Colonial Cuba Research Articles

Irish Immigrants in Colonial Port Cities of Cuba: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos

Abstract The port city of Havana, central to the Spanish colonial fleet system since the late sixteenth century, remained an important nexus for nineteenth-century Atlantic trade networks of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and the slave trade. Positioning Irish immigrants in this global hub allows us to examine their presence in Cuba and their participation in global circuits of commodities, trade, and labor. Drawing on local colonial sources, we evaluate the opportunities and experiences of Irish immigrants as social actors in the multi-ethnic urban spaces of Havana and other strategically located port cities of Santiago and Cienfuegos. The Irish who converged on Cuba rarely came directly from Ireland. Hence, we explore three migration trajectories mediated through the British West Indies, the Spanish metropole, and globally connected cities of North America. The most prominent were high-ranking military men who arrived in Cuba in the eighteenth century through Iberian-Irish connections; a smaller number of propertied Irish who migrated from the West Indies; and lastly, distinct flows of largely anonymous nineteenth-century immigrants who came through emerging Atlantic networks of colonial labour via the United States. This study explores the entangled histories of Irish, African, and European diasporas in the social and political worlds of three Spanish Caribbean port cities. Through an analysis of how Irish immigrants negotiated processes of class, religion, race, and gender in colonial Cuba, we highlight their participation in key economic and social dynamics of white colonization strategies, plantation slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Contesting Indigeneity in Colonial Cuba

Abstract: This article analyzes the differing trajectories of two Indigenous pueblos—Guanabacoa (outside Havana) and Jiguaní (on the outskirts of Bayamo)—to explore the persistence of Native communities in colonial Cuba and various contestations of indigeneity across the longue durée. Though protected Indigenous pueblos were grafted into a larger patchwork of unequal and overlapping republics that formed the building blocks of legal pluralism across the Spanish Americas, they were virtually nonexistent across the Greater Antilles because conquest and colonization had destroyed Native chiefdoms. Consequently, surviving Native communities in the Greater Antilles were suspended between their own claims to Indigenous ancestry and how those with power defined them as an incoherent population. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Spanish officials repeatedly dismissed the authenticity of Native communities on the island, suggesting that they were frauds from the Atlantic world or the vestiges of Indigenous communities that had long ago lost their "Color." Charting these contestations and attending to the formation, composition, and litigiousness of these pueblos demonstrates that indigeneity in Cuba was neither extinguished nor static; it was actively (re)created by a diverse community of indios who used histories rooted in the island's past and legal strategies routed across the Spanish American colonies. This article is accompanied by an appendix on the OI Reader (https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/contesting-indigeneity-in-colonial-cuba/).

Happiness in Havana? Día de Reyes as an Emotional Refuge in Colonial Cuba

ABSTRACT This article draws on William Reddy’s framework of emotional regimes and refuges to assess marginalized emotionality in colonial Cuba and to position Día de Reyes as an important emotional refuge. Día de Reyes, or ‘Day of Kings,’ in colonial Cuba marked not only a holy day on the Catholic sacred calendar, but also a holiday for the island’s Afro-Cuban population. On this day each year, the enslaved were granted their freedom and allowed to celebrate throughout Havana. This article argues that in their observance of Day of Kings, enslaved peoples maintained a sense of identity and agency through embodied emotional performances that inverted public space and social roles. Their sanctioned celebration yielded a collective emotional experience that allowed them to rewrite normative emotion scripts and freely express indignation, happiness, pride, or sadness. The resulting refuge demonstrates the role of emotion in both wielding power and resisting it.

Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

El interés inicial que impulsó a Henry B. Lovejoy a viajar a Cuba –aprender a tocar los tambores– se convirtió en una investigación acerca de la historia de la religión y la cultura lucumí. Una investigación muy interesante, añadiría, que gira en torno a la figura y actividades, reales o imaginadas, de Juan Nepomuceno Prieto, y que ha sido publicada por la Editorial de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte. Se trata de una historia que a tramos funciona como la narración en una película, por el ritmo y por la forma en la que mezcla datos históricos recabados acuciosamente con otros que pudieron serlo, pero de los que no hay una evidencia documental referida al personaje central, sino la combinación de opciones posibles. El uso de este recurso, en mi opinión, es un gran atractivo, al mismo tiempo que constituye la debilidad más evidente del trabajo académico. La conjunción de ciertas posibilidades y la elección de la más factible contribuyen a llenar los vacíos en la vida que se relata, sin embargo, un if o un likely que no hayan sido y la estructura se tambalea, por más fundamentadas que estén las referencias. Prieto bien pudo actuar de manera diferente, no ubicarse donde las conjeturas lo sitúan, o no pensar como se pretende. Dedicar gran parte de su esfuerzo a llenar los vacíos de información en la vida de Prieto condujo al autor a un desequilibrio estructural en su trabajo, que terminó dedicando solamente un capítulo, de ocho, al asunto transcendental: el conocimiento del cabildo Sangó te deum, de Prieto como su líder indudable y del inicio del sincretismo de la actual santería.Rescatar la historia del cabildo –cuyo nombre alude a un himno cristiano en opinión de Lovejoy–, identificar sus características, señalar el estatus que asumió su dirigente y que promovió para el futuro, y desmentir falsas ideas son las principales aportaciones de este libro. Contribuciones medulares son: identificar a Prieto como el líder incuestionable del cabildo Sangó te deum, contra ideas propagadas a partir de aseveraciones de Fernando Ortiz; mostrar que el origen de la criollización se encuentra en la práctica de este dirigente, que vinculó a los santos cristianos con los dioses del panteón yoruba; y, finalmente, pero no menos importante, acreditar que Prieto no participó de la rebelión de Aponte de 1812, afirmación repetida sin sustento. Para Lovejoy es indiscutible que Prieto es la figura clave en la rama cubana de una religión más amplia. Resulta paradójico que los practicantes actuales no tengan en la memoria a este personaje, ni lo que hizo, aunque algo se sepa de la existencia del cabildo que dirigió. Por ello bien vale la pena revisar los hallazgos de este autor.La información documental acerca de Prieto se encuentra en un grueso expediente en el que hay más falta de información que abundancia de ella. ¿Cómo hizo Lovejoy para armar su relato? Lo primero, utilizando hábilmente la documentación de archivo disponible y haciendo las preguntas correctas para aprovechar mejor la bibliografía secundaria y los relatos orales que logró reunir. El investigador recurrió a la metodología que utilizan los biógrafos para reconstruir las vidas de sus personajes y echó mano de la estrategia de “‘a veces imaginar’ el pasado” –propuesta por Natalie Zemon Davis– para recrear todo el camino recorrido y conocer cómo llegó Prieto a ser el líder de la Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos Nación Lucumí de Santa Bárbara, nombre oficial del cabildo, hasta que su rastro se pierde por completo después de haber sido acusado falsamente de instigar una revuelta calificada de conspiración (p. 4).En el proceso de reconstrucción de la vida de Prieto, Lovejoy logra darle sentido a la manera en que este personaje se fue identificando como lucumí y cómo los distintos saberes adquiridos a lo largo de su vida confluyeron en la forma en que propuso la dinámica del cabildo. Esta destreza de Prieto sentó un precedente para legalizar la práctica y evitar la persecución en Cuba.Al seguir la vida de Prieto, uno de los elementos llamativos, si no es que el más sugestivo, es que ésta ocurre en una época muy compleja. Según el autor, Prieto nació durante el periodo de auge del tráfico esclavista en África occidental, y llegó a Cuba cuando terminaba la emancipación estadounidense y antes del inicio de la Revolución francesa. Ya en Cuba, se unió al ejército español como parte del Batallón de Morenos Leales durante la Revolución haitiana, las guerras napoleónicas y las independencias americanas, y vivió la fase más agresiva de las reformas borbónicas. Como soldado, supervisó el arribo de población esclava que llegó en grandes cantidades y, hacia los últimos años de su vida, fuera del ejército ya, dirigió el cabildo. Su historia merece conocerse.

Yorùbá-Speaking Diaspora in Cuba - Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba During the Age of Revolutions. By Henry B. Lovejoy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2019. Pp. 219. $90.00 cloth; $32.50 paper.

Yorùbá-Speaking Diaspora in Cuba - Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba During the Age of Revolutions. By Henry B. Lovejoy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2019. Pp. 219. 32.50 paper. - Volume 79 Issue 3

The Whitewash of Blackface in Fernando Pérez’s José Martí: El ojo del Canario (2010)

Fernando Pérez’s José Martí: El ojo del canario (2010) is a foray into Martí’s childhood and adolescence on the big screen that perpetuates the hagiographic narrative of José Martí as white savior for what is ostensibly a self-fashioned mestizo national ideal. To that end, Fernando Pérez minimizes Afro-Cuban agency and offers a whitewashed version of the revolutionary milieu in which Martí came of age. Through the analysis of black representation, historical revisionism, and symbolism, I show how the story of Martí and colonial Cuba envisioned by Fernando Pérez enshrines the notion that the burgeoning nationalism and radical politics of mid-nineteenth-century Cuba were a whites-only enterprise, a move that turns the film into a Cuban minstrel show for the new millennium.

Aproximación al léxico cubano de la esclavitud desde el Diccionario Provincial de Esteban Pichardo (1836, 1849, 1862 y 1875): la percepción de la cubanidad en la lexicografía general

In the colonial Cuba of the second half of the 18th century the adoption of an economic model founded on slave-based plantation will lead to a slavery with its own characteristics, which would differ from the continental slave system. Considering the language, a starting assumption is that the inherent tensions of the extralinguistic context has given rise to an own Cuban lexicon of slavery. In order to prove this hypothesis we aim a lexicographical study of Esteban Pichardo’s Diccionario Provincial de Voces Cubanas, the first dictionary dedicated to a regional variant of American Spanish. Starting from the identification of the lexical pieces related to slavery we will focus on the lexicographic treatment of voices in general dictionaries both academic and extra-academic. The analysis of the lexicographic visibility in the different sources and the study of the reception of the diatopic mark will allow us to achieve the approach to the better understanding of the Cuban lexicon of slavery, in addition to contribute to the history of Spanish lexicography.

The Tragedy of a Man Who Cursed: On Leonardo Padura's The Novel of My Life (2002)

This article explores how in The Novel of My Life Heredia’s tragedy -that is forced exile- stems from a dynamics between colonialism and culture in Cuba. At the same time, this dynamics reveals the transatlantic concatenations between the imperial politics of Spain and the colonial character of nineteenth-century Cuba. Heredia’s tragedy, I argue, is depicted in Padura’s novel as a consequence of a socio-historical reality in which Heredia’s enlightened, or liberal, ideas about politics and independence where rather “misplaced ideas” in the Cuba of the 1820s. In other words, some of these European liberal ideas became “misplaced ideas” when they were displaced first to the Spanish context, and subsequently to the colonial context in Cuba. The incongruences between the political structures and culture of the Spanish dynastic state and enlightened European ideas reflected themselves on colonial Cuba.

Henry B. Lovejoy. Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xv + 219 pp. $90.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1469645384.

Henry B. Lovejoy. Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xv + 219 pp. $90.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1469645384. - Volume 65 Issue 1

“미국 공놀이”와 쿠바니다드: 19세기후반 쿠바 민족주의의 형성에서 야구가 한 역할

“미국 공놀이”와 쿠바니다드: 19세기후반 쿠바 민족주의의 형성에서 야구가 한 역할

Prieto: Yoruba Kinship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

Prieto: Yoruba Kinship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

Getting locked up to get free in colonial Cuba

ABSTRACT This essay examines the histories of two enslaved Africans living in Cuba and sent to prison in the mid-nineteenth century, to consider the ways in which prison represented a path to freedom within and beyond slave societies. Formerly enslaved people in Cuba and Puerto Rico, released from bondage upon entering the carceral system, were often resold into slavery upon completion of their prison sentences – but not always. The essay focuses first on the case of Gregorio Lucumí, imprisoned in Cuba, whose civil status post-sentence was debated by authorities seeking to discourage crime as a means to secure prison sentences that might yield freedom from slavery. It then turns to the lengthier case of Isidoro Gangá, sent to prison in Melilla, North Africa, and who, post-sentence, appealed for freedom via free soil principles.

A insondável vida do lucumí Juan Nepomuceno Prieto

Resenha de:<br />LOVEJOY, Henry B.. <em>Prieto: Yoruba Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions</em>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 240p.

Review: Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, by Henry B. Lovejoy

Review: Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, by Henry B. Lovejoy

Lovejoy Henry B. — Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

This book contextualizes the biography of a West African forced migrant in Havana, Cuba from the 1770s to 1835. Following Prieto’s life chronologically, the eight chapters start with “Badagry”, the lucrative port controlled first by the Oyo empire, then by Fon-speaking Dahomey, and once “Old Oyo” collapsed its subjects became victims of the Atlantic trade. Imaginably, Prieto was carried from Badagry to Jamaica in 1784 before reaching Havana in 1785. On arrival Prieto was labeled as a “Luc...

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

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.

Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, by Henry B. Lovejoy

Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, by Henry B. Lovejoy

Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

Diverse and Dynamic Dietary Patterns in Early Colonial Cuba: New Insights from Multiple Isotope Analyses

The European conquest and colonization of the Caribbean precipitated massive changes in indigenous cultures and societies of the region. One of the earliest changes was the introduction of new plant and animal foods and culinary traditions. This study presents the first archaeological reconstruction of indigenous diets and foodways in the Caribbean spanning the historical divide of 1492. We use multiple isotope datasets to reconstruct these diets and investigate the potential relationships between dietary and mobility patterns at multiple scales. Dietary patterns are assessed by isotope analyses of different skeletal elements from the archaeological skeletal population of El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba. This approach integrates carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of bone and dentine collagen with carbon and oxygen isotope analyses of bone and enamel apatite. The isotope results document extreme intrapopulation dietary heterogeneity but few systematic differences in diet between demographic/social groups. Comparisons with published isotope data from other precolonial and colonial period populations in the Caribbean indicate distinct dietary and subsistence practices at El Chorro de Maíta. The majority of the local population consumed more animal protein resources than other indigenous populations in the Caribbean, and their overall dietary patterns are more similar to colonial period enslaved populations than to indigenous ones.

Commitment beyond Rules: Franciscans in Colonial Cuba, 1531–1842

Commitment beyond Rules: Franciscans in Colonial Cuba, 1531–1842