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“Barbados or Canada?” Race, Immigration, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-3-415

1527-1900

Aviva Chomsky,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

The most optimistic Cuban commentators today can be heard arguing that the economic crisis on the island in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union has brought with it Cuba’s first chance to be truly independent. The island passed from being a literal colony of Spain to being what Cuban scholars refer to as a “neocolony” of the United States in 1898, and then to a state of economic and political dependence (albeit of a different nature) on the USSR after 1959. In each of these periods ideologies of national independence provoked strong resonances among the population. But the nature of this nation and the meanings of independence have been subject to repeated contestation.Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Cuba on 22 January 1998 with a speech denouncing Spanish colonialism, and linking Spain’s extermination of Cuba’s indigenous population, its enslavement of Africans, and its atrocities during the War for Independence (1895–98) with the Nazi holocaust, the Roman persecution of Christians, and the current U.S. embargo of Cuba. He drew a parallel between Cuba’s position in the world today as victim of the U.S. embargo and the situation of the indigenous, enslaved Africans, Cuban patriots, holocaust victims, and Christians. What it means to be Cuban, he suggested, is to be a victim of, and to resist, oppression by foreigners. Although he alluded to ethnic, cultural, ideological, and biological mixing as also inherent to Cuba’s character, this was subordinated to a political and ideological characterization of Cuban identity:In the course of centuries, over a million Africans ruthlessly uprooted from their distant lands took the place of the enslaved natives already exterminated. They made a remarkable contribution to the ethnic composition and the origins of our country’s present population, where the cultures, the beliefs and the blood of all participants in the dramatic history have been mixed…Today, Holy Father, genocide is attempted again when by hunger, illness and total economic suffocation some try to subdue this people that refuses to accept the dictates and the rule of the mightiest economic, political and military power in history; much more powerful than the old Rome that for centuries had the beasts devour those who refused to abdicate their faith. Like those Christians horribly slandered to justify the crime, we who are as slandered as they were, we choose a thousand times death rather than abdicate our convictions. The revolution, like the church, also has many martyrs.1The difference between the way the colonial period, slavery, and the indigenous population are conceptualized and used in nationalist ideologies in Cuba and in the United States is quite striking. Patriotic speeches in the United States rarely refer to European atrocities, and if British crimes (or more likely, in U.S. discourse, misdemeanors) are mentioned, they are crimes against white colonists (for example, taxation without representation). Slavery and extermination (or subjugation) of the indigenous are topics usually avoided altogether by nationalist ideologues; if they are mentioned at all, it is in the context of whether “we” need to apologize for them—the national “we” being identified with the perpetrators, not the victims, of these crimes (or misdemeanors).2 In Cuba, however, the post-independence period is today seen as continuing, rather than transforming, Cuba’s subordinate political and economic status, and the internal social and racial inequalities that were a product of colonial status.This paper looks at two interrelated themes. The first is race and sovereignty: how is a racial understanding of what it means to be Cuban related to conceptions of Cuba’s ability to be a sovereign nation? The second is past and present: how have Cuban commentators understood Cuba’s history in different historical contexts? Which moments in Cuba’s past, which historical subjects, and what kinds of interpretations have been privileged, and why?Today it is almost a truism that Cuban nationalism has historically been based on an anti-racist ideology, and harked back to the words of José Martí, that “to be Cuban is more than being black, more than being white.”3 Nationalist ideologies have associated political independence with Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freeing his slaves, and with black leaders like Antonio Maceo. Legends of Cuba’s patron saint, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, emphasize how she appeared before three Cubans, a white, a black, and an Indian. If colonial rule was responsible for slavery and racial exploitation, national independence was associated just as clearly with the transcending of the racial divide: abolition of slavery would turn slaves into citizens. There would be no more black and white, no more exploiter and exploited.4Several studies have explored the ways in which Cubans’ denial of racial identity—that is, the insistence that national Cuban identity superseded any racial differences—has been used to suffocate black attempts to formulate and struggle for goals of racial equality.5 Nationalist ideologies have simultaneously celebrated black resistance to oppression and demanded black subservience in the interests of national unity. Cuba’s centuries-long dependence has contributed to this emphasis on national unity and the need to transcend particularistic differences; when foreign threats to national sovereignty have loomed, claims that group identities are divisive and that patriotism demanded national unity have had greater resonance.Beliefs about the racial nature of the Cuban “nation” responded in part to international intellectual currents: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many Latin American nationalists embraced so-called “scientific” racism and urged European immigration and racial whitening as building blocks to national dignity and independence. After the Mexican Revolution, cultural nationalism and a celebration of mestizaje as the essence of Latin American national identities came to the fore. The growth of U.S. influence in Latin America and the receding perceived threat of Spain affected this transition, as did a growing recognition that integration in the world economy through foreign investment in export-led growth was not resolving problems of poverty and dependence. An interpretation of the present that saw foreign domination as still a problem in Latin America contributed to an identification with the “races” that had been the primary victims of Spanish colonialism, even among those whose ancestors might have been among the colonizers, not the colonized.In Cuba a continent-wide growth of U.S. influence was magnified by the country’s protectorate status and the concentration in U.S. hands of the island’s major agricultural export, sugar. Cuba’s population was primarily of African and Spanish origin, and following 1898 the island experienced another large immigration from Spain, as well as a smaller but significant immigration from the West Indies. If in the colonial period it was the Spanish-dominated sugar industry that encouraged the widespread importation of African slave labor, in the neocolonial period it was the newly mechanized, U.S.-dominated sugar industry that fostered a new influx of black immigrant workers. U.S. domination had cultural effects on understandings of race, not simply by spreading racism, as some have argued. People from across the color spectrum in Cuba debated the issue of race and the nature of “Cubanness” in the context of a large, ongoing immigration, and of social and economic changes brought about by U.S. investments. At the same time, they debated Cuban history and Cuba’s future: was Cuba “Barbados”—a black, impoverished colony, or “Canada” —a white, prosperous independent nation?6 The social construction of race was intimately tied to questions of sovereignty and economic development, but what these connections meant was hotly contested and shifted dramatically over time.Independence-era ideologies held that sovereignty depended upon blacks and whites fighting together, and that slavery, racial injustice, and racial divisions were imposed by Spanish colonialism. In the first decade after independence, white commentators buried this belief and argued that only white immigration could create a Cuba strong enough to be truly sovereign; the Partido Independiente de Color (hereafter PIC), which sought equality for blacks, was banned as divisive and finally crushed. After the 1912 massacre black Cubans reiterated their claims for equal rights and citizenship based on their patriotism and independence-era ideologies. In response, white intellectuals shifted the terms of blanqueamiento: they argued that Cuban blacks were not only assimilable, but in fact not really black and that the growing Haitian immigration threatened Cuban sovereignty by introducing inassimilable blacks into the Cuban polity. Cuban blacks’ appeals for racial justice were either ignored, or attributed to “contamination” by Haitian immigrants. Black Cubans responded by resurrecting the contribution of the struggle for racial justice to the struggle for independence, and arguing that black racial consciousness was the guarantor of, rather than a threat to, Cuban sovereignty.Yet a historical analysis that made Afro-Cuban resistance the basis for their citizenship had complicated resonances in the early twentieth century, when nationalists and intellectuals came to see Cuban control of their nation being challenged by an apparent recreation of the past, as U.S. companies created a new “slave traffic” by importing black non-citizen workers from the West Indies to harvest the sugar crop. In spite of, or perhaps because of, their insistence that nationality came before color, white Cuban nationalists made it quite clear that West Indian immigrants were a threat to the Cuban nation, while Spanish immigrants were not. Some of their arguments were simply racist, but they also argued that the West Indians were undesirable because they were imported by foreign companies, and their presence facilitated foreign profits from Cuban resources. But both blacks and whites were aware that this argument threatened the historical interpretation of Cuba’s racial identity, and the insistence that African slaves could become citizens through the dismantling of the oppressive colonial system.After the crash in sugar prices in 1921, the terms shifted again: white intellectuals recast the United States as the new colonial oppressor, and opposed Haitian immigration on the grounds that it recreated the colonial foreign-dominated sugar/latifundia/slavery (that is, imported black labor) complex. Sovereignty must be based upon citizenship and smallholding. Racial equality received new validation with Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation (in 1940), but even he emphasized the “foreignness” of slaves and the “nativeness” of white smallholders. Fidel Castro, in 1998, identified the national “we” explicitly with the victims of slavery, in positing a Cuba historically the victim of foreign aggression, while still emphasizing national unity and racial mixing as intrinsic to Cubanness. This paper examines the development of different interpretations of Cuba’s history of slavery, colonial status, and the struggle for independence, and how these have been used as justifications for interpretations of the present and of what it meant to be Cuban.Throughout Latin America, scholars have noted that ideologies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento have been key elements of the development of nationalist ideologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Latin American intellectuals adapted European “scientific” racism to their own racially mixed countries by arguing that the naturally stronger “white” genes would ultimately prevail, so that mestizaje and blanqueamiento would become synonymous. Thus they could celebrate, without apparent contradiction, both their countries’ mestizo origins and the eventual disappearance of the “black” and “Indian” races. As Peter Wade argues for Colombia, “the glorification of the mestizo draws its meaning and force from the history of mestizaje and the emergence of a large set of mixed people in the country…. On the other hand, blanqueamiento, by envisaging a future in which blackness and Indianness are not only absorbed but also erased from the national panorama, giving rise to a whitened mestizo nation, smuggles in discrimination and turns the vision into an impossible utopia.”7 Efforts to promote white European immigration were an integral part of this project of blanqueamiento in many Latin American countries.In Cuba black immigration, past and present, comprised a key arena in which Cubans wrestled with the place of blacks in Cuban society.8 U.S. sugar companies expanded their control over Cuba’s sugar industry immediately following nominal independence (under U.S. occupation).9 They took over land in the lightly-populated Oriente province and established new sugar mills, and soon turned to Jamaica and Haiti to import seasonal workers for the sugar harvest. Initially U.S. occupation authorities prohibited the immigration of “undesirables” (that is, blacks).10 In fact, in the early republican years Spanish immigration was encouraged and 128,000 Spaniards immigrated to Cuba (70,000 of them permanently) between 1902 and 1907.11 However, the struggle between racist and economic interest was resolved in favor of economic interest: West Indians became less “undesirable” when U.S. companies needed them for cheap labor.12 According to Louis A. Pérez Jr., “liberal immigration policies and unlimited access to contract labor from Haiti and Jamaica long had been central elements of North American efforts to depress wages and discourage unionization.”13 Thus some Cuban nationalists saw encouragement of migrant labor as an integral part of U.S. attempts to control Cuba.14Attitudes and policies towards black immigration in Cuba can illuminate the development of the different ideological conceptions of nationhood and who was included and excluded in these conceptions, and why. The continuing national dialogue about migrant workers in Cuba was an implicit dialogue about Afro-Cubans and their place in the national polity as well. Attacks on West Indian migrants were implicit attacks on Afro-Cubans and on Afro-Cuban culture, thus they were attempts to prove or urge Afro-Cuban assimilation and rejection of class and racial identities. Euro-Cubans appealed to upwardly mobile Afro-Cubans to join them in these attacks, which flourished especially when class, race, and ideological fissures threatened Cuba’s imagined national community. Scapegoating of immigrants in times of national crisis in Cuba was a way of displacing critiques of power-holders, both native and foreign, onto the most powerless. Yet it played another important role in the development of Cuban national identity myths, that of defining a Cuban conception of race and its relation to national identity, a relationship that was understood through interpretations of Cuba’s history. If Afro-Cubans identified themselves as black, rather than simply as “Cuban,” it was but a short step to their challenging racial inequalities in Cuba, and rupturing the fragile national consensus. Elites almost hysterically attacked West Indian migrants in their attempt to discourage the threat of Afro-Cuban racial consciousness.Even before large-scale migrations began, the issue was framed by Fernando Ortiz, one of Cuba’s foremost twentieth-century intellectuals and commentators on questions of race and national identity.15 Throughout his career, attitudes towards immigrants shaped and colored his conceptions of Cuban history and identity, and also towards Cuba’s international status.Although Ortiz is best known as a founder of Afro-Cubanism, the nationalist ideology of the 1920s that saw national identity as residing in Cuba’s African heritage,16 I focus here on his 1906 essay, “La inmigración desde el punto de vista criminológico,” which leaves little room for ambiguity about at least his early position on race: his argument mirrors the conceptualization of mestizaje and blanqueamiento analyzed by Wade.17 1906 was also the year of the second U.S. occupation of Cuba, following the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1902. Ortiz’s article was published in May; a new immigration law further promoting white immigration was passed in July18, the liberal revolt began in August, and U.S. troops landed shortly afterwards—thus Ortiz’s defense of Cuban nationality was written in the context of Cuban attempts to define and preserve national identity and sovereignty in exactly the terms he described.Cuba’s national future, Ortiz argued, rested primarily on the issue of immigration, and “race is perhaps the most fundamental aspect that should be considered in the immigrant.”19 Since the “black race” had proved itself in Cuba to be “more delinquent than the white situated in the identical social position,” black immigration should be avoided at all cost. “White immigration is what we should favor,” because it would “inject in the blood of our people the red blood cells which tropical anemia robs from us, and sow among us the seeds of energy, of progress, of life … which today seem to be the patrimony of colder climates.”20 Here we clearly see blanqueamiento and mestizaje working together, as white immigrants will not merely add their presence by crossing the border into the nation, but also “inject” blood and “sow” seeds among the existing population.Ortiz implicitly attributed Cuba’s international subordination (in the wake of the U.S. occupation of 1898–1902 and the Platt Amendment, which clearly compromised Cuba’s sovereignty) to its racial composition; thus white immigration would help Cuba to take its rightful place among nations. “Populated with good and progressive people our beloved fatherland will be able to present itself in the international arena with the beauty of our women and with the virility of the noble sons of this eastern region of Cuba [where the wars of independence began], who among us have always been the first to see the dawn of a new day and the sun of liberty.”21 Thus independence and liberty were closely associated with racial whitening through immigration (and mestizaje) which would put Cuba on a more equal footing with the United States, rather than with a critique of imperialism and racism.22 Although Ortiz radicalized over time in his views towards U.S. economic domination of Cuba— and, not coincidentally, in his views on the meaning of “Cubanness” and the place of blacks and Blackness in the Cuban nation—his early formulations on blacks and in particular on black immigrants set the basis for a continuing theme in Euro-Cuban national identity myths, even as Ortiz himself became a founder of Afro-Cubanism and a foremost critic of racism and of U.S. imperialism.Afro-Cuban racial and national thought took different directions. In the immediate aftermath of independence, Afro- and Euro-Cubans made clear their very different interpretations of Martí’s anti-racism and association of Cuban nationalism with an end to racial discrimination. Euro-Cuban elites consolidated their hold on political and economic power, using the language of equality to cover the continuity of inequality. Education and property qualifications for jobs and public office limited opportunities for Afro-Cubans, while Euro-Cuban and Afro-Cuban elites condemned any attempt at race-based organizing as a threat to national unity, especially after the second U.S. occupation began in 1906.23As Alejandro de la Fuente shows, the existence of universal male suffrage meant that formal politics was a particularly compelling arena for socially marginalized peoples in Cuba—many of whom were Afro-Cuban. Established political parties courted Afro-Cuban voters in ways that explicitly engaged race: by promoting Afro-Cuban candidates, and by trying to outdo each other in their professed commitment to racial equality, including accusing each other of racism. (They also appealed to the disproportionately poor Afro-Cuban electorate on a class basis through populist rhetoric and patronage.) Universal suffrage, along with de facto social and political exclusion, also set the stage for the first explicitly black political party in Cuba.24The Partido Independiente de Color, founded in 1908 (and recognized by U.S. occupation authorities) based its program on a combination of class and race issues, and clearly called upon the language of emancipation and Cuban independence to promote its program. “We continue to love and adore the goddess of slavery with the tunic of the Republic” explained the party’s founder, Evaristo Estenoz, associating racism with colonialism and insisting on the association of independence with racial equality. “No people has achieved freedom by kneeling before those who enslave them … faith … kills initiative, and all men who have maintained faith in others, as those of the race of color have in Cuba, have lived like a giant flock of sheep and have perished in slavery, because all slaves are capable of conquest and if we are sometimes unjustly accused of being ungovernable, we should at least be unconquerable for passive servitude.”25Estenoz was not attempting to challenge U.S. domination or influence with this statement. Rather, like Ortiz, he was grappling with the nature of the independent Cuban nation. But while Ortiz saw national dignity and progress as residing in whitening, Estenoz asserted that the Republic must be based on the ability of marginalized peoples to claim their rights and freedom.To combat racial inequality, the Party proposed increasing compulsory free education, creating free higher education, trial by jury, abolition of the death penalty, social legislation like the eight-hour day, and land reform: all class rather than explicitly race issues, reflecting the low class position of the majority of Afro-Cubans, and the party’s understanding of the links between race and class hierarchies.26 Aline Helg notes that on only one issue did the PIC stand alone among political parties: that of immigration. The Party’s newspaper criticized state-sponsored European immigration as an attempt to “whiten the horizons [and] to destroy” the Afro-Cubans27—thus it directly challenged elite formulations on race and nationality. However, at the same time that the Party called for free immigration of all races, it qualified this by excluding “those [immigrants] who would be inadmissible because of their considerable lack of education.”28 In the context of elite attacks on blacks— both immigrant and native—for their low educational levels, and of the PIC’s logical response that increasing access to education could resolve this problem, the Party’s inclusion of an education requirement for immigrants shows a certain correspondence with elite views about the nation. Furthermore, the PIC adhered to a demand for the nationalization of work, which became part of later anti-West Indian immigrant campaigns.29 In 1908, however, West Indian immigration was still small, and this plea for nationalization of work responded to the very real threat that white Spanish immigrants posed to Afro-Cubans in the labor market.30 Thus in certain respects the PIC adhered to Martí’s adage that being Cuban came before being black, mulatto or white: blacks sought their rights as Cubans rather than as blacks; immigrants, as foreigners, were not seen as potential allies in the struggle for racial justice.The PIC dissociated itself from certain aspects of cultural blackness insofar as it associated Afro-Cuban culture with slavery, and sharply criticized African religion, dance, and medicine. At the same time, the party “denounced the hunt of brujos launched by the white press as a subtle attempt to portray blacks as uncivilized and unfit for enfranchisement.”31 At the other end of the spectrum of black political thought were Cuba’s only senator of color, the mulatto Morúa Delgado, who authored the 1910 law banning political parties based on race, and Juan Gualberto Gómez, who also opposed the PIC. Thus the PIC represented a sort of middle sector of the Afro-Cuban population in terms of both class and assimilation to or acceptance of elite Euro-Cuban norms, between the lower classes who maintained a more distinctively Afro-Cuban culture and the more assimilationist black middle classes.32 Despite the party’s position essentially within the mainstream in terms of its struggle for inclusion, rather than revolution, Cuba’s whites saw the party as a threat to both their dominance and to the nation as they conceived it.In 1912 the party was crushed by armed attack and thousands of Afro-Cubans massacred, including the party leadership.33 The relationship between the defense of sovereignty and the need for repression of racial organizing crystallized when the U.S. threatened intervention: “patriotism” became a defense of the need for a virulent repression. On 25 May the United States “as a precautionary measure”—and under intense pressure from U.S. sugar investors—prepared its forces to intervene in the conflict. “In case your government cannot, or does not, protect the lives and property of American citizens, my government, following its usual conduct in such cases, will land troops to lend the necessary protection” U.S. Minister Beaupré informed the Cuban government. Cuban President José Miguel Gómez defended his government’s ability to respond violently to events: “Such a serious resolution alarms and injures the feelings of a people [ pueblo] who jealously love their independence … it places Cuba in a position of humiliating inferiority by ignoring its national rights…. Cuba has carried out such extraordinary activity in mobilization and operations that in only four days it has gathered over 3,000 regular forces and sent them from the west to the east by land and by sea, and it has in this short time cleaned the whole Island, except for a small part of the east, of armed parties.”34The issue of “patriotism” also arose with respect to West Indian migrants, who were numerous in Oriente even before the contract system began in the aftermath of the rebellion—and also the political importance lent to migrants’ roles.35 As workers on the plantations under attack, some sought protection from plantation authorities, while others escaped and joined the rebels.36 The British consul noted: “It is rumoured that lots of Haytians and Jamaicans are in the movement but I have tried to investigate the matter with influential Jamaicans here in Cuba and they all say that it is true about the Haytians but completely false about the Jamaicans.”37 In one case, at least, Haitian migrants linked race and class identities and articulated their reasons for joining the rebellion as black workers explicitly in these terms: they had been “very badly treated as blacks” by a plantation administrator who was “very despotic with all of the people of color.”38Two different conceptualizations of the relationship between color, race, and nation operated in the minds of Cuban whites. For some, color was the transcendent issue: all blacks were equally dangerous. At the San Antonio mill near Guantánamo, Rural Guards stopped two unarmed Haitians and, according to an eyewitness, “when asked to identify themselves they answered ‘Haitians’—then the Guards said ‘black Haitians or black Cubans, it’s all the same’ (negros haitianos o negros cubanos, es lo mismo)” and shot both of them, killing one and seriously wounding the other.39For many Cubans, however, 1912 presented an opportunity to emphasize the role of nationality and ideology in determining what was thought of as race. Blacks insisted upon their loyalty to the nation, and whites argued that this loyalty separated those blacks who deserved respect and inclusion from those who must be crushed. The juez municipal (municipal judge) of Caibarién posted flyers announcing that “the men of color who live in this district (término) are only Cubans (no son más que cubanos), who have condemned the current state of things and who must remain always faithful on the side of the government (y que se han de mantener siempre fieles al lado del gobierno).40 This stance allowed white Cubans to both acknowledge the legitimacy of black citizenship, and at the same time demand black subservience. The idea that Haitian immigrants must have played a decisive role in the 1912 uprising was the final link in this train of thought. If Cuban blacks were—at least potentially—citizens, non-Cuban blacks epitomized all that was threatening about blackness.Regardless of the actual numbers of Haitians (or Jamaicans) joining the rebellion, the association that elites made between West Indian migrants and Afro-Cubans—and the threat that both posed to the social order—was clear in government and press reactions. When the rebellion began, the government immediately ordered that no West Indians be allowed to land in Oriente. Two ships, one from Haiti and one from Jamaica, were turned away from the port of Santiago at the end of May, and their passengers repatriated to their islands of origin.41 The system of contracting West Indian labor, implemented only months after the rebellion and massacre, may have responded to the conjunction of a diminished work force and the growing labor needs of the sugar industry, but it may also have been an attempt to bring migration, and migrants, under more effective employer and state control.42For some self-proclaimed patriotic white Cubans, José Miguel Gómez’s decision to authorize the first shipment of contract laborers into Cuba during the first harvest season after the massacre (in January 1913) was a dire threat to the Cuban nation. Carlos de Velasco, in an early issue of Cuba Contemporánea,