a robust, sovereign, and democratic nation-state and national economy. Little wonder that republican Cuba is predominantly portrayed as constrained and truncated and that we are frequently asked to understand this period principally in terms of failure, discontinuity, deformation, and illegitimacy. The main premise of this collection is that there is a need to revisit the Cuban republic on its own terms, in its own time, and with an eye to all segments of society, and to do so in a way that bridges the three historiographical solitudes discussed above. This is in no way to question the integrity or the value of the historical scholarship that has been done on the republic to date, much of which stands out as among the very finest work accomplished on the history of Latin America and on the history of Spanish and U.S. foreign policy and imperialism. Nevertheless, there is a certain narrowing of vision that comes from seeing periods of history as failures, or as adjuncts to grander historical processes whose subjects lie elsewhere, or in teleological terms as simply anticipations of other more authentic and significant periods.

The historical experiences of the republic were as real as any others, as authentically Cuban as any others. Deserving of infamy as some of its signature episodes are, the republic was also made by a broad spectrum of Cubans who embraced a political and civic culture of national self-realization through citizenship, though they may have remained ambiguous about how precisely to achieve it. In revisiting republican Cuba, our collection shows how this period in Cuban history can be recast as one of deep continuity in processes of liberal state- and nation-building that were periodically upset—but also reinvigorated —by foreign intervention and profound uncertainty. Its contributors explore how Cubans at all levels were urgently involved in the creation of liberal national political communities—imagined and real—and in defining the meaning and practice of a democratic modernity, though times and conditions did not remain long in their favor.

In this sense, we might see republican Cuba as a “tropical Weimar,” for it shared certain important traits with its later and more notorious German sibling. The Cuban republic, too, was born of (and in) military stalemate; it, too, saw the United States enter the fray at that point of stalemate and determine the outcome. In terms of net effect, the Platt Amendment and the Versailles Treaty were also surprisingly congruent. Imposed in the context of postwar occupation, each crippled sovereignty and inserted a wedge that ultimately prevented patriotic people from identifying their sense of national selfhood with the state. Both Weimar Germany and postcolonial Cuba constructed a republican politics in the shadow of foreign intervention legitimized in treaties that were the price of assuming statehood, and both did so in a context of constant political instability that was in good measure a product of that “legitimate” shadow. Each political experiment was pitched about by volatile economic extremes while vital sectors of national industry suffered domination by foreign capital backed by military occupation or the threat thereof. All the while society was consumed by fits of violent racist paranoia carefully cultivated by political elites and in each case drifted toward political dysfunctionality, inflated nationalism, and dictatorship.

To adopt the perspective of a recent book on Weimar Germany, Cuba’s first republic still speaks to us as a “warning sign” —among other things of what havoc is wrought by opportunistic interventions and occupations that disguise imperial designs behind hollow commitments to democracybuilding. Yet both Weimar and Cuban republican political cultures were also transformed by irrepressible boundary crossing, especially in urban spaces associated with cultural and intellectual flowering. And as with the case of Weimar Germany, republican Cuba's serious political and cultural conflicts and disasters should not erase its significant political and cultural achievements. In Cuba, too, the “destruction of the old imperial order in war and revolution unleashed the political and social imagination.”**

A similar comparative point can be made without leaving the hemisphere. In essential ways, late colonial and early republican Cuba fit nicely into what Latin American scholars call the Liberal period, typically understood as running from roughly 1870 to 1930. Curiously, almost without exception, Cuban scholarship eschews this periodization.” For many Latin American countries Liberal state-building was based on primary product exports benefiting an alliance of foreign capital and a local ruling class, and it was characterized by autocratic regimes capable of maintaining stability. Cuban historians have tended to avoid the “Liberal era” classification, concentrating on what they see as the uniqueness of the island's brutal wars of independence and their aftermath, the U.S. intervention and occupation, the torturous experiment with democratic government that was crippled by corruption, patronage, electoral fraud, and gangsterism, and the precious sectors of the economy swallowed up by U.S.-based banks and super-corporations like United Fruit that created an acute agro-export dependency. Yet even a casual student of Latin American history will have noted how readily all these “uniquely Cuban” structuring experiences apply to Latin American states of the era, particularly to Mexico, Central America, and northern South America, all of which shared a geopolitical proximity to the new imperial United States. Cuba's first war of independence is in many ways analogous to Central America's struggles against William Walker in the 1850s, and Mexico's against European reconquest in the 1860s. The strong regional inflection and social

8 | Palmer, Piqueras, Sánchez Cobos yearnings of Cuba's second war of independence and the interventionist arbitration of the United States are comparable to the experience of revolutionary Mexico, with its northern insurrectionism, its populist nationalism, and U.S. military intervention in Veracruz in an effort to broker a political outcome palatable to U.S. interests. There is also an enormous, and almost entirely unploughed, field of potential comparative study between this era in Cuban history and Brazil’s late emancipation of slaves (both coming only at the end of the 1880s) and tardy and curtailed republican experience (in the Brazilian case, the “old republic” of 1889-1930).

Historians of Latin America are acutely aware of the anti-democratic, economically dependent, and militarist polities of the Liberal era. Yet they have not shied away from exploring them as authentic expressions of political cultures and foundational processes of nation-building. Indeed, recent studies tend to take the political cultures of the Liberal period much more seriously and fully than in the past. They are treated with much greater nuance as important for the imagining of national political community, for the constitution of modes of gendered and racialized citizenship, for the launching of modern urban identities, and for the structuring of central-regional dynamics in the modern state, to name just a few areas of current focus. There is no question that the Platt Amendment undermined aspects of state sovereignty and called into question Cuba’s degree of national independence in a peculiarly explicit way. However, the main thing separating the Cuban plight from that of most Latin American countries who were also in the United States’ sphere of influence may have been its unique (and uniquely awkward) status in international law. The republic became neither a protectorate nor a colony in the formal sense, nor was it a colony of a new kind whose typology had yet to be defined. It is true that an external power limited in some ways the ability of the island’s representatives to make decisions about some issues. At the same time, this limitation did not erase the existence of a new juridical framework that provided a normal domestic government with complete powers of rule legitimated through participative mechanisms of citizenship.

Placing Cuba in the Latin American context is revealing and not simply because U.S. expansionism and its voracious Caribbean appetite were visible elsewhere. The Cuban republic had a rocky life, but if it was not the best of political regimes, for a long time it was far from the worst. The country freed itself from its former colonial master, and Cubans were able to provide themselves with their own institutions. The ideals of the revolutionary struggle were partially put into practice, if in some measure sacrificed in the interests of pluralism and the opposition of interests, and for the most part they suffered a rapid decay. Cuban citizens were able to associate freely and elect their representatives, even if the processes for doing so showed marked deficiencies. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century a very small minority of American nations enjoyed constitutional systems that were respected and authorities who were subject to periodic electoral renewal, and even more rare were those that accepted universal male suffrage and a secret and direct vote. Cuba’s representative democracy quickly showed defects in its machinery. Different from virtually all its Latin American sister states, however, the Republic of Cuba was born democratic and endowed with representative institutions that stood in marked opposition to the arbitrary authoritarian rule and political exclusion that the people had been subjected to during the Spanish colonial era.

The Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos contributed to promoting the expression “república mediatizada” [mediated republic] by using it for the title of a pamphlet on the Cuban situation. The adjective mediated fits nicely with the “republic of generals and doctors” that provided the title to Carlos Loveira's famous novel: a state that was nominally free but actually dependent, conditioned less by external dictate than by the threat of intrusion into national life and the imposition of a transitory administration that would reorient politics in a direction conducive to the occupier. The example of the U.S. occupation government of 1899-1902 was ever present. By not establishing with precision the unbreachable limits of Cuban sovereignty, a mirrored conditionality was created in the country's domestic life. On the one hand, this imposed self-limitation and even surreptitious submission to signs and suggestions emanating from Washington and, on the other, it gave different factions the option of going to the American Protector (or threatening to) to resolve internal disputes. This was a double perversion, based on the threat of invoking an international treaty.

Still, the task remains to define precisely the margins of action of Cuba's republican government and the real degree of interference by U.S. diplomatic agents versus the threat of foreign intervention as a domestic political tool. Just as important would be to deepen our knowledge of the effective space of sovereignty that was developed during the republic, one that seems to have had a greater impact on the future of Cubans during the first three decades of the twentieth century than did those limits imposed from outside, no matter how important these latter were. Exploring the evolution of a republican society that it is impossible to reduce to the shrunken figure of dysfunctional politics is a task of considerable historical urgency that we turn to in the following pages. As editors we have chosen to characterize the

10 | Palmer, Piqueras, Sánchez Cobos main patterns of republican civic life and public culture in terms of ambiguity rather than betrayal, failure, deformation, or liminality.* By doing so we mean to acknowledge the hesitation, doubt, and uncertainty of different individual and collective Cuban actors as to the course republican political culture should take. We also acknowledge the dubious and sham qualities the republic all too often exhibited. At the same time, we wish to emphasize that this historical experience must be understood in multiple ways, in terms of many levels of significance, and as the result of choices made and not made by Cuban actors themselves.

The following pages present contemporary work by leading scholars of Cuban history from all three of the “national” historiographical networks mentioned above—the Spanish, the Cuban, and the North American. Many of the authors are based in Canada or Valencia, and the Cuban contributors are distinguished by their contemporary training in historical methods. The ensemble expresses new ways of thinking about the late colonial and early republican period, developed over the past decade or so in overlapping networks that have come together, in varying combinations and with different objectives, in Havana, Trinidad, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Cardenas, Ann Arbor, Windsor, Montréal, Toronto, Castellón, Valencia, and Madrid. Whether presenting panels on specific themes, reading documents together in methodological workshops, or building bridges between different tendencies in Cuban historiography at ecumenical seminars, the authors in this collection have coalesced on the basis of a shared historical sensibility and a sense of complementarity in their approach to the Cuban past.

Marial Iglesias begins the collection by exploding 1898. She takes us past the contentious domains of diplomatic, military, and economic history that have focused discussion of the United States’ most egregious acts of imperial excess (which are sovereign Cuba’s most painful episodes of violation).” Iglesias instead explores the political and popular culture of the successive exhumations of the “cadaver” of the USS Maine from its resting place in Havana harbor where, in 1898, it sank after a mysterious explosion —a blast that ostensibly triggered the U.S. intervention in the Cuban war of independence. Republican Cuba had a forensic obsession, one displayed early in the submission of the exhumed skeleton of Antonio Maceo for anthropometric examination in a racially anxious attempt to de-Africanize a hero of the new Cuba in the interests of creole hegemony.”° Iglesias draws our attention to this culture of unsettled republican remains: if the United States took possession of certain sacred portions of Cuba’s sovereign history when it brokered and restricted Cuban independence, Cuba also came to possess sacred

Introduction | Il

“American” relics. The monumentalization of the Maine's remains would take a volatile course throughout the history of the republic. It showed itself capable of signifying a wide variety of public feelings about the fusion of U.S. and Cuban experience, from catharsis and love to hatred for the U.S.-backed dictatorial manipulation of public space. The rupture of relations between the two countries in 1961 at the beginning of the socialist revolution meant that the remains of the ship that stayed in Cuba would fall into oblivion in a corner of Havana's Malecón, but not before being the object of a wave of anti-imperialist ire unleashed by the new regime. The United States did not simply impose itself on republican Cuba; its material presence circulated symbolically around the country, becoming part of Cuban popular culture in the process, vulnerable to expropriation, possession, and public and private violence and rejection.

Iglesias's magisterial redeployment of the Maine sets up four studies that explore important continuities connecting the late colonial period to the republican era. In many respects, and in good measure because of the essential conservatism of the U.S. occupation government, the republic was more reformulation of an agenda sketched out under Spanish sway by Cuba's creole elites than a radical break with the past. As the important liberal intellectual José Enrique Varona noted in 1915 (when he was vice president of the republic!), “republican Cuban looks like the sister of colonial Cuba.””! Yet it was far from a twin, identical or fraternal. The radical break with the past dreamed of by many in the independence armies was frustrated by U.S. occupation and the room it gave the old creole elites to reestablish themselves in positions of strength in the new republic. At the same time, the reformulation of a late colonial agenda allowed for considerable maneuvering and the launching of novel programs and processes.