The Structure of Cuban History

Meanings and Purpose of the Past

Louis A. Pérez Jr., Louis A. P?rez Jr.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781469608860
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In this expansive and contemplative history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. argues that the country's memory of the past served to transform its unfinished nineteenth-century liberation project into a twentieth-century revolutionary metaphysics. The ideal of national sovereignty that was anticipated as the outcome of Spain's defeat in 1898 was heavily compromised by the U.S. military intervention that immediately followed. To many Cubans it seemed almost as if the new nation had been overtaken by another country's history.
Memory of thwarted independence and aggrievement--of the promise of sovereignty ever receding into the future--contributed to the development in the early republic of a political culture shaped by aspirations to fulfill the nineteenth-century promise of liberation, and it was central to the claim of the revolution of 1959 as the triumph of history. In this capstone book, Perez discerns in the Cuban past the promise that decisively shaped the character of Cuban nationality.

1 ALL THIS WE PREFER

We prefer to see our Cuba converted into a mound of ashes, and the cadavers of its sons reduced to charred remains, before consenting to the continued rule over this unhappy land by Spanish domination.

— Salvador Cisneros Betancourt to Antonio Aguilera (December 31, 1896)

[After 1868] everything was rubble, smoke, pain; and at every step a tomb was erected. In that revolution . . . [we] learned to die and kill; patriotism and self-esteem were defined along precise lines. And a sentiment of dignity took hold within the heart of the country.

— Manuel Márquez Sterling, Alrededor de nuestra psicología (1906)

On January 1, 1899, the true Cuban people [el verdadero pueblo cubano] had no worries. . . . Everything was joy and brotherhood. If it had been possible for human beings to show their heart it would have revealed a people who yearned to see their idolized Cuba free and independent.

— Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo (1912)

The war ended in the summer of 1898. Only then was it possible to begin to take in the magnitude of the devastation wrought by Cuban determination to achieve independence: the culmination of nearly fifty years of protracted warfare and intermittent insurrection, marked by recurring cycles of destruction and disruption, decades of political repression alternating with economic depression interspersed with years of destitution and dispersal.

Peace found a people prostrate. The war had been especially cruel in its conduct and frightful in its consequences. Spaniards were ruthless in their defense of colonial rule, and Cubans were relentless in their demand for national sovereignty. Contending forces laid siege to the largesse of the land, preying upon the bounty of its resources, consuming cultivation and confiscating livestock as a matter of need and destroying the rest as a method of war. The wartime abundance of displacement and destruction found its inevitable consequences in the peacetime prevalence of impoverishment and indigence.

It had been total war, a campaign in which the practice of pillage and plunder was adopted as a cost-effective method of warfare, in which the systematic destruction of property and production became an acceptable if not the preferable means each side used in the effort to defeat the other. What the Cubans spared, the Spanish destroyed—and vice versa. Total, too, in that the war produced havoc in almost all the 1,000 towns and villages across the island, where the distinction between civilians and combatants lost any useful meaning, where neutrality was suspect and security was often obtained only behind one or the other battle line, rarely ever outside them, and never between them.

The losses were incalculable, the suffering was unimaginable. Powerfully destructive forces were let loose upon the land, sometimes as a matter of policy, planned and deliberate; at other times as a matter of happenstance, improvised and random. These were perhaps differences without distinction, for the results were almost always the same: chaos in the lives of the affected men, women, and children, lives shattered and forever changed.

Few Cubans in 1898 found home as they remembered it—if they found home at all. Many of the things that they had previously used as reference points in their lives had disappeared, or no longer worked. Objects of memories no longer existed, familiar landmarks had vanished, old boundaries had disappeared: not dissimilar to the experience of Iznaga in Luis Felipe Rodríguez’s short story “El despojo” (1928), who returns home after the war to discover that he was “a stranger in his own land.”¹

The cause of Cuba Libre had been sustained with the support of Cubans of all classes, men and women, black and white. Many had abandoned their businesses, shops, and farms; others had discontinued their educations and disrupted their careers. Vast numbers of Cubans lost their principal sources of income and their only means of livelihood. Many succumbed to indebtedness from which they never recovered. They willingly had sacrificed personal assets and family fortunes, great and small, in pursuit of sovereign nationhood. Thousands of families lost the savings of a lifetime and property accumulated over several lifetimes: businesses, professional offices, retail shops, farms, and homes—almost everything of worth and anything of value—possessions and property lost to tax collectors or creditors, or to punitive confiscations or the ravages of war. They were without homes, without money, without jobs, without influence.²

Cubans of means plunged into vertiginous downward mobility afterward. Pawnshops flourished as families liquidated what remained of their personal property and household possessions in one last desperate effort to stave off indigence. “There are many families in Santiago who 18 months ago were in comfortable circumstances,” the U.S. consul wrote from Santiago de Cuba in 1897, “and who to-day are paupers, selling the remaining pieces of furniture in their homes in order to buy bread, with no future before them but starvation, or a bare subsistence on charity.”³ Horacio Ferrer returned home to Unión de Reyes after the war to find his family in conditions of utter destitution. “Some members of the family had died,” he recalled years later; “others had sought refuges abroad. My aging mother and invalid sister had suffered the vicissitudes of nearly four years of war. In the process of diminishing resources, they had to sell what little they had. First, living room and dining room furniture; later jewelry, lamps, bedroom furniture, clothing, and all kinds of utensils.”⁴

Want and need extended fully across the island, with neither relief nor remedy in sight. Life assumed a nightmarish quality as a war-weary people went about the task of reconstituting their households and resuming their lives in the midst of desolation and disarray. Cubans contemplated the landscape of postwar Cuba with numb incredulity, unable to perceive order in the world. Everything seemed to have disintegrated into unrecognizable fragments. They returned to ruin, to incalculable material losses and irreplaceable human ones. Hundreds of thousands of men and women faced the prospect of permanent displacement and destitution, with no place to return to and nowhere to depart for. “Entire towns and villages remain destroyed,” Avelino Sanjenís wrote at the time, “and vast numbers of families have disappeared.”⁵

Some of the most prominent military and political leaders of the insurrection had come from families of means, often with property and professions, with plans and prospects. After the war, they had nothing. Captain Carlos Muecke despaired over the condition of his comrades, whose “property whether in town or in the country has been destroyed and they must begin anew. . . . [They] have sacrificed all—[their] houses, even their clothes are gone. . . . Without money they cannot rebuild their houses, restock their farms, refit their offices, or go to work.”⁶ Many officers and soldiers of the Liberation Army found themselves in various conditions of indigence, without resources, without representation, often far from home, and no way to get back and often nothing to go back to. “I left the army like everyone else,” recalled José Isabel Herrera. “We were mustered out of service with $75 to return to our homes, most of which had disappeared. We were not even given passage back home from one part of the island to the other, for there were men from Oriente in Pinar del Río, and vice versa. Many men, upon returning to their towns, found that their families had disappeared.”⁷

It was not at all clear how things would get right again, or how Cubans would find the ways and means to reclaim what had been formerly theirs and make a place for themselves in the nation for which they had sacrificed so much to claim as their own. The war had shattered life as it was previously known, and never again would conditions return to the way they used to be. No one was quite certain how, or where, or with what, to begin anew. Few could see a way ahead, and those who did look ahead did so with fear and foreboding. In Sombras eternas (1919), novelist Raimundo Cabrera portrayed the conditions of his protagonist in poignant terms: “Without the old home in which he had established his household and managed to put aside modest savings after twenty years of work, his farm destroyed and in debt, he was now obliged at forty-five years of age to start all over again with the difficult task of making a living, and feeling very old.”⁸

Households had been shattered and families scattered, communities had dispersed and towns had disappeared. Where towns and villages once stood, there remained only scattered piles of rubble stone and charred wood. The countryside remained all but totally despoiled of its productive capabilities. What previously had been vistas of lush farming zones were now scenes of scorched earth and singed brush. The farms were untended, the fields unworked, the villages uninhabited. The pastures were vacant and the orchards barren. Abandoned houses in the interior were roofless and in ruins. “Our countryside had been transformed into sites of melancholia and sadness,” recalled Santiago Rey. “The fields of cultivation were devastated; homes were reduced to charred remains. . . . Where once existed tranquil hamlets and peaceful households only desolation and ruin remained.”⁹ Farmers had few incentives to return to the land. For many, it was easier to move on than it was to go back. Many had no choice. Across the island, men, women, and children, the uprooted and downtrodden, often as entire households and extended families, foraged for a living, picking through rubble in the countryside and begging for alms in the cities. Novelist Pedro Pablo Martín gave first-person narration to the circumstances of his times: “The destruction of the sugar industry ruined the principal means of subsistence of many families and hunger reared its ugly face in our fertile fields. . . . We saw entire towns and villages, once filled with life and commerce, succumb to the ferocity of the war. Those towns and villages that in other times were the well-spring of wealth were reduced to mounds of rubble. . . . What horrible scenes! What a painful scene the countryside of Cuba presented.”¹⁰

Travelers to the island that first autumn of peace were uniformly appalled by the magnitude of devastation. “I saw neither a house, nor a cow, calf, sheep or goat, and only two chickens,” one journalist reported from Camagüey. “The country is wilderness,” a “desert,” wrote another traveler from Las Villas.¹¹ One rail passenger in 1897 reported frightful scenes en route to Matanzas from Havana: “The country outside the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. It was as fair a landscape as mortal eyes ever looked upon, but I did not see a sign of life, except an occasional vulture or buzzard sailing through the air. The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.”¹²

Conditions were desperate at both ends of the island. In Pinar del Río, General Fitzhugh Lee described conditions in late 1898 in the western province in bleak terms:

Business of all sorts was suspended. Agricultural operations had ceased; large sugar estates with their enormous and expensive machinery were destroyed; houses burned; stock driven off for consumption by the Spanish troops, or killed. There was scarcely an ox left to pull a plow, had there been a plow left. Not a pig had been left in the pen, or a hen to lay an egg for the poor destitute people who still held on to life, most of them sick, weary, and weak. Miles and miles of country uninhabited by either the human race or domestic animals were visible to the eye on every side. The great fertile island of Cuba in some places resembled an ash pile, in others the dreary desert.¹³

Inspector General James McLeary toured the eastern province at about the same time and reported equally desperate conditions in Oriente:

Many of the people appear to be almost destitute of clothing. . . . Taken as a whole, the people who came under my observation cannot be regarded as prosperous; commerce in the towns being entirely dead, and agriculture in the country being in a state of suspended animation. There does not appear ever to have been any such thing as manufacturers. . . . There are scarcely any work animals to be found along the route, a very few horses and still fewer mules and oxen, none of which can be obtained at any price. . . . Houses and fences are burned, fields abandoned and suffered to grow up in guinea grass, and the orchards which formerly covered it, are entirely gone. All the fruit tress in this section have been destroyed.¹⁴

“There does not exist a single place on the island of Cuba,” Fermín Valdés-Domínguez recorded in his field diary, “not even in the most remote recesses of its forests, that does not possess a holy memory [un recuerdo sagrado] of the long and cruel struggle for independence.”¹⁵

Property damage could be assessed and in many instances verified and validated. But material losses were only part of the havoc wrought by the war. What could never be fully ascertained, and certainly never fully comprehended, was the suffering, the despair, the heartache. “Anyone who lived in those times,” historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez wrote years later—and he did indeed live through those times—“lived through a period of chaos and tragedy.” He remembered vividly: “We were a people in ruin; a little country, in misery, starving. Our only source of strength was our hope, combined with a firm and energetic determination to endure and live on.”¹⁶ Traveler Robert Porter described a people “left enfeebled by deprivation and too weak to take up their occupations,” inhabitants “huddled half starved in miserable huts near the towns and cities,” a “hungry and discouraged native population [standing] listlessly on the streets and in the public places,” where at “each station the railroad trains were boarded by half-starving women or children begging for bread or coppers.”¹⁷

That many survived in sound body did not always mean they were of sound mind. Vast numbers bore their pain in their memories, in sadness and sorrow, haunted by the loss of persons and places that had once given meaning to their lives, learning to reconcile themselves to the persistence of life with the permanence of loss. They carried on with broken hearts and inconsolable grief: the many tens of thousands of widows and orphans, parents who lost children, children who lost parents, the coun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Structure of Cuban History
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ALL THIS WE PREFER
• 2 INTIMATIONS OF NATIONALITY
• 3 TRANSFORMATION IN TIMES OF TRANSITION
• 4 NATION IN WAITING
• 5 ANTICIPATION OF THE PAST
• 6 HISTORY WITH A PURPOSE
• NOTES
• INDEX