A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The history of race in nineteenth-century Cuba unfolded amid a series of dramatic transformations. With the meteoric rise of Cuban slavery, the island became the focus of campaigns to abolish the slave trade, followed by three independence wars merging the imperatives of antislavery and antiracism. As Bonnie A. Lucero's A Cuban City, Segregated demonstrates, this history also took place through incremental change.Rooted in a wealth of archival research, Lucero's study provides an important perspective on colonial Cuba within a historiography dominated by studies of the city of Havana and the slave plantation. Lucero analyzes the “multiple axes of oppression” through which white residents of the city of Cienfuegos endeavored to achieve a modern ideal of “urban order” characterized most prominently by a “white city center” (p. 11). In doing so, Lucero contributes to a growing number of studies reimagining the mutually constituted histories of race and nation through increased attention to family and the rhythms of everyday life.Founded in 1819, the settlement that would come to be known as Cienfuegos was intended to combat the “Africanization” of Cuba by incentivizing white immigration to the island. Dreams of a white settlement never materialized, however, as free people of color already inhabited the region and as white residents brought with them their slaves. Though municipal laws did not explicitly mandate the exclusion of the African-descended, white residents nonetheless contrived ways to limit black property ownership to peripheral areas, resulting in the emergence of what Lucero refers to as “de facto racial segregation” (p. 48).As Cienfuegos grew into a city, the aspirations of the African-descended to acquire property continued to confront the inclinations of local authorities to control that property's development. Even as people of color took advantage of leasing practices to gain access to land, building regulations and tax codes ensured that such access was always precarious. Lucero's research shines as she reveals the ways that shifts in sugar markets abroad and war at home were particularly stressful for people of color, who generally held subordinate positions throughout Cuban society. As they inherited properties from their parents, they were more likely to have to sell these properties owing to burdensome taxes and regulations, thus curtailing the generational accumulation of wealth by Cienfuegos's black community. Nevertheless, pockets of black proprietorship matured into established neighborhoods that became coveted properties of an expanded city center.Black residents also experienced uneven access to public spaces. While a small middle class of color faced frustration as they tried to gain access to places such as schools, cafés, and theaters, local authorities acted on gendered notions of hygiene as they policed predominantly black centers of Cienfuegos's informal economy, such as the red-light district. As Lucero argues, “These mechanisms of control and containment effectively restricted the way black residents of the expanded city center could inhabit the urban space surrounding their properties” (p. 119).With the US occupation of Cuba in 1898, municipal authorities in Cienfuegos reconfigured their efforts to achieve “urban order” to conform with the racial ideologies of the United States. Black veterans of the Liberation Army were thus excluded from various jobs and levels of civic engagement, black labor organizations experienced suppression, and black neighborhoods faced displacement, engendering uncharacteristic levels of urban violence. The city's racial topography, which had historically expressed the logics of control and containment, now began to resemble the type of segregation that had taken root in the United States.The strength of Lucero's study lies in its careful research, even as aspects of her analytic framework feel slightly shopworn. Lucero relies on the concepts of de jure and de facto segregation to argue that racial integration played a less prominent role in Cuban history than the dominant narratives suggest. As legal historians of race have increasingly noted, however, the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is more of a political artifice than a social fact. In the United States, for instance, this distinction developed over time to obscure the pervasiveness of segregation and to frustrate legal arguments equating segregation with racial discrimination. Indeed, Lucero's own use of the terms control and containment resonates far more clearly with the complicated history of exclusion and inclusion in nineteenth-century Cienfuegos than do the terms segregation and integration, with all their attendant twentieth-century meanings. At the center of her study, then, is a sophisticated analysis of the interplay between the development of urban space and racial ideologies that will be of interest to scholars of Cuban and Latin American history as well as urban history more broadly.