Envisioning Cuba

Melina Pappademos

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807869178
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

While it was not until 1871 that slavery in Cuba was finally abolished, African-descended people had high hopes for legal, social, and economic advancement as the republican period started. In Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, Melina Pappademos analyzes the racial politics and culture of black civic and political activists during the Cuban Republic. The path to equality, Pappademos reveals, was often stymied by successive political and economic crises, patronage politics, and profound racial tensions. In the face of these issues, black political leaders and members of black social clubs developed strategies for expanding their political authority and for winning respectability and socioeconomic resources. Rather than appeal to a monolithic black Cuban identity based on the assumption of shared experience, these black activists, politicians, and public intellectuals consistently recognized the class, cultural, and ideological differences that existed within the black community, thus challenging conventional wisdom about black community formation and anachronistic ideas of racial solidarity. Pappademos illuminates the central, yet often silenced, intellectual and cultural role of black Cubans in the formation of the nation's political structures; in doing so, she shows that black activism was only partially motivated by race.

CHAPTER ONE
“Political Changüí”

Race, Culture, and Politics in the Early Republic

In January 1901, as constitutional delegates hammered out the new republic’s architecture, even coming to ideological blows over such issues as North American occupation (1898–1902) and the restricted suffrage, the polemical Havana daily La Lucha ran an editorial derisively titled “Changüí Político.”¹ The piece ridiculed ranking Republican Party activists in the capital busily campaigning for the island’s first-ever general elections, to be held later that year in December.² Havana’s Republican Party, representing white and some black Liberation Army leaders and their supporters, was one of several, disparate, Republican Party organizations dotting the island and competing against each other for political office. Rather than campaign nationally, as one, united Republican Party (as their common name would imply), these early party organizations were locked in contentious battle with one another, each founded under the aegis of a different, locally or regionally powerful cacique (political boss).³ Such political fragmentation was common in republican Cuban politics; it contributed to the importance of local political developments and limited opportunities for mass mobilization through at least the 1930s.⁴ Indeed, early twentieth-century parties might have been more truthfully described as foxholes scattered across the island. Like their colonial predecessors, political activists generally politicked most fervently at the local level to win endorsements and votes from organizations or neighborhoods.⁵ When the Havana-based Republican activists came under La Lucha’s fire, they were in the midst of holding a public forum in the city’s Pilar barrio, using a then-common, open-air style of neighborhood organizing.⁶

Though La Lucha blasted both white and black Republicans on the forum stage, accusing them of bald politicking to build party support, the forum’s black speakers, including Juan Felipe Risquet (later Republican Party congressman from Matanzas province) and Juan Gualberto Gómez (career politician, founding editor of several newspapers, and later Liberal Party senator), were the objects of particular contempt.⁷ The black politicians had apparently displayed a complete lack of cultural sophistication and political savvy during the forum, so much so that La Lucha was moved to a burlesqued recount. The editorialist accused one black speaker of being “so dark-skinned he was blond,” another of “blathering delusions of grandeur,” and a third black politician, Juan Gualberto Gómez, a former Liberation Army general and journalist at various life stages for French, Belgian, and Cuban newspapers, of circling his arms over the head of a fellow white party member in an African ethnic ritual cleansing (“Aquello parecía un simbolismo del Ecorio Efó”).⁸

The relationship drawn by La Lucha, between impropriety and the black politicians, exists at many registers, especially given the headline, “Changüí Político” (Political Changüí), because changüí is a music form based on specific rhythmic patterns that are historically associated with both plantation slavery and the predominantly black, eastern city of Guantánamo. The editorial calls attention to the centrality of cultural practice in racialized discourses in Latin American and Caribbean histories, which use normative values to subordinate and alienate certain members of national communities.⁹ It shows how cultural attributes (however invented) can both convey and reinforce racial identities (such as the racial connotations of changüí music or the racialization of political behavior), often without explicitly referencing biological race or phenotype.¹⁰Changüí music, which in Cuba references slavery as well as Arará (rará) African ethnic and Haitian cultural practices and which, historically, is performed primarily by black Cuban musicians (often of Haitian descent), is believed to have its roots on coffee plantations largely populated by the Arará, in Cuba’s east.¹¹ Additional uses of the word changüí (“throng,” “public squabble,” “disagreement,” “rabble”) refer to behaviors that, presumably, stood in opposition to the rational debate of modern political culture (as both ideology and practice). In essence, La Lucha editorialists intimated that based on their phenotype, warped sense of entitlements, and Africanist cultural tendencies, black men brought to the forum qualities incompatible with its purpose, thus discrediting Havana’s Republican Party (one of three parties that had edged out many others) and reinforcing (amid vigorous debate on how far to extend the franchise) a climate of negative judgments and propositions about black political participation. Black political authority was also harmed by the public disrespect and humiliation that was heaped on black leaders, such as when President Tomás Estrada Palma (1902–6) refused to meet with distinguished black Liberation Army general Quintín Bandera in 1905. Estrada Palma also excluded black political wives from presidential functions that year, when he failed to send invitations for an end-of-the-year reception to the wives of Antonio Póveda Ferrer, Generoso Campos Marquetti, and Las Villas senator Martín Morúa Delgado.¹² In essence, both North Americans and elite Cubans believed that even if blacks secured the vote, their ascendance to political leadership was an altogether different and unacceptable outcome of the new republican order.

North American occupation officials, for example, pushed for an elite franchise that excluded most Cubans, and they were even disdainful of the idea of a black voter. In 1900, they vacillated between scoffing at black political empowerment (“the Negro has never been a political factor in the land”) and full-blown anxiety about the idea of blacks armed with votes (black enfranchisement would lead to a “second edition of Haiti and San Domingo”).¹³ A decade later, in 1912, on the eve of the Independent Party of Color uprising against the political status quo, the minister to Secretary of State Philander Knox, Arthur M. Beaupré, seemed unsettled when he surmised that “the negroes have always been the backbone of political uprisings in Cuba, but under white leadership … the negroes themselves lack the necessary leadership and talent for organization to bring about unaided a widespread revolt.”¹⁴

Notwithstanding North American desires to control black political participation, especially black political leadership, Cuban elites were, if no less anxious, more pliant. Cubans’ majority tendency across socioeconomic sectors was, for various reasons, to push for suffrage rights for all males—irrespective of class or color. Prominent personalities, ordinary citizens, town councils, and civic organizations all protested early attempts to limit the suffrage, such as the Territorial Council of the Veterans of Independence of Matanzas, which petitioned Governor General Leonard Wood in January 1900, or the white veteran general José B. Alemán, who insisted that for the Cuban people suffrage was an “acquired right.”¹⁵ White intellectual and statesman Enrique José Varona¹⁶ supported universal male suffrage but argued for a “plural vote,” which assigned additional votes to men of a certain status and wealth—generally white men who were educated, propertied, and legally married.¹⁷ White veteran officer and ex-president of the Cuban Revolutionary Republic General Bartolomé Masó (who was widely supported by blacks in his 1901 bid for the presidency) argued in 1899 that universal suffrage would not serve to unduly empower or embolden the black population. He intimated to North American general James H. Wilson that blacks posed no political threat because in general they would avoid political assertiveness; they were, he assured Wilson, “humble and tranquil.”¹⁸

In fact, black political aspirations seemed to cross the imagined borders of a modern Cuban political culture by blurring the ostensible boundaries between the habits of colonialism, on the one hand, and postindependence modernity, on the other. The “old” was often portrayed by intellectuals and lawmakers alike as Africanisms, corporate favoritism, patronage, and social hierarchy under the monarchy, whereas the “new” was imagined as Cuban representative democracy, rational engagement, flourishing civic institutions, strong local government, and the absence of social divisions (such as race). Yet this break between colonialism and independence was not so clean. Spanish ghosts were everywhere visible after 1898—militarily, in the old, imposing El Morro Castle (the one-time sentinel still presiding over the island, on the precipice between Havana’s harbor and open sea); architecturally, in the island’s plazas and baroque facades; in hagiographic street names, Cuban cuisine, and historic décimas music; and also in the exercise and exchange of power. The legacy of Spanish colonialism, especially late colonialism, left an indelible mark on the republic’s social and political structures, including the exercise of racial power.

Historian Ada Ferrer argues insightfully that late in the year 1896, with the Cuban victory against Spain imminent and an inclusive and multiracial citizenry on the horizon, insurgent leaders began to contemplate the ramifications of a socially open, postindependence society.¹⁹ She posits that on the eve of peace, high-ranking Cuban officers rethought the very profile of leadership (including authority, prestige, and enlightenment) that the thirty-year, racially inclusive independence movement had produced. They purposely ignored widely held ex-rebel expectations of meritocracy—that one’s valor in war would become as obvious as cream afloat in milk and would be rewarded without regard for class or color. By extension, the nation’s first civilian leaders would be plucked pro forma from among those who on old insurgent battlefields had proven themselves most noteworthy. Yet fearing the ramifications of this scenario, of political power sharing in what would soon be an independent, egalitarian republic charged with implementing the revolution’s mandate, high-ranking rebel leaders (mostly white and of privileged backgrounds) reconfigured the bounds of republican political authority by deploying colonial hierarchies based on class, race, and gender norms.

In their deliberations, the officers chose not to speak openly or pointedly about their sense of vulnerability as men or the presumption of the failure of the black race. Rather, they ascribed to themselves the right to interpret behavior and assess the cultural requisites (such as refinement, education, comportment, civility, honor, austere self-sacrifice, and sexual restraint—if only in the public eye) of political authority.²⁰ Then in August 1897, for the crime of flouting the concepts and precepts of power, they stripped black general Quintín Bandera (a highly ranked and respected fellow officer) of his command. At the same time, they increasingly favored other, mostly white (“truly worthy, honorable, and civilized”), officers over black ones for seniority promotion.²¹ Their actions helped to set in motion the social face of postindependence political administration, providing U.S. occupation officials and republican Cuban leaders alike with a refashioned demographic profile for leadership and a precedent for later administrative appointments that implicitly argued for who in the postwar republic should lead and who would indefinitely follow.²²

Had republican elections for public office been a meritocratic affair, without racial considerations, many black political hopefuls would have fulfilled and exceeded the pedigree requirements of nascent public and political spheres. Juan Felipe Risquet and the erudite Juan Gualberto Gómez, for example, had traveled internationally. Gómez was Paris-educated and a key revolutionary ideologue and nationalist intellectual and had been exiled to Ceuta, Spain (at Spanish Morocco), by colonial forces for his radical oratory and revolutionary media during Cuba’s “fecund truce” (1880–95). His prestige landed him an appointment to Havana’s Board of Education and the Cuban Academy of History, as well as a delegate’s seat at the constitutional convention of 1900 to 1901. And Gómez spearheaded a hearty but unsuccessful protest among fellow constitutional assemblymen to prevent the adoption of the U.S.-authored Platt Amendment in the new Cuban constitution. Moreover, he served in the House (1914–16) and Senate (1917–24).²³ By most measures, then, he was an intellectual, activist, and quintessential patriot with more than sufficient pedigree to enter the political arena.²⁴

Juan Felipe Risquet also held political office after the war, and in 1900, in an almost prescient gesture, he wrote Rectificaciones: La cuestión político-social en la isla de Cuba (Rectifications: The Socio-Political Question in Cuba), in which he defended resolutely blacks’ fitness for cultural and political leadership. The book examines the history of Cuban slavery, intellectual thought, and black activist-intellectuals and attests to blacks’ ongoing efforts for cultural evolution and social justice after independence. Rectificaciones profiles writers, educators, doctors, politicians, and other black professionals in Cuba and the broader African diaspora, demonstrating, first, black Cubans’ moral character, liberalism, and social and economic achievements, and, second, their significance for new directions in republican Cuba.²⁵ In theory, then, both Gómez and Risquet embodied the tenor of authority in progressivist politics. Further, in practice, civic leaders, aspiring professionals, and local politicians of all colors looked pragmatically to certain black men (such as black activists Gómez and Risquet) for their political connections, influence, favors, and counsel—even as antiblack voices challenged black leadership and alleged cultural impropriety in order to restrict black suffrage rights and limit black political participation.²⁶

The suffrage controversy, which was at the heart of the debates about strong political leadership and representation and which raged among the republic’s constitutional convention delegates as early as November 1900, had began decades earlier when the anticolonial insurgency was first under way. Alejandro de la Fuente and Matthew Casey note that the issue of universal suffrage was raised in 1869 by insurgent leaders who saw a broad franchise as foundational to both social and political emancipation. By the middle of the final War of Independence (1895–98), both Spanish officials and Cuban separatists had reached consensus on the issue, albeit for different reasons.²⁷ Colonial authorities even made a tactical decision to draft a new constitution (1897) granting Cuba and Puerto Rico autonomy and universal (male) voting rights, in an unsuccessful, last-ditch maneuver to gain popular support and save the colonial regime.²⁸

With North American occupation (1899–1902), the franchise issue surfaced again. As occupation officials pushed to reverse suffrage rights gained under colonial rule and to limit the vote to propertied, literate, and wealthy Cubans, they suffered a sharp rebuke by local governments and communities across the island. Among Cubans, voices both likely and unexpected supported Liberation Army veterans’ political rights and the installation of a universal rather than a limited suffrage. Among U.S. journalists and legislators, the justifications for a limited suffrage were varied, but these voices consistently disparaged Cubans’ ability to self govern. As the Nation lamented in 1898, Cuba was a “territory … unused to self-government.”²⁹ Officials especially feared the large percentage of blacks in the island’s total population. In a February 1900 letter to Secretary of War Elihu Root, Cuba’s military governor Leonard Wood stated his belief that black Cubans were an “illiterate mass of people … unable to become responsible citizens.”³⁰ Writing to Root a few weeks later, he asserted that black Cuban enfranchisement would lead to a “second Haiti.”³¹

Suffrage debates were fueled by idealisms such as egalitarianism, representative democracy, and especially (given the large population of Liberation Army veterans) revolutionary sacrifice. And in this context, universal male voting rights seemed to capture more of the general will than did a limited suffrage that enfranchised only an elite, pro-U.S. electorate. Moreover, in flaunting a powerful U.S. agenda for a limited suffrage, Cuban constitutionalists laid the groundwork for a potentially egalitarian body politic. Despite their hold on the vote, however, black men continued to be marginalized in the republic because they could not win much in the way of government jobs or elected offices.³² In fact, as de la Fuente has argued, voting rights did not inevitab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: At the Crossroads of Republic
• CHAPTER ONE “Political Changüí”
• CHAPTER TWO Black Patronage Networks
• CHAPTER THREE Inventing Africa and Creating Community
• CHAPTER FOUR Africa in the Privileged Black Imaginary
• CHAPTER FIVE Power and Great Culture
• CHAPTER SIX We Come to Discredit These Leaders
• CONCLUSION: Republican Politics and the Exigencies of Blackness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List