Our Rightful Share

The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912

Aline Helg

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807844946, 9780807821848
• eBook ISBN: 9781469615868
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In Our Rightful Share, Aline Helg examines the issue of race in Cuban society, politics, and ideology during the island's transition from a Spanish colony to an independent state. She challenges Cuba's well-established myth of racial equality and shows that racism is deeply rooted in Cuban creole society. Helg argues that despite Cuba's abolition of slavery in 1886 and its winning of independence in 1902, Afro-Cubans remained marginalized in all aspects of society. After the wars for independence, in which they fought en masse, Afro-Cubans demanded change politically by forming the first national black party in the Western Hemisphere. This challenge met with strong opposition from the white Cuban elite, culminating in the massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans in 1912. The event effectively ended Afro-Cubans' political organization along racial lines, and Helg stresses that although some cultural elements of African origin were integrated into official Cuban culture, true racial equality has remained elusive.

Chapter 1

After Slavery, 1886–1895

Above all I believe that without freedom and without equality fraternity cannot exist. The slave never loved the tyrant, and those who felt scorned because they were regarded as inferior could never be fond of the haughty ones who despised and humiliated them.

— Juan Gualberto Gómez, Por Cuba libre

The official abolition of slavery decreed on 7 October 1886 by the Spanish Cortes (Parliament) did not represent the watershed that many in the Spanish and white Creole elite of Cuba had feared. Blacks did not rise up in arms to make another Haiti of the island. Freed people of color did not turn idle or criminal, nor did they take revenge against their former masters. Rampant banditry was not widespread among Afro-Cubans. Cuban separatists did not renew the military struggle against Spain until 1895. Spanish voluntary immigration, stimulated by free passage to Cuba, continued. Following the severe crisis of the early 1880s, sugar production increased instead of declining. The year 1886 was indeed relatively peaceful, a year in which Cuban Autonomists, now with the support of a Liberal government in Spain, seemed about to achieve their dream of an autonomous Cuba in the bosom of the metropolis.¹

Yet despite this apparent normality, contradictions were becoming more pronounced. Slavery was abolished, but Cuban society continued to be deeply divided along racial lines. Although separated from each other by cultural, class, sexual, and regional differences, the population of color began to challenge the social order. Some organized to demand equal rights and attempted to formulate a counterideology to white supremacy. By doing so, they unmasked the opposition to racial equality that prevailed among many in the Spanish and white creole elite. Even among the separatists promoting independence, many displayed racist ideas and used the fear of Cuba’s becoming another Haiti to justify their control over blacks.

As Rebecca Scott has demonstrated, slave emancipation was in fact a gradual and complex process of economic, social, and legal change that had begun with the launching of the Ten Years’ War against Spain in 1868. Whereas in 1877 some 200,000 men, women, and children of African descent were still slaves, at the time of the 1886 royal decree of emancipation their number had fallen to 25,381 out of a total population of color of 528,798 (32 percent of Cuba’s population).² Through a variety of strategies, slaves had accelerated the process of emancipation. Moreover, by becoming the agents of their own freedom, many had gained self-esteem and had built high expectations for their future. A newspaper distributed during the parade celebrating abolition in Havana on 1 January 1887 read: “Yesterday’s sufferings, the chains that oppressed us are broken. And today their fragments pile up to inflame the torch that will illuminate the statue of Liberty that made of America the altar of its choice.”³ Not only were Afro-Cubans hopeful; many also wanted their rightful share in society. As a sociedad de color newspaper of Sagua la Grande (Santa Clara) expressed in 1886: “Certainly, we are tired of being tied up to the unworthy stake of servility by contempt, vituperation, and persecution. We want to get out of this revolting state of dishonor and also have a share in the most worthy pedestal occupied by honorable people. And let us be clear, we only demand what we deserve. . . . We are included in the constitution and therefore we are also citizens of the Nation.”⁴

The end of slavery, however, did not bring equality to Afro-Cubans. Spanish social essayists continued to advocate white supremacy. Several post-1886 studies identified Afro-Cubans as the principal cause of Cuba’s problems. They viewed slavery as a curse, not because it meant the deportation and maltreatment of Africans but because it allowed “the barbarian and savage descendants of the race of Cham” to contaminate Cuba’s whites physically, morally, and culturally. The island’s prostitution, criminality, superstition, and lack of industry allegedly originated in the “lustful mulata,” the black ñáñigo, the “African fetishist,” and the “lazy black.” One author even proposed to solve Cuban problems by returning Afro-Cubans to Africa.⁵

After 1886, Cuban society remained divided along racial lines. According to the former slave Esteban Montejo, when a child was born, the first thing parents had to state at registration was his or her skin color.⁶ Blacks and mulattoes continued to be discriminated against in education. Their access to elementary public schools was still restricted; most secondary institutes were in private hands and did not accept them as students. In 1887, only 11 percent of Afro-Cubans of all ages could read and write, compared with 33 percent of whites.⁷ Prisons and hospitals had one section for whites (including Chinese) and another for blacks and mulattoes.⁸ The criminal code still made racial distinctions and considered membership in the raza de color as an aggravating circumstance.⁹ Spanish officials continued to discriminate against the Cuban population of color by crossing Don and Doña out of their identity cards and official documents, a practice that symbolized the denial of full citizenship to Afro-Cubans despite the fact that they were full taxpayers.¹⁰

Entertainment also remained an area of segregation. Afro-Cubans were excluded from all seats in the main theaters except in the gallery. Such disposition was even applied at a meeting of the Autonomist party in the Albisu Theater of Havana in the early 1890s, during which two Afro-Cuban politicians were banned from the orchestra. Balls and receptions were not interracial. The best hotels in Havana and other towns refused to accommodate blacks and mulattoes. Many cafés, bars, and restaurants either refused to serve Afro-Cubans in the room, overcharged them for service, or asked them to pay for orders in advance. The powerful Spanish mutual aid societies, which provided thousands of members with entertainment, free education, health facilities, and emergency assistance, admitted white Cubans but not Afro-Cubans.¹¹ Cockfights were in fact one of the few areas of entertainment where blacks and whites alike could attend and bet. But, as Esteban Montejo noted, few blacks had much money for gambling.¹²

Employment also discriminated against Afro-Cubans, though no systematic segregation existed. This situation had allowed a small middle class of skilled people of color to subsist since the early nineteenth century, particularly in some unprestigious manual trades or as musicians and artists. However, certain distinguished professions, such as lawyer or medical doctor, counted hardly any Afro-Cuban practitioners.¹³ Positions in commerce were chiefly in the hands of Spaniards. In the many small factories and businesses still organized on a domestic basis, clerks, assistants, salespersons, and operatives who received board and lodging in addition to their salary were generally white. Some skills were protected by apprenticeships that discriminated against youth of African descent, such as printing or the top cigar trades of master cigar worker, sorter, and box decorator. The union of railroad drivers banned Afro-Cubans from the profession altogether. Many job ads in the press specified the race of the candidate. On the opposite side of the spectrum, cane cutting during the zafra (sugar harvest) was still a job employers preferred to entrust to blacks. Among the male workers, the majority of domestic servants, masons, woodworkers, coopers, shoemakers, and tailors were black. Female wage labor was thought to suit Afro-Cuban women better than whites, especially if it involved being out in the street or working in the fields. The trades in which women numbered in the thousands, such as servant, laundress, laborer, and seamstress, were overwhelmingly dominated by Afro-Cubans. Most women selling at the marketplace were of African descent. In fact, only in the more respected jobs of schoolteacher and cigar worker, for which influential recommendations were necessary, did white women largely outnumber black women.¹⁴ In the urban working class, traditional craft mutual aid societies were generally not integrated, although a handful of anarchist labor unions comprised blacks and whites, Cuban-born and Spanish-born alike.¹⁵

In rural areas, postslavery patterns of land tenure showed broad racial inequality. In 1899 (no statistics for earlier years are available), on the whole island, only 14 percent of Afro-Cuban agriculturalists rented or owned land, compared with 22 percent among whites. But there were important regional differences. In Matanzas, where sugar latifundia prevailed, these figures dropped to 2 percent among Afro-Cubans and 14 percent among whites. On the other hand, Oriente, which comprised a large rural free population of color whose constituents owned farms and ranches before 1880, was a region of equity, where approximately 30 percent of Afro-Cuban and white agriculturalists rented or owned land.¹⁶ Similarly, the most lucrative export crops grew in primarily white-controlled areas. Only 4 percent of the land producing sugar and 9 percent of the land producing tobacco was in the hands of black renters and owners. But the areas where agriculturalists cultivated crops for domestic and local consumption, such as coffee, bananas, and yams, were more equitably distributed between blacks and whites.¹⁷ Wages in agricultural labor were higher in the predominantly white regions of tobacco production than in the sugar areas, where most workers were of African descent.¹⁸

Afro-Cubans were more likely to be disfranchised than whites, although suffrage was granted on an economic rather than a racial basis. Since 1878, men who paid an annual property tax of 25 pesos could vote in parliamentary elections, and those paying 5 pesos in municipal and provincial elections. In the early 1890s, the tax requirement for voting in any election in Cuba was reduced to 5 pesos. In relation to class, this limitation discriminated against all lower-strata men and small landowners, but it especially affected Afro-Cubans, who were, for historical reasons, less likely to be property owners than were whites.¹⁹

Marriage was also affected by race. Although the law prohibiting interracial marriage had been abrogated in 1881, the legally sanctioned union between a white and a person of color remained uncommon, particularly between a white woman and a man of African descent. Consensual unions between white men and black or mulatto women were more frequent—a pattern inherited from slavery, when white men largely outnumbered white women, while free women of color were more numerous than free men of color. In addition, as Verena Martinez-Alier shows in her study of marriage in nineteenth-century Cuba, in a highly stratified multiracial society, dominant attitudes regarding women varied according to their race. White women were expected to legally marry within their race and class. Their union to Afro-Cuban men was exceptional and was generally looked down on, even if their male companion was of a higher socioeconomic background. Consensual unions between Afro-Cuban women and white men were tolerated, however, especially if men were of lower economic status than their spouses, because these men improved their economic situation, while Afro-Cuban women and their offspring gained some social advancement through “whitening.”²⁰ Such bending of marriage rules, however, required ideological justification. The stereotypes of the virtuous Cuban white woman versus the lustful mulata and negra, promoted by essays, novels, theater plays, and popular songs, sanctioned white males’ behavior toward white and Afro-Cuban women.²¹

In general, black patterns of sexual union differed from patterns prevailing among whites. In 1899 (previous statistics date back to 1861), Afro-Cuban families were three times less likely to be headed by legally married fathers and mothers than white families. In fact, in strong contrast with whites, more Afro-Cuban couples lived in mutual-consent unions than in legal marriages. Moreover, a majority of adult black men and women were single. As a result, about one-half of Afro-Cuban children were illegitimate, compared with 12 percent of white children. In a society that legally restricted the rights to recognition, inheritance, and protection of illegitimate children, these family patterns further marginalized many Afro-Cubans.²² Nevertheless, the broad sense of kinship that predominated among Afro-Cubans, for whom godparents—who sponsored Christian baptism and initiation into santería—were often as important as parents in protecting and educating children, somehow compensated for these patterns.²³

Obviously, the 500,000 men, women, and children of African descent living in Cuba in the early 1890s were far from a homogeneous group. Although all of them probably shared the experience of some kind of white racism, broad cultural, educational, class, sexual, and regional differences divided them. Generally, those who had been brought over from Africa and the offspring of those Africans distinguished themselves from Afro-Cubans from families of generations of Cuban residence; also, those who had experienced slavery traveled a different path from those who had always been free or those with long-standing free lineage.²⁴ In addition, no common Afro-Cuban culture or subculture united them against the dominant Spanish-Cuban culture. Rather, African and Spanish traditions blended to produce a continuum of subcultures that can only be crudely sketched.²⁵

At one end of the continuum, the African-born (of whom there were approximately 13,000 elderly in 1899²⁶), along with many Afro-Cuban rural workers, were deeply attached to African cultures that older men and women, who often came from Africa and spoke little Spanish, transmitted orally. Predominant among the latter were the Yoruba-speaking peoples of the Bight of Benin, who brought with them what was known in Cuba as the Lucumi tradition, and the Congos of Angola and northern Congo, who brought the Congo tradition.²⁷ Former Lucumí and Congo slaves had a decisive influence on folk medicine, religion, and brujería,²⁸ as well as on oral literature, music, dance, play, and cooking. As Montejo recalled, although the African-born did not know how to read and write, they were the ones who taught him morality and culture. In fact, in some rural Afro-Cuban communities unfrequented by local priests and other disseminators of Catholicism and Spanish culture, the influence of the African-born was little challenged.²⁹

At the other end of the continuum, several Afro-Cubans with longstanding free status and residence, especially in western port cities, were close to the dominant white culture. Some of them came from literate families of artisans and semiprofessionals who, despite strong racial discrimination, had enjoyed relative economic success during the early-nineteenth-century sugar boom. In the heyday of slavery in the 1840s, however, free people of color faced a stronger color barrier, more severe discriminatory laws, and growing suspicion, culminating in the massive repression of La Escalera that decimated them in 1844. By the 1880s this urban sector had partially regained its economic position, and several of its members actively followed the modes of the dominant Spanish culture in literature, journalism, philosophy, music, and religion. Some mulattoes among them also assimilated prevailing racial prejudices and distanced themselves from blacks, former slaves, or Africans.³⁰

In general, Afro-Cubans living in towns followed African traditions to a lesser extent. Some even rejected them altogether. The cabildos de nación, religious and mutual aid societies originally supported by Spain to promote Christianity while maintaining divisions among the population of color, allowed descendants of distinct African ethnic identity to perpetuate part of their cultural heritage. In addition, after 1886 former rural slaves, especially women, moved away from the plantation to villages and cities in search of better opportunities. These migrants brought to their new settings their own African-based traditions. However, the Spanish way of life intertwined with traditions of African origin more fully in the cities than in the countryside. Here Afro-Cubans were subjected to control from Spanish authorities and to the white Cuban elite in more aspects of their lives. Entertainment, a major area in which Afro-Cubans could maintain their own ways in the countryside, was regulated. Cabildos’ activities were restricted to the inside of the society’s building; street celebrations had to take place during Catholic feasts and under ecclesiastical supervision. Nevertheless, although new Spanish legislation in the 1880s further limited the autonomy of cabildos, many managed to continue to serve the religious and social needs of their members under the guise of Catholicism.^3...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dynamics of Ideology and Action
• Chapter 1: After Slavery, 1886–1895
• Chapter 2: The Fight for a Just Cuba, 1895–1898
• Chapter 3: The Making of the New Order, 1899–1906
• Chapter 4: Frustration, 1899–1906
• Chapter 5: Mobilization, 1907–1910
• Chapter 6: Rumors of a Black Conspiracy, 1907–1911
• Chapter 7: The Racist Massacre of 1912
• Conclusion: The Limits of Equality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index