Cuba's Racial Crucible

The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750–2000

Karen Y. Morrison

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780253016546
• eBook ISBN: 9780253016607
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

This prize-winning study examines the historical interplay of racial identity, nationality, and family formation in Cuba from the 18th century to today.

Since the 19th century, there have been two opposing perspectives on Cuban racial identity: one that frames Cubans as white, and one that sees them as racially mixed based on acceptance of African descent. For the past two centuries, these competing views of have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented decisions about choosing partners and family formation.

Cuba's Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the role race has played in reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of "race," "nation," and "family," in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison also analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent.

Winner, NECLAS Marissa Navarro Best Book Prize

1

Ascendant Capitalism and White
Intellectual Re-Assessments of Afro-
Cuban Social Value to 1820

HIMNO DEL DESTERRADO	THE EXILE’S HYMN
José María Heredia (1825)
¡Dulce Cuba!, en su seno se miran	Sweet Cuba! We see at your breast
en el grado más alto y profundo,	the most exalted and profound
las bellezas del físico mundo,	delights of the natural world
los horrores del mundo moral.	and the greatest moral horrors.
Te hizo el cielo la flor de la tierra;	The Heavens graced you as the earth’s flower;
mas, tu fuerza y destinos ignoras,	but you remain ignorant of your destiny and power,
y de España en el déspota adoras	And in Spain, with its despotism, you adore
al demonio sangriento del mal.	evil’s bloody terror.
¿Ya qué importa que al cielo te tienda	Does it still matter if the Heavens bless
De verdura perenne vestida,	you with a perennially verdant dress
Y la frente de palmas ceñida	and adorn you with luscious palms
Á los besos ofrezcas del mar,	like kisses that you blow to the tide,
Si el clamor del tirano insolente,	if the clamor of insolent tyranny,
Del esclavo el gemir lastimoso,	the slave’s lamentful cries, and
Y el crugir del azote horroroso	the slashes of the angry whip
Se hoye sólo en tus campos sonar? . . .	are the only sounds heard in your countryside? . . .
¿A la sangre teméis . . . ? En las lides	So you fear patriotic blood . . . ? In the battle,
Vale más derramarla á raudales,	it is better to shed it by torrential floods,
Que arrastrarla en sus torpes canales	than to let it waste slowly from the veins,
Entre vicios, angustias y horror.	in sin, agony, and pain.
¿Qué tenéis? Ni aun sepulcro seguro	Cuban—you do not even have
En el suelo infelice cubano.	a safe grave on your own repressed terrain.
¿Nuestra sangre no sirve al tirano	Doesn’t our blood only serve to fertilize
Para abono del suelo español?	Spain’s tyrannical domain?

INTRODUCTION

In “Himno del desterrado,” the early Cuban nationalist poet José María Heredia imagines a new and distinctive Cuban blood, one born with “insolent tyranny” in relation to imperial Spain.¹ He deploys imagery common in Western modernity, using blood as a metaphor for a united, nationalist past and for a similarly cohesive future. But his indignation at the “slave’s lamentful cries” under the “slashes of the angry whip” expresses an ambiguity with respect to the inclusion of African heritage in a unified Cuba. Were African-descended people to be only slaves for Cuba’s economic development or were they to be freed to act as compatriots in creating the nation? Such considerations were part of the many conflicts apparent in Cuba from the middle of the eighteenth century to which Heredia was giving voice. Capitalism, liberalism, monarchy, and slavery vied with each other to shape the colony’s future. By the middle of the eighteenth century Cuban capitalists were gaining ground in what had been a long-standing struggle against more seigniorial forces and the absolutist tendencies of the Spanish state. These conflicts continued until the 1810s, by which time Cuba’s leading merchants and export agriculturalists had won significant concessions from a metropolitan government much weakened by Napoleonic military intervention. But this politically ascendant group then had to face Spain’s new liberal nationalist politics that sought to constrain autonomist possibilities for the remaining Caribbean colonies after the mass defection of continental Latin American territories. In the evolution of these processes, Cubans of different ideological stripes were positioned against an evolving Spanish monarchy that remained very consistent in its primary goals of self-preservation and the lucrative management of its empire.

“It is of little importance to the state that the inhabitants of Cuba be white or black; it only matters that they work greatly and are loyal.”² This statement by one of Cuba’s earliest historians, Nicolás Joseph Ribera (1724–1775), is an important, but often unacknowledged, assessment of the role of race in Cuba’s early colonial history. It confers upon Spanish monarchs a utilitarian approach to the social differences marked by race and suggests a de-emphasis on slavery, and perhaps even capitalism, in favor of a larger set of imperial objectives. An implication of this assessment is that modern versions of anti-black racism do not equate to earlier forms. While the Roman legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem, where a child’s initial servile status equaled that of the mother, was the pre-eminent determinant of social identity throughout slaveholding regions in the Americas, in Spanish territories it was also qualified by other considerations.³ Prior to the 1810s, Spanish colonial visions of blackness could acknowledge social worth beyond economic or labor value. One’s political loyalty often took priority over racial identity as a strong remnant of a feudal perspective on the management of empire that by the early nineteenth century had still not been erased by capitalism’s emphasis on profit and its economic reading of social relations. But this outlook was not immutable. In a continually contested ideological terrain, capitalist priorities would gain the upper hand, but never fully silence pre-existing alternatives. The interpretations of racialized reproduction presented in this chapter take a long-run view of these ideological struggles, following them over the course of the eighteenth century, up to the 1820 criminalization of Cuba’s slave trade. This chapter outlines the institutional framework of state, church, and military practices in which Cuba’s free and enslaved African-descended people moved and created social identities for themselves and their families.

When Philippe de Bourbon assumed the Spanish monarchy in 1700 as Philip V his objectives were not unlike those of the Hapsburg kings who preceded him. Their most pressing aims had been to maintain unquestioned dynastic control over government, ensure the empire’s profitability, and prevent the encroachment of rival European nations on existing Spanish territory. It was within this context that the new policies that historians have designated the “Bourbon reforms” began during Philip V’s reign and were developed further by subsequent Bourbon monarchs, enduring until the crisis of Spanish imperial governance occasioned by Napoleon’s 1808 imprisonment of Ferdinand VII. Especially during the reign of the second Bourbon king, Charles III, and in the wake of the 1762 British occupation of Havana, these reforms not only impacted the economics and politics of the empire; they also stimulated important, if unintended, social outcomes specific to Cuba. In Cuba, these reforms, their reception, and their contestation reshaped the social reproduction of race at the local level. All aspects of Bourbon colonial governance, from the control of religious orders to the reconfiguration of economic relations, transformed the constitutive elements of race, and especially of blackness. Caught between ascendant colonial capitalism and other imperial concerns, such as the economic and social upheaval occasioned by the Haitian Revolution, the varying white notions of the racialized reproduction surrounding Cuba’s African-descended people reflected these ideological and material struggles. And the race-making practices generated in the process became fundamental to the emergence of Cuban national identity. These Bourbon policies culminated in 1817, when shortly before conceding to British pressure and criminalizing the slave trade, Spain’s newly restored absolutist government issued a royal order concerning the need to whiten the island’s population and to shift away from imported African labor.⁴ With this, the tacit, existential and racist threats that Cuba’s mulattoes and blacks had previously faced became codified as imperial policy.

While recent scholarly literature has challenged previous beliefs in the Bourbon reforms’ internal coherence and the novelty of their final objectives, these reforms were created within an era defined by two new and related major forces: the solidification of a capitalist political economy and the insertion of Enlightenment philosophies into Spanish imperial statecraft. As notions of meritocracy gained currency in the bureaucratic administration of empire, at the grander social level patriarchal hierarchy and seigniorial order remained important operating frameworks. The Spanish Crown continued to attend to all its vassal subjects by grouping them into recognizable corporate units, despite the fact that fluid colonial social realities (especially of origin, class, and race) complicated these categories.⁵ Cuban-born whites were imagined as distinct from their peninsular cousins; wealth increasingly challenged noble birth as a determinant of elite status; and the variety of colors and castes found within colonial Cuba often defied neat classification. Nonetheless, the Crown’s corporatist approach largely distinguished five major social units within Cuba: Catholic clerics; secular economic leaders and titled nobility; white commoners; African-descended free people; and enslaved people. Bourbon policies intended to manage one of these groups often generated unexpected outcomes for the others. We will see below that the reforms that had the most profound effect on the meaning of race on the island were those that limited the scope of Catholic institutions, reorganized the military, restricted the open selection of marriage partners, promoted agricultural exports, and directly addressed living conditions for enslaved people.

EARLY AFRO-CUBAN CATHOLICISM

Bourbon reconsideration of religious authority impacted the long-standing Catholic acculturation processes that had been essential to building even the limited degree of social respectability that African-descended individuals could achieve in the early colonial period. Since the fifteenth century, Spanish monarchs had repeatedly stressed the need to indoctrinate African ethnics as good Catholics.⁶ This policy rested on an assumption equating Catholicism with loyalty to Spain, in contrast to the dangers posed by Jewish and Islamic “infidels.” With the rise of Protestantism, this distinction was extended to a lesser degree to nationals of other European nations. A combination of religious and imperial goals was at play when Africans and their children (both free and enslaved) were baptized and confirmed as co-religious Catholics alongside Hispanic whites. These groups often worshiped in the same parishes and integrated lay religious brotherhoods, although social inequality and segregation persisted.⁷ In many cases, black intimate unions were blessed by Catholic marriage, and their offspring given the social honor of legitimacy. These practices stand in well-noted comparison to the religious exclusion of enslaved people commonly experienced in English-speaking regions of the Americas. A generation of U.S. historians used this contrast to compare the oppressive intensity of slave systems and to describe national generalizations in racial meaning.⁸ While these debates have ebbed, I suggest that temporal shifts in these two distinct issues require deeper examination. The views on race and slavery of the Spanish government, Church, and people did not remain stagnant over the nearly 400 years of colonial rule in Cuba.

The existing Cuban historiography on the depth of Afro-Cuban Catholicism during the colonial period divides almost neatly along political and institutional lines. State-sponsored Cuban historians writing since the 1959 revolution tend to discount early Catholic socialization among Afro-Cubans. Writers in this vein instead emphasize the close social and economic association between Cuba’s elite and Catholic clerics, which occurred especially in the nineteenth century. Such scholars suggest that these groups prioritized white creole education over missionary activity among African ethnics and their Cuban-born descendants.⁹ By contrast, Catholic authors such as Monsignor Ramón Suárez Polcari describe a more inclusive, though still racially discriminatory, early colonial Church that at the diocesan level even ordained black and mulatto priests, despite some white resistance. Polcari documents a 1685 complaint by the island’s lieutenant governor to the Spanish Crown about “the number of priests who were the sons and grandsons of mulattoes and even worse, the case of one Juan del Rosario, the son of an African slave woman. He is not only a mulatto, but [his] color is so dark as to cause irreverence.”¹⁰

Similarly, the inter-racial educational institutions managed by local religious orders offered a limited degree of mobility to young men of color. Surviving records offer the example of pardo carpenter and militia battalion commander Antonio Flores educating his son Joseph Ignacio at Havana’s Jesuit school during the 1750s. In the 1760s, another pardo, Miguel Aviles, trained in medicine under the Catholic clerics of San Juan de Dios Hospital.¹¹ In using such records to distinguish eighteenth-century experiences of black social mobility associated with the Church from the more pronounced discrimination that emerged later, Polcari acknowledges, but does not explain, an increased racial boundary against the admission of Afro-Cuban men to the priesthood and other learned careers that developed in the nineteenth century. This increased institutional discrimination paralleled other social transformations of racial meaning brought about by the rise of Cuban capitalism. We will return to this point later in the chapter.

Distinctions existed between colonial Cuba’s two types of Catholic lay brotherhoods (cofrádias and cabildos de nación). Unlike cofrádias, with their devotional focus on particular Catholic saints, Afro-Cuban cabildos de nación were often organized by the approximate regional origins or linguistic commonalities of African ethnics. Cabildos of this type were reported in Cuba as early as 1535 for Santiago and 1568 for Havana.¹² The ostensive public aim of many of these brotherhoods was to promote Catholic education and socialization. Both the Spanish state and Cuba’s Catholic authorities supported this mission. For example, in 1755 the bishop of Cuba, Pedro Agustín Morel de Santa Cruz, wrote to the Spanish monarch Charles III, celebrating the successful spiritual work that had been done within Havana’s twenty-one African-descended cabildos. The bishop also claimed hopefully that such religious indoctrination would lessen the “auspicious disorder” that originated in these groups.¹³

The bishop was right to have such concerns. Black cabildos were one of the important sites for the New World reproduction and reformation of African ethnic identity. For all their outward Catholicism, specific African ethnic cosmologies remained unifying points among members. They restructured as best they could particular African ethnic forms of authority, relying frequently on the personages of cabildo “kings” and “queens” to do so. They were disconnected from their original biological lineages, but rebuilt and modified the spiritual lineages that were central to African forms of self-identification.¹⁴ As this current study will discuss in later chapters, these spiritual lineages would subsequently combine with social perceptions of biological kinship to influence Cuban racial meaning. A basic understanding of the social importance of African spiritual lineages begins with an awareness of how many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Crucible of Race: Historicizing the Sexual Economy of Cuban Social Identities
• 1 Ascendant Capitalism and White Intellectual Re-Assessments of Afro-Cuban Social Value to 1820
• 2 Slavery and Afro-Cuban Family Formation during Cuba’s Economic Awakening, 1763–1820
• 3 The Illegal Slave Trade and the Cuban Sexual Economy of Race, 1820–1867
• 4 Nineteenth-Century Racial Myths and the Familial Corruption of Cuban Whiteness
• 5 Afro-Cuban Family Emancipation, 1868–1886
• 6 “Regenerating” the Afro-Cuban Family, 1886–1940
• 7 Mestizaje Literary Visions and Afro-Cuban Genealogical Memory, 1920–1958
• Epilogue: Revolutionary Social Morality and the Multi-Racial National Family, 1959–2000
• Notes
• References
• Index