State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic ed. by Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sánchez Cobos (review)

Abstract

Steven Palmer, Jose Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sanchez Cobos, eds. State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 376 pp.Cuba's first republic has been largely understudied, typically understood in relation to the revolutions that preceded and followed it as the betrayal of the promise of the independence struggle or a period of laying the groundwork to the true revolution of 1959. With essays diverse topics from the social life of the USS Maine to provincial Rotary clubs, this edited volume makes significant strides toward redressing the weaknesses of the historiography. The contributions are united in their commitment to taking the early republican era seriously, as a significant and authentic period in Cuban history. In this vein, the authors seek to revisit the republican era on its own (19), without the distorting lenses of failure or teleology that have so often been applied to the period. In the introduction, the editors make a strong case that Cuban exceptionalism has prevented scholars from noting the similarities between the Cuban Republic and the institutions and processes at work in other Latin American nations during the Liberal era (1870-1930), many of which were less and representative than the Cuban system, despite its shortcomings. From this vantage point, the contributors approach the era as a period of continuity in terms of liberal state- and nation-building processes, with an eye toward the participation of Cubans at all levels in defining emerging notions of democratic (7).This volume offers an impressively broad look at republican Cuba, with chapters that extend beyond Havana and cover a wide variety of topics. A number of themes run throughout, with labor history and the history of science particularly well represented. Defying a simplistic chronology, several chapters point to links between the colonial and republican eras, as a result of economic continuities, the influx of Spanish immigration, and the goals of modernity and order pursued by the creole elite. Jose Antonio Piqueras's study of Havana's architecture reveals modernity to be the elusive aim of construction and urban design from 1835, with aesthetic forms often associated with the U.S. occupation actually rooted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the island's elites increasingly looked toward the United States as a model of progress and modernity. Steven Palmer reveals the central role of science at the heart of creole politics in both the colonial and republican eras, as well as the continuities in Cuban scientific leadership, which remained largely unchanged from the 1870s through the 1920s. …