Cuban History Research Articles

A Social History of Cuba's Protestants: God and the Nation

A Social History of Cuba's Protestants: God and the Nation

The Great Havana Hurricane of 1846: A Reconstruction of the Storm’s Track, Intensity, and Impacts

This article reconstructed the track, intensity, and societal impacts of the Great Havana Hurricane of October 1846, using all available historical data, which include ship logs, newspapers, diaries, and early instrumental records. Most of the data were extracted from original manuscripts at historical libraries and repositories. Meteorological aspects of the hurricane were analyzed by mapping twice-daily surface synoptic weather maps from geographic information systems methods, estimating central pressures from known wind–pressure relationships derived from modern hurricane studies, and assessing intensity based on damage descriptions from the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale and an inland decay model. The storm was found to be much stronger than previously known. In this study, we clearly define the first known record of a landfalling Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin, which likely ranks among the top of all those known in the modern (1851–present) Atlantic Basin official hurricane database. Although this storm has been previously referred to as one of the most destructive hurricanes in the history of Cuba, the impacts of the Great Havana Hurricane actually spanned well beyond the Caribbean, tracking from Florida through many major populated cities along the East Coast and into Atlantic Canada. Clearly, such a storm today, with much larger metropolitan areas, would have caused enormous economic damage and should be anticipated in long-term hurricane mitigation, zoning, and worst-case scenarios. This study highlights the importance of examining historical documentary sources for extreme events, providing a framework on how to research case studies of premodern Atlantic hurricanes back in time.

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

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

Historiography of Cuban Heraldry in the 20th – the Beginning of 21st centuries

In recent years, Russian heraldry has gone beyond the scope of local and Western European heraldry. One of the new areas of research is Latin America. Among the countries of the New World, Cuba has been the friendliest to Russia. Historically, Cuba was the gateway to America, so it is logical to open a series of articles on Latin American heraldry with Cuban heraldry. In Cuba, interest in state, family, and municipal heraldry has not declined among researchers, despite the change of regimes. Despite gaining independence from Spain in 1898, cultural ties with the former metropole were not severed. One of the most important areas was the study of the genealogy and titulature of the local nobility and their coats of arms. The first Cuban historians, whose works were published in the 19th – 20th centuries, paid little attention to social representation in society. Cuban Heraldry in the 20th century is represented mainly by the relevant research of Cuban, Spanish, and American specialists. The ecclesiastical heraldry and emblem studies, as well as the emblems of political parties and organizations in the 20th century are still waiting for their researchers. By and large, Cuban heraldry studies could be reduced to only a few well-known names, but the good news is that new names appear today, especially in related historical disciplines. The works of Russian researchers on the history of Cuba should be noted since, without them, this study would be less informative.

Los vegueros canarios en Cuba durante el siglo xviii

Tobacco development in Cuba, combined with the Canarian migrant movements for centuries, were important factors of the politics, business, society and culture in the island. Fusion of two realities, tobacco and canary emigrant made the mythical figure of the tobac-co farmer, who was known as veguero along the cuban history. This article wants to shed light on the subject, who together with the vision of «labrador» and «guajiro», will be part of the Cuban collective imaginary.

Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba by Jalane D. Schmidt

Reviewed by: Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba by Jalane D. Schmidt Alison Fraunhar Jalane D. Schmidt, Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. The title of Jalane D. Schmidt's excellent history of Cachita, as the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre, Cuba's patron saint, is affectionately known, signals the spatial component of the worship of the saint. The streets of Cuba, from Santiago to Pinar del Río, are the contested ground on which social, ideological, and spiritual identities and faith are performed in this analysis. From the occupation of informal social space to the sanctioned performance of ideology and identity, the streets are the stage where secular political and religious affiliations are formed as well as play out. As Schmidt details in her far-reaching study, since the nineteenth century, religious and state authorities have battled for the hearts and minds of the Cuban people, as they authorize some public acts in some public spaces and foreclose on others, asking which forms of observance can be performed in public? Which behind closed doors? Who gets to be on the streets, and who is forbidden public agency? Who is allowed inside, and who must remain outdoors? The point that Schmidt makes over and over, as the book moves through time from the sixteenth century to the present, is how these positions shift over time in response to different political and social conditions, and how symbols play a key role in mobilizing hearts and minds. Schmidt constructs a historical genealogy of Caridad, ably deploying archival records, tracing the early seventeenth-century origins of the cult of the Virgin in the small town of El Cobre in far-eastern Oriente province (the most remote and among the poorer and blackest of Cuban provinces), the growth of the mythology surrounding her, and the spread of her worship from a regional phenomenon to encompass Havana and western Cuba. The worship of Caridad began among free indigenous and enslaved black Orientales who, in Schmidt's account, proved adroit at navigating colonial and ecclesiastical bureaucracies in Caridad's name. Thus begins the historical account of Caridad's association with blackness and her eventual evolution into the spiritual and national symbol of Cuba. In her careful exegesis of Afro-Cuban religious and spiritual practice, Schmidt avoids a binaristic reading, but she deploys the binaries of inside-outside [End Page 325] and order-spontaneity quite usefully to mark regimes of sanction and authorization. One of the most original moves Schmidt makes is detangling Caridad from Ochun, the Lucumí orisha, or divine being, with whom Caridad shares salient aspects. For many Cubans and Cuban scholars, the doubling of these two seminal figures in Cuban history, spirituality and identity, is accepted as given. Schmidt undertakes the unpacking of their entwined iterations and histories, overwriting the widely accepted reading of religion in Cuba as always-already African with a thin veil of Christianity drawn across it for the strategic purpose of official compliance and self-protection that has dominated the discourse for the past half century. Although the emphasis on Afro-Cuban cultural practices and their contribution to Cuban identity has been vital to overcoming Eurocentric hegemony, Schmidt argues instead that Caridad does not always bear Ochun within, and she marshals an impressive body of research to support a claim that the cult arose out of Christian practice, with the imbrication of African forms of belief and spiritual practice latent until the nineteenth century. Schmidt's point is not to reassert the acculturation model of Afro-Cuban spirituality (common prior to the mid-twentieth century, this model was rooted in Eurocentric scholarship and validated the European contribution to Cuban culture while denigrating the African) but to refine the scholarly record to reflect more accurately the complexity of the preeminent national symbol. In doing this, Schmidt accounts for African-based spiritual practice and other popular forms of worship, especially Lucumí and espiritismo. While Caridad/Ochun is not a central figure in either Espiritismo or Palo Monte—nor the male secret society of Abakua (which Schmidt does not address, although this could have...

‘Cadáveres Amados’: Martyrs, Memory, and Cuban National Symbols

Abstract On November 27th, 1871, eight young medical students were marched into a public plaza in Havana and shot by Spanish authorities. On the first anniversary of their death, the exiled José Martí used their execution to denounce Spanish rule in Cuba, and to legitimize the violent struggle for Cuban Independence. The executed students became martyrs to Cuban nationalism. Since then, their execution at the hands of tyrants has been repeatedly repurposed in revolutionary periods in Cuban history. This article engages with the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, and Pierre Nora to reflect on the process of collective and cultural memory formation and reformation. It considers the factors that contributed to the transformation of the execution of these students from a singular tragedy, among a wider field of atrocity, into a defining moment in Cuban identity. Further, drawing on works by Jay Winter, Robin Cohen, and Ron Eyerman, this article interrogates the role of individuals and groups in this process. Over one hundred and fifty years, members of exile communities, moral witnesses, student protesters, and revolutionary leaders used the memory of these martyrs to contest authoritarian rule, hoping to advance their vision of a Cuba that could be. Driven by changing political imperatives, the memory of the students altered to reflect new collective priorities. This case study shows change and continuity in cultural memory. Tracing the evolution of this narrative from the Cuban War of Independence, through the rule of dictators, Castro’s revolutionary war, and the following socialist era, this article concludes by asking how their memory is being—once again—transformed today. With a focus on the construction and use of public monuments and memorials, but incorporating literature, images, annual marches, and films, this article argues that the public memory of their deaths altered in different periods to invoke a revolutionary vision of Cuban national identity battered by a century and a half of instability.

“LookingForwardAlways toAfrica”:William George Emanuel and the Politics of Repatriation in Cuba, 1894–1906

AbstractThis article examines a back-to-Africa movement from early twentieth-century Cuba. The leader, William George Emanuel, arrived in Cuba from Antigua in 1894, and over the next several years, he worked to unite thecabildos de naciónandsociedades de coloron the island. After independence in 1898, Emanuel and his followers rejected Cuban citizenship and began petitioning Britain, the United States, Belgium, and the Gold Coast for land grants in West and Central Africa. Each petition, however, told a different story. Emanuel skillfully tailored his appeals according to his audience, variously claiming that he and his followers were “British,” “African,” “Congolese,” or “Mina,” among other identities. Anticipating the rise of Marcus Garvey by over a decade, Emanuel's campaign reveals an overlooked pan-Africanist strand in the typical narrative for this period of Cuban history. Drawing mainly on the petitions themselves, the article analyzes how Emanuel blended the languages of empire, nation, race, and ethnicity to create a dynamic pan-African identity. More generally, the article demonstrates how marginalized groups have long negotiated the boundaries of identity in the pursuit of belonging.

Chemical characterization and radiocarbon dating of the rock art of Las Charcas caves, Cuba

There has been much debate over the decades amongst Cuban archaeologists about what group or groups may have created the rock art in the karst caves of Cuba. The complexities of Cuba's history made dating rock paintings an attractive method for determining their origins. Samples were collected from three caves in Mayabeque province, collectively referred to as Las Charcas. Chemical analyses were carried out along with plasma–chemical oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometric radiocarbon dating. The paintings in two caves contained bitumen, resulting in anomalously old dates, whilst the other cave's amorphous carbon‐based paintings fit within a pre‐Columbian context.

Seeing the light in Santa y Andrés: Metaphor, myth and historical ambivalence

Drawing on theories about bricolage as creative resistance, this article examines the sudden, unexplained appearance of the masked Abakuá íreme in the middle of Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés (), a film that otherwise focuses entirely on the repression of a gay writer in post-Mariel era Cuba. This disruption of the narrative is explored as a strategy that urges the viewer to consider cyclical processes by which displaced social anxieties are mapped onto different marginalized groups to form a shifting locus of backlash following moments of progressive social change in Cuban history. The article tracks the ways in which the film evokes Abakuá mythology to create historical parallels for the viewer to discover. Utilizing doubled characters and parallel journeys as its analogical grammar, tensions between the film’s archetypal figures signal larger conflicts around the policing of acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality, and the social and political processes by which particular expressions of masculinity that are perceived as ‘dangerous’ or threatening are regulated in Cuban society at different historical moments. Even though Santa y Andrés is set in 1983, the film’s contentious reception in 2016 makes it what I am calling a historically ambivalent film about repression both in the past and in the present.

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.

Historical deconstruction in Return to Ithaca (2016), by Leonardo Padura and Laurent Cantet

In the last century, the most prominent event in Cuban history was the 1959 Revolution, an influential social movement, especially among the generation that participated in the Revolution and began to experience the postrevolution. In the fifties of the last century, Cubans suffered a spiritual and physical trauma difficult to overcome. The characters of Return to Ithaca (2016) represent that period, reflect of a microworld of the general situation of the time. The return of one of them from Spain causes the meeting between the five friends on a rooftop in La Habana. The discussion between them only manages to revive hope at the same time as the disappointment of their past, present and future. As the work is presented under the structure of a script, it respects the three rules of the theater, which favors a view from the theatrical interpretation. For this work we will rely on the sociological and psychological analysis, in order to better understand Padura and Cantet´s recreation of the general situation of that period. Our analysis aims to show that the intertextuality between literature and history allows us to understand an epoch, and the human experiences that take place in it, in a more vivid way. Padura and Cantet not only present a script of a reunion between five old friends, but also state that they all face a reconsideration of the illusions lost by and in the Revolution, in a painful but, at the same time, humorous, caustic and even joyful way.

“Children of the Revolution”

Abstract This interview of Gregory Randall offers a lens onto a transnational life experience, including that of international refugees in Cuba. Randall was born in New York in 1960. He spent his early childhood in Mexico and arrived in Cuba in 1970, where he remained until the 1980s. In this interview, Randall reflects on Cuban policies toward women, homosexuality, and youth. He also analyzes his own family’s experience, characterized by a strong commitment to reflecting the Cuban Revolution in its own social relations and its ways of living and loving. The interview provides a unique perspective on these challenges and on Cuban history, shaped by Randall’s particular position in that historical process. Unmoored from national frameworks, his subjectivity is anchored in a transnational Left sensibility. He belongs to a generation of children of the revolution, part of Socialist Cuba as children and teenagers, and belonging to Left and internationalist families.

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider

Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...

“A Cuba That Keeps Unsettling”

Abstract Two young Cuban historians, Ailynn Torres Santana and Diosnara Ortega González, discuss their forthcoming book of oral histories with Cuban women. They describe their methodology, their intellectual formation, and the reception of gender studies and oral history in the Cuban academy.

Trabalho social cubano e tendências teóricas atuais

Este artigo tem por objetivo abordar as tendências teóricas do trabalho social cubano a partir do início da transição socialista na Ilha (janeiro de 1959). Para tanto, recupera aspectos da história mais recente deste país e situa a importância do movimento 26 de julho (M-26-7) que lutou contra a ditadura de Fulgencio Batista que culminou como a transição socialista e a reestruturação do trabalho social em Cuba. Destaca, ainda, as principais inspirações teórico-políticas que têm orientado o sentido do trabalho social cubano nos últimos 25 anos, suas diversas tendências, seus elementos constituintes, suas teses centrais. Analisa, por fim, com base nesse estudo, os limites e as potencialidades para consolidar uma formação universitária profissional crítica na Ilha, fiel à tradição socialista nela construída e caudatária de suas experiências militantes e progressistas.

Sumisión y resistencia del cuerpo en «El central» de Reinaldo Arenas

Reinaldo Arenas en su poema «El central» describe la subyugación a la que se ven sometidos los sujetos a lo largo de la historia de Cuba; privados de individualidad y convertidos únicamente en fuerza productiva mediante los mecanismos de opresión del poder. En este caso analizaremos de qué manera Arenas se centra en la corporalidad del indígena, el negro y el recluta para denunciar la sumisión que padecen y convertir el cuerpo en un dispositivo de resistencia.

Cien por Ciento Cubanos: National Identity, Master Narratives, and Silencing Moves in a Transnational Caribbean Family History

This article focuses on the oral and artifact-filled archive of a working-class Afro-Cuban family to create an intimate set of histories that illuminates the Americas as deeply connected and challenges the limits of national borders. The article explores the ways in which national identities assert themselves in the “private spaces” of migratory life through storytelling and the creation of collective memories, and how gender functions within these spaces. This family has created a master narrative about its own racially conscious, respectable, revolutionary Cuban working-class identity and practice that denies the centrality of international marriage and diasporic experiences to its making. Women’s whispered stories, marginalized from the familial narrative, illuminate alternative meanings and motivations for the strategies that propelled their family into the center of the great conflicts of Cuban history.

Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal”

This examination of José Lezama Lima’s groundbreaking essay on the controversial late-nineteenth-century Cuban poet Julián del Casal situates the essay in the postrevolutionary context in which it first appeared in a Havana newspaper in 1941, a year after the ratification of the Constitution of 1940 and the publication of Fernando Ortiz’s celebrated Cuban Counterpoint. It explores Lezama Lima’s essay as a response to this moment in Cuban history as one that sought to forge, according to Rafael Rojas, a new “pact of national reconciliation,” and was characterized by anxieties over Cubans’ ability to produce. It argues that Lezama Lima’s essay responded by turning from questions of production and proposing instead an urban aesthetic practice of reception and failure that foregrounds—in a manner not unlike contemporary queer critics—the racial and sexual spectral and ephemeral as sources for alternative forms of productivity and agency.

Multidimensional diagnosis of competitive anxiety in youth baseball team

Santiago de Cuba It is one of the provinces with the best sports results in Cuban history, baseball is one of the leading disciplines in this regard, however, in recent years, such achievements have been affected. Multiple are the answers that technicians, researchers, and specialists have tried to offer these unfortunate events. Youth baseball has not been exempt from this problem and, in this sense, Sports Psychology has played an important role in the study and search for scientific alternatives that contribute to reversing these results. During the last 3 years, high manifestations of competitive anxiety have been observed in baseball players in this category, this fact motivates the present investigation, it aims to rigorously diagnose how this negative emotion has been presented in said population. To complete the objective, the 25 members of the Santiago youth team were selected as a sample, the study is descriptive, being able to record, analyze and describe the general and observable characteristics of anxiety in real moments of training sessions and competitions, it is supported by the qualitative-quantitative methodology using psychological techniques such as observation, interview, CSAI-2, attitude tests for competition and appreciation of time and pulsometer.