The aftermath of repression: Race and nation in Cuba after 1912

Abstract

In 1912, only fourteen years after Cubans fought for independence from Spain under the banner of José Marti's ringing statements about a Cuba ‘with all, and for the good of all’ and that ‘to be Cuban is more than being black, more than being white, more than being mulatto’, a predominantly white Cuban government presided over the slaughter of some four to seven thousand blacks, ostensibly in retaliation for a much smaller number attempting to defend the right of an explicitly black political party—the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC)—to participate in elections. These events contributed to a fundamental restructuring of the ways that Cubans spoke publicly about race. The stirring egalitarian rhetoric of the independence era was silenced, and the small political space in which black Cubans had tried to take advantage of this rhetoric and seek their rights in racial terms was closed. Race became a forbidden topic: for blacks, raising the issue of race meant risking being attacked as a 'racist'; for whites, it meant acknowledging inequalities, an acknowledgement that seemed to threaten both their own (generally privileged) social position, the ability of their 'nation' to withstand foreign domination through unity, and the very myths upon which their nationalism was based.1