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“En Plena Libertad y Democracia”: Negros Brujos and the Social Question, 1904-1919

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-3-549

1527-1900

Alejandra Bronfman,

Race, History, and American Society

On 14 November 1904, El Mundo, Havana’s conservative newspaper, reported the “mysterious disappearance of Zoila,” a four-year-old white girl, from her home in El Gabriel, a small town outside of Havana.1 Over the course of a year, the newspaper would devote a great deal of attention to the story. Eduardo Varela Zequiera, the story’s reporter who would eventually build a career based on his reporting on issues of race, publicly surmised, along with his reporting of the facts, that the child had been a victim of brujería. At the same time, El Gabriel’s increasingly alarmed and vocal residents demonstrated before the courthouse and police station, demanding thorough searches of every household in the vicinity until the brujos were found and detained. Suspicion settled on Pablo and Juana Tabares, a black couple living together, and on Domingo Boucourt, a former slave known in the area for his African-derived healing and religious practices. They were detained briefly, but released after questioning for lack of evidence. The same month a parallel case involving the death of Celia, another little girl, and the arrest of a black man named Tin-Tan also occupied the front pages of the newspapers. About two weeks after Zoila’s disappearance, the police found a body. A gruesome description of its condition communicated, in all its details, the allegedly barbaric nature of the crime. A large portion of the torso and extremities were missing skin and flesh. Yet the feet were intact, including shoes and socks that were still on the body. The heart had been extracted, according to forensic doctors, with a sharp instrument. After a lengthy investigation in which the number of accused grew to a dozen, the following story began to emerge. Boucourt was said to be the leader of a group of brujos who gathered regularly to enact rituals and healings. Juana Tabares, whose children suffered from ill health, had sought Boucourt’s help, and since his remedy required the blood of a white child, he was said to have demanded that someone in the group kill one and bring him the corpse. The investigation had failed to pin down the actual murderer, although suspicion rested on Victor Molina and another man of African descent. But it had confirmed (or so it claimed) the instigating role of brujería.By January 1905, Boucourt and Victor Molina had received the death penalty for murder. They were executed amidst a great deal of attention from the press in 1906. After the execution, the brains of Molina and Boucourt were sent to Luis Montané, professor of anthropology at the University of Havana, to be put on display at the Museo Antropológico Montané on campus. There, they took their places alongside ñáñigo suits, ritual objects and archaeological findings, adding to the collection of “criminal brains” examined by students of anthropology for morphological evidence of violent tendencies.Zoila was the first of a series of public, sensational brujería scares that shook early Republican Cuba. As this brief example suggests, the unfolding of events reverberated, beyond the families and towns most immediately affected, into courts of law and elite intellectual spheres. In the courts, both prosecutors and defendants exploited the contradictions arising from a changing legal system. Long investigations and trials tested the elusive boundaries among brujería, ñañiguismo, asociación ilícita, and delinquency against changing notions of legal responsibility and new codifications of rights to freedom of religion and association. For intellectuals monitoring Cuba’s imbibement of modernity, evidence of practices deemed primitive threatened the achievements of political autonomy and universal manhood suffrage and aspirations to social order.In the earliest moment of the republic the contours of criminality and citizenship had been subject to contention. A hybrid and evolving legal system both codified and added ambiguities to the definitions of brujería, ñañiguismo, and asociación ilícita. Although authorities often conflated them as part of an array of practices related to African-derived religions, brujería and ñañiguismo were not comparable legal categories. Ñañiguismo, understood as a network of secret, often feuding and violent societies, fell under the rubric of asociación ilícita under the penal code adopted in 1879. Brujería, a term that subsumed, as it has in other historical contexts, practices ranging from casting spells, to healing, to engaging in spiritual leadership of a community, had escaped codification during the Spanish regime. In the early years of the republic, however, authorities had begun to persecute brujería under the rubrics of both asociación ilícita and public health, which had been granted high priority in the years of the U.S. occupation. The 1901 Cuban Constitution included provisions for freedom of religion and association as part of a Bill of Rights modelled after the U.S. Constitution’s. In other words, those accused of brujería and ñañiguismo enjoyed new protections if they invoked freedom of religion in their defense. Changing conditions threw the meanings, both legal and cultural, of African-derived religious practices into a state of flux.2Social scientists entered this complex nomothetic arena and, drawing from anthropology, criminology and sociology (disciplines also characterized by elusive boundaries at the time), took it upon themselves to understand and explain the presence of what they perceived as aberrant practices amongst Cubans mostly of African descent. The Zoila case, with its unprecedented accusations of murder and cannibalism, added new urgency to the tasks of surveillance and confinement and drew new participants into the debate. Racial discourses in the first two decades of the Cuban Republic formed in this repercussive milieu in which sensationalized events, contention over legal definitions, and seductive social scientific theory impinged on one another.The time and place in which the scares occurred cast a sense of bewilderment upon observers. Brujería and its codified counterpart ñañiguismo emerged as inherent but inexplicable features of a recently inaugurated democratizing republic:Mingling irony with incredulity, the journalist who wrote these sentences pointed to the accusations against Cubans of color as curious manifestations of Cuba’s experience of modernity and formal political democratization. The coexistence of a vibrant religious and social life of former slaves and their descendants along with an expanding political base created a context different from any in Europe or the Americas. At stake was proving to the rest of the world (and themselves) Cuban capacity for self-understanding and self-rule. Would the nascent republic survive independence from Spain and black political participation with the U.S. looking over its shoulder, ready to invoke the Platt Amendment at the first sign of “instability”? Cuban uncertainties about new political contours may have intensified the search for explanations of the disturbing occurrences.During the first two decades of the republic, Cubans of color claimed their places, not without conflict, as citizens. As Alejandro de la Fuente has shown, established political parties competed for the black vote in both local and national elections. Blacks themselves were elected as representatives for both Liberal and Conservative parties, and although skeptics expressed doubts about the extent to which they represented “genuine black interests,” their inclusion in public life marked a significant moment. In addition to formal political participation, blacks benefited from educational campaigns and voiced their views in a number of arenas, including the proliferating press, both in the mainstream and exclusively black newspapers. Neither contemporaries nor historians argue that blacks achieved complete inclusion and equality, but an egalitarian nationalist ideology gave them a powerful tool with which to fight ongoing battles about desegregating public spaces and increased access to civil service positions. By 1919 the presence of black intellectuals in the press and in civic associations, if limited, carried significant moral authority.4In light of these changes the presence of brujería and ñañiguismo seemed particularly vexing, especially since brujería had never before been associated with murder and cannibalism.5 Cast as a manifestation of the “problem of race,” many Cubans perceived these practices as obstacles to the implementation of the kind of republic they envisioned. As such, they inspired intense scrutiny and accompanying meditations on causes and remedies of the perceived civilizational malaise. A growing literature on race and politics in Republican Cuba has offerred important insights with regard to the uses of race in electoral politics, labor, and education, focussing on the uses and misuses of the “myth of racial equality.” This essay contributes to that discussion with an examination of the making of the “myths of racial difference” understood as a contested process arising out of the conjunction of state formation in Cuba, a growing transatlantic hegemony of scientific discourses, decolonization and neocolonialism. It seeks to elucidate the ways in which both democratizing tendencies and growing anxieties about black criminality inflected understandings of race, and how those understandings circulated between different spheres. Analyses of racial discourses in the press, social sciences, and in the courts call into question characterizations of the republic as either wholly “inclusive” or “exclusive” with regards to race. In fact, they illustrate that egalitarian, primitivist, and criminalizing racial theories and practices not only coexisted but were also intimately related to one another.6 Increasing legal and political inclusion of blacks set the stage for racialized constructions of criminality. However, blacks seized the opportunities afforded by this growing inclusion to challenge those constructions.The discussions that formed around the problem of black criminality slid easily into ongoing debates about Cuba’s viability as a democracy, often expressed in racialized terms. Politicians and intellectuals on different sides of ideological divides frequently conceived of problems and solutions with reference to the hereditary characteristics of the nation’s inhabitants. Both Francisco Figueras, a politician whose writings, according to Aline Helg, “made a deep impression on Creole intellectuals and literate audiences and became a reference for other writers”7 and Francisco Carrera y Justiz, whose course on “gobierno municipal” became one of the most enduring at the University of Havana, published and disseminated essays using race as the primary interpretive tool to diagnose the “social problem.” Figueras’s two most influential essays, Cuba y su evolución colonial (1907) and La intervención y su política (1906) argued for the racial incapacity of all Cubans to form an independent republic. From Spaniards they had inherited a propensity for “education based on feelings” and an attachment to slavery. Africans had contributed lasciviousness and lack of foresight to the national character. In La intervención y su política, Figueras argued that this backward and corrupt context had fostered the 1906 rebellion, as much a racial revolt as a political one. The subsequent necessity for a U.S. occupation to establish peace and stability proved that Cubans were not ready for self-rule, that universal suffrage had been a mistake, that racial and cultural heterogeneity was a drawback, and that the solution was “pacific penetration” by American culture.8The notion of race as the source of social ills shaped the ideas of an observer whose analysis diverged sharply from that of Figueras. For black commentator Emilio Céspedes Casado, addressing Havana’s Booker T. Washington Society in 1906, Cuba’s social problem derived from what he called “unhealthy fomentation” between the races. But the solution was education and social sanitation. Relying on the increasingly persuasive alignment of race and civilization and simultaneously inverting diagnoses that sought a North American cure, he blamed the U.S. intervention for Cuba’s degenerating condition: “The odious Intervention introduced, along with its ‘civilization,’ its barbarism and its narcissism.”9 However divergent, these visions of Cuba’s future shared an assumption that racial vitality provided the key to the preservation of autonomy and self-government.The intense journalistic attention to a series of violent crimes poured amorphous concerns about race, defined as Latin, African or Anglo-Saxon, pure or mixed, degenerating or regenerating, into the figure of the black criminal. Reinaldo Román’s research on this subject has uncovered well over three-dozen cases reported in the press between 1904 and 1943. If Céspedes tried to convince his listeners that barbarism had been imported from the United States, the press campaigns that brought brujería and ñañiguismo to a larger reading public construed them as a national problem.As the first, Zoila set the tone for many that followed. The reporting was endlessly thorough, detailed, and repetitive. Long daily articles, always on the front-page of the newspapers summarized facts and speculations previously recounted and included new evidence regardless of its relevance. Interviews with the family and acquaintances of the little girl filled space when new information was not available. The stories also included pictures of the family, of the discovered shoes, of the accused and their companions. When the trial began, its proceedings were diligently reported. By the time of the execution, readers were thoroughly, if not overly, familiar with each stage of the case. As Román has argued, out of the interactions between journalistic and popular discourses about witchcraft emerged a genre of brujería stories and a typical brujo. Regardless of the variations, the stories usually involved one or more black men, often associated with African-derived religious cults, attacking and/or murdering white children in order to use their blood for ritual purposes. The accused brujo, depicted in stock fashion as a remorseless murderer driven by savage instincts, was proof of Varela Zequeira’s observation that “amidst full liberty and democracy, these barbaric citizens are initiating cannibalistic practices.”10 It was in these accounts, and particularly in the words of the persistent and vituperative Varela Zequeira, that the figure of the black brujo was crafted most unequivocally as a barbaric savage, a trope that social scientists would capture, explain, qualify and prescribe against. Yet even as he demonized brujos, Varela Zequiera characterized them as citizens. If for his purposes that was even greater cause for repressive action, it was nonetheless an incontrovertible fact of the republic.It may be possible to estimate the distribution (always a thorny issue in examinations of print culture) of these journalistic narratives by looking at the role of literacy and printed materials in Cuban life. Some evidence gestures towards an attentive readership, a growing literacy rate, and an increasing volume of newsprint produced in the early years of the republic. Newspapers had been part of public life since the early eighteenth century, with the first printing press established in 1720. In the nineteenth century, newspapers had proliferated despite (or perhaps because of) ongoing battles with Spanish censors. Many sectors came to publish their own newspapers and periodicals, including workers, black associations, and mutal aid societies. During the wars of independence, newspapers had proved a crucial way for exiles and supporters of independence to communicate with one another.In the early republic, the availability and appeal of newspapers grew as a result of changing material conditions. A tariff agreement resulted in increased importation of paper for periodicals. Developments in technology meant that it was easier to print photographs, perhaps rendering newspapers more attractive to readers. Between 1899 and 1907 literacy rates increased by 13.4 percent.11 In addition, since relatively few books were published at the same time, choices of reading material were limited.12 At least two major Havana newspapers, El Mundo and Diario de la Marina, reported the scares.Varela Zequeira must have assumed that he had captured a readership hungry for analysis as well as lurid detail. He published, along with his diligent reporting of the facts, his explanation of the source of the problem.13 The murder was not an isolated instance of racial antagonism, but rather a symptom of a deeply rooted historical and sociological malady, deriving from slavery, the original sin tainting Cuba’s colonial past. Though he vacillated on his assessment of brujos’ authenticity as religious leaders, claiming at times that they were nothing more than perverse and manipulative con-men, he believed that the presence of an ignorant multitude willing to believe in and practice brujería was real and at the heart of the problem. He wrote, “Slavery was a great sin. It left us our ignorant, nearly savage masses. The murder of Zoila was not meant as a punishment for whites, but it is one of the fruits borne by the tree so fatally sown by our predecesors. I refuse to see, nor do I want anyone to see, in the assasination of Zoila a proof of racial hatreds.”14Although Cuba had managed to eradicate many signs of its slaveholding, colonial past, he argued, this vestige lingered and was growing more threatening by the fact of its continuation in the modern present and its dissemination to masses recently included as citizens: “Brujería, with its sinister practices has unsettled the entire republic, and what was perceived before as a ridiculous or absurd religion is now perceived as a terrible threat against our peace of mind. Brujería has reached alarming proportions. The rites and practices of brujos signal, at the very least, a threat to hygiene and a threat to morality.”15 More than a singular event, Zoila signified corruption and pointed to the fragility of the republic.The day of Boucourt’s and Molina’s executions, Fernando Ortiz, a young man who would soon rise in intellectual circles, published his response to Varela Zequeira’s interpretation. Against the journalist’s rather predictable historical explanation, Ortiz introduced the competing authority of ethnography, moral relativism, and positivist methodology. Cubans looking for a clear condemnation of Boucourt and a commendation of the way the Cuban justice system handled the crime would be disappointed. Ortiz situated himself above politics, with science, in search of scientific truth rather than of moral judgement. It was a shame, he argued, that the brujo was going to be executed, because he would have been a valuable scientific specimen. Not only had he committed one of the most ferocious crimes known to Cubans, his African origins and his prominent role as a priest in the “barbaric cult, with a well-defined theology and an extensive, indisputable, if not fully solidified organizational structure” were significant characteristics that would have yielded much by way of empirical evidence for the understudied phenomenon of brujería.Nonetheless Ortiz offered a few criminological insights: first of all, since Boucourt (also referred to as Bocú) was a fervent believer of his religion, his had been a crime motivated by altruism and good will. “When he convinced the others to assasinate Zoila,” he wrote, “he did so believing that his act although recognized as a crime was perfectly moral and even altruistic, according to the ethical criteria he had brought from Africa and had clung to, due to an arrested moral development, something which is quite common amongst the inferior levels of our society.”16 In marked contrast to Varela Zequiera’s imputation of inexplicable savagery, Ortiz claimed to uncover the logic and ethics of Boucourt’s actions. If he had ordered the murder, knowing that he risked punishment by the authorities, he had done so because the intensity of his belief left him no choice. “If Bocú insisted on the necessity of the white child’s blood, it was because his primitive sorcery and the tradition of his ancestors dictated it, and due to his own conviction in his beliefs and a sense of honor, he couldn’t escape the primitive and antisocial aspects of his fanaticism.”17Religious relativism informed Ortiz’s account of the events: it was a matter of understanding a different but potentially valid set of religious beliefs. He outlined briefly the mythological and theological bases for beliefs that had required, in the end, the shedding of a white child’s blood. But his relativism did not extend to entire civilizations. It was precisely the possibility of civilizational evolution that was the source of the problem. Cuba was more advanced civilizationally than Africa, and so African religions were untenable in a Cuban context. A brujo was simply out of place: “A respected person in Africa, who perhaps led his tribe according to the moral criteria compatible with their level of civilization, and a delinquent in Cuba for his inability to submit to the ethical norms that this society has established under the influence of its own social and ethnic components over the course of time.”18 It was, ultimately, a problem of translation: “It would be more appropriate to say that in the course of being taken from Africa to Cuba, it was society itself which jumped forward, leaving him and his compatriots in the deepest savagery, in the first stages of psychic evolution … they are savages brought to a civilized country.”19Ortiz backed his theory of the altruistic brujo with references to European and Latin American anthropologists and criminologists including Armand Corre, Nina Rodrigues, Girard de Rialle, and Edward Burnet (E.B.) Tylor, relying on established writers to validate his expositions. The ideas of Italian criminologist Césare Lombroso, with whom Ortiz had studied during his stay in Italy, figured prominently in the Cuban’s evaluation of the kind of crime disturbing the new republic. Of several of Lombroso’s explanations of crime and criminal typologies, Ortiz invoked two and translated them, rendering them applicable to Cuban problems. Lombroso held, on one hand, that criminals were atavistic throwbacks to a primitive state, and as such they had underdeveloped moral sentiments. On the other hand, he held that entire races, as less evolved, could be prone to crime and delinquency. Ortiz drew from both claims and combined the theory of atavism with the notion of delinquent races, arguing that blacks, as a race with African origins, lived with less evolved moral sentiments than European whites. It was not that these individuals had been thrust backwards by an accident of birth, rather that they had been transferred as a group to an environment pushed forward by the accident of progress.20Ortiz’s view was premised on a more optimistic view than Varela Zequiera’s of the state of Cuban civilization. Although brujería still posed a very real threat, he argued, it had only become a problem because of its dissonance with Cuba’s generally advanced state of civilization. The emphasis, for Ortiz, was on the disorientation of criminals rather than on the fragility of the republic. His rendition of the problem erased the contradiction between claims about Cuba’s modernity and the presence of brujos as manifestations of backwardness. They were presented not as opposing forces, but rather as proofs of one another’s existence. It is only because Cuba had made so much progress that brujería seemed so out of place. And it was only with the tools of modern science that one could see the problem clearly.Yet the fact of their presence required investigation and self-scrutiny: Why did these savages still exist in such a civilized society? What would it take to ensure that this kind of parasitism would not continue to reproduce itself? First, they needed to study the problem objectively and scientifically, and then respond, following the recommendations of Enrico Ferri, another Italian criminologist, not with repressive measures but with preventive measures:The press, having constructed the notion of the demonic brujo, provided the space in which Ortiz would reinterpret the problem. He had transformed the worrisome proliferation of ritual murder and cannibalism into evidence of Cuban progress. And as he was quick to point out, his work contributed to European science, which had long theorized about its domestic witches but lacked studies of the transplanted African version. At the end of his article, Ortiz announced that Boucourt was such an ideal specimen of what his mentor called a criminal nato or born criminal, that the Italian criminologist had requested a photograph for his renowned Archivio di Psichiatria published in Torino. In a neatly self-promoting move, Ortiz had created a long-lasting mandate for himself and anyone who cared to join him in the pursuit of “objetiva observación,” as well as a market for his soon to be published study of what he called “criminal ethnology.”Fernando Ortiz was in 1906 a relatively unknown lawyer. He had studied at the University of Havana between 1896 and 1898, and travelled to Spain in 1898, returning to Cuba in 1902. In 1903 a thesis entitled “On the Reorganization of the Police as a Necessary to the Administration of Criminal Justice” earned him a degree in civil law.22 By 1904 he was in Genoa, serving as Cuban consul. He had published a few brief articles introducing the field of criminology to Cuban readers in Azul y Rojo, a journal directed by the well-known intellectual Raimundo Cabrera, who was later to become his father-in-law.23Although Ortiz was out of the country when the Zoila case obsessed the press and public, he seems to have paid attention from afar. Not long after the story appeared in the newspapers he had apparently begun the research on which he would base La Hampa afrocubana: Los negros brujos (apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal), the book that became the canonical disquisition on the problem of the Cuban “Hampa.”24The book’s argument was an expanded and elaborated version of the article Ortiz published on the day of Boucourt’s execution, formulating as its principal task the scientific study of the causes and manifestations of the Cuban nexus between race, religion, and crime. Yet the book’s significance, beyond the argument, lies in its novelty of form and genre. In between Europe and Cuba, criminology and ethnology, textual and empirical bases for knowledge, Los negros brujos was a new kind of book for Cuban readers, turning a sensational series of events into the raw materials of a learned, original and (in the author’s eyes) redemptive social analysis that placed Cuba on the map of modern nations plagued by similar ills. At the same time it launched Ortiz’s significant career as a translator of people, practices, ideas, and texts.In a text with footnotes crammed with European intellectual heavyweights including E. B. Tylor, A. B. Ellis, James Frazer, John Lubbock, Emile Durkheim and the recently published Marcel Mauss on magic, as well as references to the Spanish criminologist Rafael Salillas on la mala vida in Madrid and Napoli, Ortiz marshalled evidence both to draw parallels to the European phenomenon of brujería and to make a case for Cuban exceptionalism. As social scientists were beginning to discover, the mala vida was a phenomenon that disrupted many European capitals. Because of the country’s ethnic makeup, however, Cuba’s mala vida was unique. Europeans didn’t need to account for the effects of importing African slaves into the mix.Even while the book was based on the effect of race on criminality and delinquency it rested on several different and potentially contradictory notions of race. Lombroso was the proclaimed godfather of the book. Yet Los negros brujos dwells at greater length on descriptions of brujos’ belief system, on accounts of their rituals, clothing and objects and on the words, incantations, names and nicknames specific to their jargon than on physiognomic sleuthing or criminological casuistry. His first chapter, which examines the emergence of Cuba’s hampa, concludes with a fluid conception of race and its effect on cultural change: “Ethnicity is the fundamental factor,” he theorized, “and it not only produced delinquent milieus particular to each race, in addition, by contributing their specific vices to “low life” in general, a common criminal milieu was created out of the fusion of diverse psychologies, a layer which constituted and constitutes the nucleus of our delinquent strata … due to the mutual influence each race exercised upon the other, the black race acquired an impulse toward progress, which continues to develop … and the white race has Africanized its criminal class.”25 It is clear that taking cultural factors into account did not detract from the racialist assumptions of his claims. Race and culture were for him, as for many anthropologists at that time, not distinct but rather mutually reinforcing terms. The mapping of race and culture onto criminality was not an argument derived from neat deductions but rather from overdetermined contiguity.26As soon as he introduced proliferating definitions, Ortiz altered his voice from synthesizer of ethnological and sociological material to reporter of contemporary, local phenomena. An entire chapter lists excerpts from newspaper clippings that report incidents of brujería between the years 1902 and 1906. Given the overwhelmingly monotonous dominance the story of child murders would take on after 1906, the wide range of practices and