The Merchant of Havana

The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive

Stephen Silverstein

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826521118
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

1

The Notional Jew

Judaizing the Merchant

IN HIS TRAVEL MEMOIR of Cuba, the Frenchman Hippolyte Piron reports having observed a profound hatred of Jews on the Spanish sugar island in 1876: “Jews, according to Cubans, are only good for burning alive.” Piron then rhetorically queries, “Are these not the Jewish dogs who killed Christ?” Such deep-seated antipathy toward Jews, according to Piron, translated into Cubans’ use of the term “Jew” as an insulting epithet that was cast at non-Jews: “When a [Cuban] desires to offend someone cruelly, he calls him Jew.”¹ Surely, the anti-Semitic reference rendered the offense that Piron asserts. The discursive practice of labeling certain people “Jews” was, however, much more than an abusive slur in late colonial Cuba. In a society upturned by contact with the forces of liberal modernity, creoles designated the imaginary Jew as a psychosocial stabilizing device.²

At the turn of the century, the engines of finance capitalism and industrialization mixed with imperial liberalism and a constellation of historical events to bring about Cuban economic expansion on an epochal scale. The sugar boom of the 1790s was triggered largely by the destruction of Saint Domingue’s sugar fields in the Haitian revolution (1792) and gained momentum after 1818 with the steam engine’s application to Cuban sugar manufacture. As the sugar industry ramped up, mercantilist monopolies collapsed, giving way to limited free trade and a redefined colonialism. By 1830, Cuba assumed the mantle as the world’s foremost sugar producer, which was facilitated by technological innovation and a multiplication of the acreage under cane cultivation. Mechanized mills swelled in number and in size, while the installation of a railroad network allowed for the sugar zone’s eastward expansion. An influx of foreign capital financed the industry’s growth, and a monumental escalation in slave imports—560,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century—supplied the labor.³

This restructuring, occasioned by the transition from agricultural production and merchant capitalism to industrial production and finance capitalism, did not limit itself to the arena of political economy but reverberated throughout the entire social order. The established creole elite, whose hegemony was founded on landholding and heredity was now challenged by a foreign bourgeoisie and the financial and industrial forces that it commanded. Smaller animal- and water-powered trapiches failed, unable to compete with the large-scale mechanized ingenios, and as sugar plantations extended to the south and east of Havana, other agricultural sectors, such as livestock and coffee, were driven out. The coerced migration of so many thousands of Africans dramatically reshaped the island’s demographic distribution. Race war seemed inevitable as the latter resisted their oppression. The island’s intelligentsia also found itself on shifting terrain, unbalanced by the processes that accompanied Cuban sugar’s sale in a world market and the wealth and land accretion that came about with the lopsided economic expansion that resulted. Their utopian fantasy of an autonomous nation organized around agricultural alternatives to sugar, or Little Cuba, was blocked by the reality of “the Plantation” as Antonio Benítez Rojo characterizes it: a society shaped by the “sugar-milling machine” and the tyrannical colonialism that it underwrote.⁴

The most noticeable accomplice to Cuba’s economic, political, and social reconfiguration, which a wide spectrum of society experienced as profoundly unsettling, was the merchant. A host of correspondences between the merchant’s curriculum vitae and that of the metaphorical Jew licensed creoles to reject the destabilizing new order by identifying its emblem, the merchant, with Jewishness. But before moving on to study how creoles attempted to mend the tears in the “fabric of Cuban life” by “personifying, capturing, and deflecting” them onto the Judaized merchant, a point made in the Introduction and confirmed in Piron’s L’île de Cuba should be reiterated: actual Jewish nonparticipation in Cuban trade is immaterial to the functioning of anti-Semitic tropes.⁵ The performative utterances of Judaeophobic diatribe, as several scholars have indicated, need not have anything to do with whether or not its target is empirically Jewish.⁶ To be sure, anti-Semitism can exist without Jews, as Bernd Marin has shown in the case of post-Holocaust Austria. Through what Marin labels “cultural sedimentation,” “antisemitic concepts and forms of expression” have become fixed in popular “consciousness” and in “ordinary language.” Therefore, in Marin’s words, “the traditional stereotype of Jews starts independently to symbolize and to become a code for certain social functions, abilities and ways of behaviour connected with them.” Much like postwar Austria, post-expulsion Spain, or present-day Japan, nineteenth-century Cuban articulations of Jew hatred were cases of “antisemitism without Jews” and “antisemitism without antisemites.”⁷ Perhaps it is the other way around, as both Marin and Bauman have suggested—that it is precisely the communities devoid of empirical Jews that find anti-Semitic discourse especially adaptable to their own circumstances, for they lack the experiential reference against which the accuracy of stereotypes might be judged.⁸ In any case, as notions of the despised merchant corresponded with long-held patterns of imagined Jewishness, and on account of the urgency with which creoles sought to protect the Cuban self and society from the disturbances generated by the colony’s transition to industrial capitalism and its engagement with the world economy, a tropology of Jewishness became both convenient and strategically useful.

LET US NOW TURN TO A PAIR of examples of the merchant’s Judaization in nineteenth-century Cuban written culture. This will help frame a broader discussion of the transfigurations that so drastically altered social relations and that, connectedly, saw Cubans project their concerns and desires onto the notional Jew as they toiled to shore up society’s crumbling boundaries.⁹ Antonio Bachiller y Morales (1812–1889), one of the most important intellectuals and reformers of the Cuban nineteenth century, underscores the merchant’s malignancy by making him into a Jew in his undated, unpublished play La venta de un ingenio (The sale of a sugar mill). A few poorly preserved pages located at the National Library José Martí in Havana are all that remain of the drama, in which a widow faces the dilemma of what to do with her sugar mill after her husband’s death. Reminiscent of the peninsular dramatist Manuel Bretón de los Herreros’s play Marcela, o ¿a cuál de los tres? (Marcela, or which of the three?; 1831), three men, representing prudence, naïveté, and greed, offer Doña Francisca their advice on the matter. In the opening scene, Don Judas (signifying greed, naturally) offers to buy the mill, which he plans to then sell at a profit. Don Judas relates to Doña Francisca that in a woman’s hands the mill will be ruined, while in his it will ruin his financial rivals. Doña Francisca questions these motives; Don Judas parodies her concerns by replying with his own rhetorical questions:

Francisca: And your conscience?

Judas: And my necessity?

Francisca: And your religion?

Judas: And my belly?

Francisca: And the tribunals?

Judas: Ha . . . Ha . . . Ha . . . And the privilege of the law of the Indies?¹⁰

Here, Bachiller aligns the merchant’s desire to usurp creole property with Jewishness. In addition to Don Judas’s name, the merchant is Judaized by Doña Francisca’s interrogation of his religion, and these two markers work together to clue the audience that her reference to “the tribunals” (“los tribunales”) may be read as shorthand for the Tribunal of Commerce but also, and more significantly, for the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The last line above portrays Don Judas mocking the privilegio de ingenios (privilege of sugar mills), the often-circumvented law stipulating that sugar mills were exempt from seizure for debt. The foreign financier’s extralegal confiscation of property for which the atrophied creole gentry had defaulted on debt, explored in detail below, was a decisive element of nineteenth-century Cuban anti-Semitism’s “multiplier condition,” David Theo Goldberg’s designation for the sum of the “exacerbation effects and characterization influences by historicized identity discourses on the precise natures and characters of particular racisms.”¹¹

The practice of tarnishing the merchant and all that he came to stand for with overtones of Jewishness as perpetrated in La venta de un ingenio was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Cuba.¹² Another instructive iteration of the trope is found in the book-length collection of costumbrista sketches Los cubanos pintados por sí mismos (Cubans as drawn by themselves; 1852). In “El maestro de escuela” (The school teacher), José Agustín Millán presents a ne’er-do-well teacher examining his pupils, one of whom is the son of a merchant:

Mr. Balandran . . . stand. . . . (to the audience) This is the son of the merchant Don Judas Tadeo, a man of conscience . . . like all merchants. (Aloud) Let’s see, Mr. Balandran. . . . If you found yourself, for example, in the countryside, hunting, and you were to see, sitting on the branches of a mamoncillo tree thirty jews and . . . firing your shotgun, you manage to kill twenty, how many would be left?¹³

Millán plays on the double entendre of the term judío at once meaning a type of bird common to Cuba (an anti-Jewish reference in itself, named for its long beak) as well as the merchant, who, like Bachiller, he names Don Judas. By virtue of their racialization as Jews, the thirty merchants of “El maestro de escuela” are excluded from the “universe of obligation determining reciprocity and inclusion in the community,” which then permits for Millán’s depiction of their homicidal removal from the body politic.¹⁴ Once again we find an author giving voice to the “spite and disdain” with which creoles regarded the merchants, as reported by Manuel Moreno Fraginals, by drawing on the ample cultural repository of notional Jewishness.¹⁵

It was in the aftermath of the sugar revolution that creoles refashioned traditional representations of Jewishness in texts such as La venta de un ingenio, “El maestro de escuela,” and so many others. Although a privileged handful enjoyed what Moreno has colorfully designated “the first dance of the millions,” the dance floor was riddled with cracks that widened with the plantation monoculture’s asymmetric expansion.¹⁶ One prominent structural fissure that was exacerbated with the economic transition was Cuba’s lack of a financing infrastructure until after midcentury. This source of instability co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Notional Jew: Judaizing the Merchant
• 2. Racial Prescriptions and Inscriptions in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841)
• 3. Racial Alchemy and Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s La cuarterona (1867)
• 4. The Jewish Escape Hatch from Cuba Impossible: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index