Nineteenth-century Cuba Research Articles

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba by Louis A. Pérez Jr.

Reviewed by: Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba by Louis A. Pérez Jr. Rachel L. Price Pérez Jr., Louis A. Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. U of North Carolina P, 2017. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4696-5153-8. Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba joins a growing number of studies of nineteenth-century Cuban history and culture that focus not on epic struggles for abolition or national sovereignty, but instead on more every day practices. Pérez is particularly interested in middle-class women's changing culture: how they turned to penning literature, adapting European fashion, riding bicycles, or engaging in flirtation and dance. Perez's claim is that market culture spurred changes in mores (he writes of morals) in nineteenth-century Cuba—changes that, while not ostensibly political themselves, contributed to a nascent national culture that sought to challenge Spanish rule. Intimations of Modernity can thus be understood as a kind of prequel to the author's On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (1999), which argued that (mainly U.S.) consumer goods and material culture in late nineteenth-century Cuba contributed to anti-Spanish, anti-colonial positions. Intimations of Modernity sets out to document the emergence of an "urban Creole middle class" in Cuba. Pérez argues that market forces drove social change and a questioning of prior economic and moral systems. As A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein's The Making of the Middle Class: A Transnational History (2012) makes clear, middle class in multi-racial societies often was understood to be synonymous with whiteness, and, although Pérez does not state so explicitly, many of the cultural practices Pérez ascribes to a Creole or criollo class seem largely available to white Cubans. A capacious term, "middle class" has also often connoted notions of modernity, a concept central to the period Pérez documents, and which he argues encompassed a range of developments: technology, trade, finance, changing fashions and sexual codes. Chapter One, "To Diffuse the Light of Civilization," stresses how the post-Haitian Revolution sugar boom in Cuba propelled the island into a more central position in a global economy and led to changes that Cubans associated with modernity: electricity, street-lights, telecommunications technology, railroads, as well as conspicuous consumption, philharmonics, literary circles, and theaters. Chapter Two, "To Advance the Course of Progress Forward," further explores a whiggish Cuban discourse that opposed modernity to Spanish culture and rule, the latter understood to be "backward." Pérez examines period consumer culture—luxury imports as well as humbler domestic goods (furniture, chinaware, silverware)—fashion, the growth of advertising, and women's role in an emerging retail economy, and offers compelling readings of little-known fashion magazines and advertisements. These readings complement recent studies on the topic, such as literary historian Víctor Goldgel Carballo's exploration of fashion in nineteenth-century Cuba (Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Prensa, moda y literatura en el siglo xix.) Chapter Three, "The Perfection of Acting," focuses on the role of the fan (abanico) in new, gendered social protocols. Chapter Four, "Mellow Effulgence," continues to explore criollas' lives, noting the multiplication of women authors in the [End Page 175] latter half of the nineteenth-century, the explosion of leisure reading, the development of accessible urban spaces, and still more extended uses of the fan. The final chapter, "Prologue to Perdition," reiterates Pérez's claim that consumption and goods drove new morals and changing gender norms, which allowed some women greater agency and queer men greater visibility, but also prompted a backlash of misogyny and homophobia. Particularly interesting is the chapter's attention to dance spaces, uniquely open to both sexes and to interracial relationships. Intimations of Modernity doesn't gloss in detail what the market's moral universe might be, but Pérez argues that capitalism's emphasis on choice facilitated new forms of subjectivity, an argument Sophia Rosenfeld is similarly researching with respect to the Franco-Anglo transatlantic world. In any slim volume entire realms of experience must necessarily be excepted, and Pérez has understandably restricted his study to a certain social class. Still...

Beyond Freedom's Reach: An Imperfect Centering of Women and Children Caught within Cuba's Long Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.

Plagio y anacronismo deliberado en la novela antiesclavista cubana

Plagiarism—the crime of stealing a slave or kidnapping and enslaving a free person—was widespread in nineteenth-century Cuba, yet it has been completely neglected by literary scholars. When examined through the prism of plagiarism, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes (1882) and Francisco Calcagno’s Romualdo, uno de tantos (1891) allow us to perceive the anachronism and replaceability of bodies; that is, the experience of the long chain of deferrals, denials, and displacements required to treat some lives as disposable, according to the logic of globally asymmetrical structural inequalities. Plagiarism was simultaneously the concrete act of kidnapping a human being and the manifestation of an abstract economic process that endowed that body with value as both commodity and capital. As a socially constitutive vulnerability, this crime evinced the social prac-tices—including violence, the forgery of documents, hypocrisy, disavowal, and sheer indifference—that sought to deny certain lives the protections commonly associated with freedom and being from somewhere or having an origin. Both Cecilia Valdes and Romualdo pay close attention to these practices, showing how increasingly fundamental they were to eliding slaves’ past in the context of the illegal slave trade

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, by Louis A. Pérez

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, by Louis A. Pérez

‘Weapons from their land’: arming strategies and practices among West African-born soldiers in early nineteenth-century Bahia and Cuba

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the essential issue of weaponry and war paraphernalia used by West African men and women in Bahia and Cuba throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that it was due to the similarities existing between their African and American environments that they were able to reproduce the ways in which they had acquired the weapons necessary to undertake their military actions. Moving away from the concept of slave revolt, and considering these movements as actions of war, also allows for a more in-depth examination of the question of weaponry. Were the weapons they used African or Western? How were West African practices associated with the arming of military forces reproduced in the new setting provided by plantation societies in Bahia and Cuba? These, among other questions, are addressed in this article.

Sustaining Freedom and Second Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba

This essay reviews the following works:Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba. By Gerard Aching. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 241. $48.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780253016935.Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850. By Rafael Marquese, Tâmis Peixoto Parron, and Márcia Regina Berbel. Translated by Leonardo Marques. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Pp. 1 + 351. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826356482.Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. By João José Reis. Translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 351. $32.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107439092.Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. By David Sartorius. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. vi + 312. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822355939.The Politics of the Second Slavery. Edited by Dale W. Tomich. Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science. Ithaca: State University New York Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 280. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781438462363.

The Cowpox Controversy: Memory and the Politics of Public Health in Cuba

Vaccination played an important role in the formation of a national consciousness in Cuba, and vaccination's earliest promoters dominate nationalist narratives of medical achievement on the island. This article investigates the intense hostility exhibited by the creole medical elite toward a pivotal figure in the history of smallpox vaccination in Cuba, Spanish physician Dr. Vicente Ferrer (1823-83), the first in the Americas to mass produce smallpox vaccine using calf vaccinifiers. I argue that anger and mistrust of both Ferrer and his innovatory vaccine production technology originated in the relationship between medical politics and cultural identity in late nineteenth-century Cuba. By the late nineteenth century, smallpox vaccination was linked to glorified memories of a Cuban creole-led vaccination program and a disinterested medical profession. Both Ferrer and his private institution for the mass production of "cowpox" became associated with destructive changes in public health, challenging cultural narratives and regional power structures.

Not a polar island: yellow fever, Spanish medical research, and the struggle for scientific and political hegemony in late nineteenth century Cuba.

This paper explores questions related to yellow fever and the political destiny of Cuba in the late nineteenth century. A forgotten therapeutic device to treat the disease invented in that period, the "polar chamber" (cámara polar), provides a useful standpoint for reconstructing the tradition of Spanish yellow fever research in Cuba, a topic largely neglected by the medical historiography. The failed history of this device can also illuminate the complex struggle for scientific hegemony between Spanish, Cuban, and US institutions and researchers. Finally, we focus on the politics of the polar chamber by analyzing how this invention intended to provide a particular solution for the complex, threefold struggle for Cuba's political future.

Subaltern Unity? Chinese and Afro-Cubans in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Subaltern Unity? Chinese and Afro-Cubans in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Slavery, race, and conspiracy: The HMS Romney in nineteenth-century Cuba

ABSTRACTThis article presents a case study of the HMS Romney, the British Royal Navy ship stationed in Havana from 1837 to 1845. The ship housed Africans awaiting the verdict of the trials of the Havana Mixed Commission Court for the Suppression of the Slave Trade. It highlights the controversies and discussions which were generated by the presence of the ship, and how they relate to the wider political scene that Robert L. Paquette has aptly described as a “conflict between empires over slavery in Cuba.” Not only was the ship a potent symbol of British abolitionism and a platform upon which ideological battles played out, but it was ultimately seen as a threat to the prevailing hegemonic order in Cuba.

‘Going back home’: slave suicide in nineteenth century Cuba

The issue of African slave suicides in Cuba was an always present one in the minds of slave traders, planters, and the colonial authorities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, discussions among the reasons behind this behavior included basically all sectors of the island’s society, including the main authorities. In this article, slave suicides are discussed both as a day-to-day action of resistance undertaken by the slaves, and as a social concern for those who had invested interests in the continuation of slavery in the island.

Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands

In Linking the Histories of Slavery Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks expand the narrative of North American bondage by integrating indigenous actors and incorporating regions outside of the plantation South. Their introduction presents the volume’s major themes: the “entrepreneurial qualities of slaving” and the magnitude of enslavers’ and slaves’ migrations (xxiii). In part 1, anthropologist Catherine M. Cameron provides the volume’s foundation by surveying indigenous slave systems across North America, stressing their “considerable antiquity,” and chronicling both the slavelike experiences of captives and captive influence on captor society (10). Parts 2 and 3 feature southern, southwestern, and western case studies that trace the rise of commercial slaving, explain common challenges faced by enslavers, describe the many forms of abuse that slaves endured, and reveal captives’ varied opportunities for social and economic mobility from the colonial period to the present.Although the sociocultural incentives for indigenous slave systems and the economic motivations for Euro-American slaving are well known, analyses of the commercial nature of Indian slavery are far less common. The volume as a whole highlights how slave labor enhanced Native production of subsistence goods and commodities, and Eric E. Bowne’s and Boyd Cothran’s chapters each highlight how slaving became a lucrative enterprise for Native peoples in the South and the Pacific Northwest. Bowne describes how Europeans’ insatiable demand for labor from the seventeenth thorough the nineteenth centuries prompted the Westos, and later the Comanches, to pursue “slaving as a primary mode of production” (36). Cothran chronicles the relationship between the rise of wealthy entrepreneurial chieftains and slave markets in the mid-nineteenth-century Klamath Basin, arguing that commercialized slavery restructured tribal political identities. These authors highlight the political, economic, and social effects of slavery and chart the spread of commercial slaving as colonists encroached and the effects of colonialism radiated westward.Euro-American and indigenous peoples’ pursuit of wealth and status sparked the voluntary and forced migrations of diverse groups of enslavers and slaves. Historian Paul Conrad explores the forced migration of Apache slaves from northern New Spain to the Caribbean. Although these captives supported Spanish colonial development in nineteenth-century Cuba, they also impeded production by resisting enslavement, often allying with African slaves and convict laborers. Historian Calvin Schermerhorn describes the intertwined migrations of Indians, blacks, and Euro-American settlers from the Old South to the Deep South. He explains how the commercialization of this migration resulted from the government and private enterprises funding slave traders, land speculators, and plantation investors to develop the South’s plantation complex.Historian Mark Allan Goldberg’s chapter brings together the volume’s themes by connecting indigenous and Anglo American slave-trading networks at a Texas trading house. Goldberg focuses on how Comanche–Anglo American trade in livestock and slaves facilitated westward expansion by supporting Anglo American farming, connecting the west to bustling eastern markets, and, most importantly, solidifying US land claims in central Texas. As Goldberg explains, by the mid-1850s “the Anglo American system of racial slavery won out,” and Anglo Americans forced Comanches onto reservations by racializing their “benign” and “inefficient” slave-use practices to justify conquest (215).In part 3, legal scholar Sarah Deer and psychologist Melissa Farley describe the continued sexual exploitation of Native women and children due to “persistent socioeconomic realities linked to the colonial past” (xxv). Deer reconceptualizes human trafficking by exploring warfare, boarding schools, and urban relocation and how these processes prevented Native peoples from protecting their women and children. Farley connects slavery and prostitution in the twenty-first century through their “intrinsic nonhumanity” and owners’ “justif[ication of] any violence or abuse perpetrated against those they enslaved” (286). Both authors urge the government to provide an “adequate legal response” to the widespread trafficking of Native women, fighting the vicious cycle of colonial violence Native peoples have endured for centuries (304).Although this volume introduces readers to understudied slaveries, many chapters cover the south and the southwest, where slavery, particularly among indigenous peoples, has considerable historiographic coverage. Natale Zappia’s chapter on the political and economic significance of southwestern indigenous captive and livestock networks, Enrique R. Lamadrid’s chapter on Pueblo music and pageantry as tools used to cope with colonial violence, and Andrew J. Torget’s chapter on slavery and state building in Mexico are compelling but cover familiar ground. Although the volume promises to describe the “intersection of . . . multiple slaving cultures in North America,” the case studies of different indigenous slave systems are more successful than the attempts to link regions and slave trading networks (xix). Despite these shortcomings, this volume expands the spatial, temporal, intercultural, and transnational dimensions of human trafficking in North America. Most important, Linking the Histories of Slavery encourages scholars to continue to piece together the “continental epic” of slavery among and between Native and Euro-American societies (xvi).

From Slavery to Freedom: Chinese Coolies on the Sugar Plantations of Nineteenth Century Cuba

To supplement a dwindling slave labour force on their sugar plantations, Cuban planters turned to south China's Fujian and especially Guangdong provinces. From 1847 to 1874 they recruited 141,000 male labourers (125,000 of whom arrived in Cuba alive). Slave-like work and living conditions on plantations, with proximity to large numbers of slaves notwithstanding, Chinese coolies were not permanent or lifelong slaves. The main question asked is not whether Chinese coolies were slaves - a well-worn argument that is not re-hashed here - but whether as contract labourers they constituted the early stages of the transition from slave to free labour. The article examines the respective and divergent framing of the bilingual Spanish and Chinese contracts, and the series of regulations designed to control the Chinese workers. Based largely on these primary documents it follows the trajectory of their work history in Cuba from indenture to freedom by way of specific life experiences.

Dangerous Encounters, Ambiguous Frontiers

Dance balls, masquerades, and street carnivals functioned as frontier spaces of otherwise reprehensible encounters between people of different gender, race, and class. I examine dance as a dense point of contact in nineteenth-century Cuba by showing how dance served ruling elites as a disciplining instrument to enforce social and legal boundaries, and was simultaneously used by colonial subjects as a tactic of survival to navigate these barriers. Because dancing lent itself to situations of intimacy and mis-recognition, it challenged Cuban ruling elites’ efforts to police dancing bodies. Dance is offered as a useful methodological venue to illuminate the predicament of the colonial state in governing colonial subjects and bodies. I offer the case of colonial Cuba as a contribution to the study of contact zones and colonial intimacies in Latin America and the Caribbean, in a much-needed examination of the relationships between imperialism, sexuality, and the governance of dance.

Preludios de la crítica literaria y feminista cubana: la apropiación del prólogo en Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Abstract: This article focuses on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s productivity as a literary critic in the prologues she wrote to introduce the work of her contemporaries. Through the analysis of two specific prologues, one for an autobiographical novel by the Condesa de Merlín and the other for a book of poems by Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, the article seeks to refute canonical interpretations of Avellaneda’s work since the nineteenth century on, which have disregarded her contribution of essays and critical texts as incidental facets in her career as a writer. This proposal begins by examining the restrictions placed on nineteenth-century Cuban women who sought to participate in literary criticism and the specific conflicts that surrounded Gómez de Avellaneda, mainly recognition of authorship and her commitment to the nation. From there, the article offers an analysis of both prologues, showing how the author discusses several taboo issues in nineteenth-century Cuba, such as the construction of a national imaginary from abroad and the intellectual and artistic equality of women.

Centering Animals in Latin American History

Centering Animals in Latin American History

Catholic Conspirators? Religious Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Previously untapped, Catholic Church records document historic networks among free black communities in Havana, Matanzas and other Atlantic ports. In earlier centuries, membership in overlapping religious and military corporations advanced their interests and gained them status in Spanish society. The slave revolt of Saint-Domingue, the Cuban sugar boom and the rise of abolitionist activity, however, caused their position to deteriorate rapidly in the nineteenth century. The alleged conspiracies of Aponte in 1812 and La Escalera in 1844 ruined them. Leaders were executed and hundreds more were deported in an Atlantic diaspora. Ironically, the well-recorded connections these groups maintained in the military and the Catholic Church allowed Cuban officials to target them and neither previous loyalty nor service could save them.

Bandits, Patriots or Delinquents? Social Protest in Rural Cuba (1878–1902)

A charismatic form of banditry has been broadly interpreted as the only manifestation of rural protest in nineteenth-century Cuba, a version of history encouraged by the Spanish authorities who criminalised protest demonstrations in the countryside to justify repression against supporters of independence and the rural population in general. But there were also other forms of protest that were more ‘silent’ and less visible but equally effective. By analysing the socioeconomic changes and the expressions of social unrest, as well as their methods and motivations, this article examines the different ways farmers and labourers reacted against oppression in the period from 1878 after the end of the first war of independence, to 1902 when the first Cuban Republic was established.

Costumbrista Description, Romantic Gaze: The Insufficiencies of Literary Discourse in Sab

Published in Madrid in 1841, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab is a remarkable novel often read for its anti-slavery and proto-feminist messages. Indeed, it allows us to glimpse the genesis of ideas regarding both the emancipation of slaves and women in nineteenth-century Cuba. However, I argue that, despite the novelty of its subject matter, the combination of the literary languages of costumbrismo and romanticism, particularly in its sentimentalist form, are insufficient for mounting a critique of either slavery or patriarchy in this novel. Though these languages do indeed advance these positions in the novel, my analysis shows that the mixture of these two literary styles, one that requires a superficial reading through character types and another that needs a deep reading of surface phenomena, only exacerbates Cuba’s condition as a colony. In this way, Gómez de Avellaneda points out that the emancipation of slaves and women could be imagined at the time of the novel’s publication, but a literary language did not exist yet that could properly advocate the freedom of slaves and women. Indeed, any such attempt could commodify even further Cuba and its people.