Photographs of Early Twentieth-Century Cuba by Sumner W. Matteson

Abstract

In February 1904, American itinerant photographer Sumner W. Matteson, a native of Decorah, Iowa, visited Cuba for about four months. He travelled extensively throughout the island and took over five hundred photographs. It was the first time Matteson had left the United States and, upon reaching the island, he headed into the countryside and began to photograph a wide range of individuals. Matteson's documentary work represents an image of Cuba that was relatively unknown in the United States at the time. His photographs cut across racial, gender, class, and geographic lines, and portrayed Matteson's subjects with a sense of pride and agency. This paper will argue that Matteson portrayed Cuba and its people with an intimacy unlike that of any photographer before him — this during the founding years of the republic, shortly after a four-year American occupation, and at a time when Cubans were seen as exotic others. The photographs reveal a multi-hued population of blacks, mulattoes, and whites, male and female — subjects rarely portrayed sensitively in photographs of the time. This paper will offer some suggestions as to why this white, Midwestern male photographer did not fall into the potentially exploitative trap of representing the Cuban people in the customary way. Matteson's images provide depictions of the Cuban people that had been previously absent, and offered a face of the rural subaltern consisting of both blacks and whites, working-class Cubans, and even a former Rebel Army leader — all less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886.