AFRICANS
The end of Amerindian enslavement in Cuba, caused by the decimation of the Amerindians, ushered in African slavery. Like the Taínos, Africans are at times constructed by elite Cubans as nonmachos and designated to serve those with power and privilege. By 1524, as Diego Columbus's term as viceroy came to an end, there were more African slaves in the Caribbean than there were Taínos. Before demonstrating how the engendering of black Cuban bodies constitutes machismo, I would first like briefly to review history from the underside of the African experience so as to expose the historical denial of Cuban racism. By exploring what was and is done to black and biracial Cubans, we will expose one aspect of the underlying tension existing in the Exilic Cuban religious expression of la lucha.
Initially, few African slaves inhabited the island, because of Cuba's lack of precious metals and a stagnant economy.[12] But by the 1640s, a sociopolitical change took place as semifeudal settlements in Cuba gave way to plantation agriculture. It was upon sugar that Cuba was created,
Since Cuba's sugar-based economy was dependent on slaves, this ensured the loyalty of sugar oligarchies to the Crown, which protected the institution during the early wars for independence. Cuban racism was thus created in an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. Skillfully using the memory of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, in which slaves overthrew their brutal masters, Spain frightened white Cubans into loyalty. Every revolt against Spanish rule was presented as the start of a race war. "Remember Haiti" became an effective negrophobic rallying cry against Cuba's attempt to liberate herself from Spain. Independence would leave white Cuba unprotected from Africanization, threatening its property, security, and white women.
During La Guerra Chiquita (the Little War, the 1879 premature war for independence), Spain interpreted the conflict for white Cubans as the start of a race war led by black gangs of Haitian origins roving through Oriente (the eastern province). Whites feared a divided Cuba with a white west and a black east that would lead to civil war, culminating in a Haitian-style black dictatorship. The Spaniards’ success in instilling fear of a "black peril" can be gauged by the remarks of Cuban freedom fighter Calixto García. During an interview in Spain after the close of the Guerra Chiquita, García confessed that the major obstacle to independence was white fear: "[Among] the whites… some eternally waver[ed] on account of the risks of the enterprise and others hesitat[ed] out of fear of a servile war with the negroes and mulattoes if Cuba became free" (Ferrer 1999, 93).
The final outbreak of the war for independence in 1895 was also labeled by Spain as a race war. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, prime minister of Spain during Cuba's war for independence, said it best: "The fact that this insurrection threatens Cuba with all the evils of Haiti and Santo Domingo, and with the triumph of the colored people and perpetual wars of races, virtually obligates the whites in Cuba to side with Spain" (Helg 1995, 49–56, 80–89). These earlier wars for independence failed because of the revolutionaries’ inability to overcome the privileged oligarchies, which remained militarily, psychologically, and economically dependent on Spain.
Legal slavery ended in the Caribbean when Cuba abolished it in 1886;
Throughout Cuban history, whenever the indigenous black population threatened to exceed the white population in numbers, a process known as blanqueamiento (whitening) occurred, whereby land was freely given to white Spanish families who would leave Spain and come to live in Cuba. During the early nineteenth century, a corporation called Junta de Población Blanca (Committee on the White Population) was organized to carry out blanqueamiento. They received their proceeds from a six-peso tax imposed on all male slaves (Corbitt 1971, 2). During the first decade after the end of the Spanish-American War, approximately three hundred thousand Spaniards emigrated to Cuba, while blacks were denied immigration rights.[13]
José Martí went further than any of his white contemporaries in affirming the equality of the races. As a white man he came to identify with the oppressed blacks. In a letter to Serafín Bello he wrote:
The man of color has a right to be treated according to his qualities as a man, with no reference whatsoever to his color; if some criterion is needed, it should be that of forgiving him for the faults for which we are responsible, and which we invited because of our unfair disdain. The worker is not an inferior being, nor must we tend to keep him in corrals and govern him with a stick. Brother to brother we must permit him to have the rights and considerations that assure people of peace and happiness. (1977, 308)
Martí attempted to give up his "whiteness" in order to create Cuba Libre, free from racist social structures, and his response to slavery was forceful; he fought racial injustice throughout his life. While in New York, he helped Rafael Serra, an Afro-Cuban, form La Liga, an organization dedicated to the education and advancement of Exilic black Cubans. Through this organization of so-called outcasts, and in many like it,
In an era when most whites believed in and accepted the inferiority of blacks, Martí continually stated that "everything that divides men, everything that separates or herds men together in categories, is a sin against humanity" (1977, 311). He went so far as to insist that there is no such thing as race, viewing it as a social construction that allows one group to oppress another. Calling race categories "razas de librería" (bookstore races), he refused to make a connection between inferiority and slavery, for as he pointed out, "blue-eyed, blond-haired Gauls were sold as slaves in the Roman marketplace" (1977, 131). Martí believed that to be Cuban meant being "más que blanco, más que mulato, más que negro" (more than white, more than mulatto, more than black) (1977, 311–14). Unfortunately, this definition of being Cuban, based on "equality" between blacks and whites, only benefited whites.
For if there is no distinction between black Cubans and white Cubans, then the abuse and suffering caused by slavery ceases to be limited to black Cubans. Recounting a color-blind history makes all Cubans slaves, not just the black ones. Whites, as Cubans, can think of themselves as victims of slavery in a society that has moved beyond being white, being mulatto, and being black. This way of thinking makes whites and blacks, as Cubans, not only the victims of slavery but also its perpetrators. Hence, if racism exists, it is not institutional; rather, it is personal. Because all are simply Cubans, racism cannot exist as an inherent manifestation of social structures. Any exhibitions of racist actions must instead focus on the attitudes of the offending individual whose race-based actions indicate a personal rejection of the established color-blind society.
In his attempt to create this type of color-blind society, Martí blames blacks for being racist when they attempt to develop black consciousness. He asks, "What must whites think of the black who prides himself on his color?" Then he answers his own question by stating, "The black man who proclaims his race, even if mistakenly as a way to proclaim spiritual identity with all races, justifies and provokes white racism" (Pérez 1999, 91). Although Martí wrote poetically on combating racism, he undermined his own rhetoric. He maintained that an integrated liberation army will forge a single Cuban consciousness that will rise above the pettiness of racism. Obviously, his dream failed to materialize, even though later generations of Cuban whites would use "más que blanco, más que mulato, más que negro" to claim that no racism existed, for if there is no race
Although Martí attempted to create a color-blind society, his views included strains of social evolutionism. In his notes for a projected book, La raza negra, he insisted that blacks must rise to the levels of whites through both education and intermarriage. He spoke of a "savage element" in blacks that prevented them from fully participating in civilized culture. With time, Martí thought, blacks would embrace Western culture and reject their African heritage (Ortiz 1942, 346–47). Unfortunately, these comments were cited by the famed Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz in an attempt to foster the very racism Martí fought so hard to eliminate.
Ortiz capitalized on Martí ’s comment on the black's "savage element" in his observations about the polarization of Cuban society. In his wellknown work, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar), he expresses the normative gaze of white Cuba. Ortiz refers to the existing polarity between whites and blacks as "the Cuban counterpoint," where "[t]obacco and sugar contradict each other in economics and in the social. Even rigid moralists have taken them under consideration in the course of their history, viewing one with mistrust and the other with favor" (1963, 1–2). According to Ortiz, sugar was introduced to the Americas by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage; Columbus likewise introduced tobacco to Europe.[14] Like sugar, half the Cuban island is sweet, refined, odorless, and white. Like tobacco, the other half is raw, pungent, bitter, aromatic, and dark. Tobacco requires constant care, whereas sugar can look after itself. Tobacco poisons, sugar nourishes. Within the spiraling smoke of a good Cuban cigar exists something revolutionary. The tobacco's consuming anarchic flames protest oppression. Sugar, on the other hand, contains neither rebellion nor resentment. It is calm, quiet, beyond suspicion. Sugar is the work of the gods, a scientific gift of civilization. Tobacco is of the devil, a magic gift of the savage world (1963, 5–15, 46).
Tobacco does not change color, it is born black and dies with the color of its race. Sugar changes color, it is born brown and whitens itself; it is syrupy mulatta that being blackish is abandoned to popular taste; later it is bleached and refined so that it can pass for white, travel the whole world, reach all mouths,
In short, Cuban racism manifested itself in two distinct forms during the early twentieth century. The most influential form was based on a theory of racial evolution that advocated the inferiority of Cubans who were not "pure" descendants of the evolved white Spaniards. The second, advocated by intellectuals like Martí and Ortiz, maintained that blacks had the potential of being equal to whites but were "stuck" in an earlier stage of cultural development.[15]
The backwardness of blacks was not biologically inherited; rather, it was culturally based. According to Ortiz, the black race characterized Cuba's low life, because it communicated its superstitions, its organizations, its languages, its dances, and so forth (1975b, 69–74). He believed, however, that the culture of blacks could be redeemed to the betterment of all Cubans. Ortiz reasoned, "Why should we lose [the African culture] when we can transform it, better it, and incorporate it, purify it, as our national folklore?" (1992, 24). The solution required assimilation to the "superior" white culture through a process of de-Africanization. Blanqueamiento, the whitening of Cuba, became a prerequisite for nationalistic advancement. While U.S. scientists and intellectuals understood racial mixing as degeneration and mongrelization, Cubans saw it as a way of advancing the savage races toward civilization and progress (De La Fuente 2001, 178).
Nevertheless, those with cojones, those who therefore write Cuban history, recast the story so that they could blame the numerous massacres of Africans on the Africans themselves. After the war for independence the Cuban African community made an attempt to reclaim their machismo. By 1910 black mambises (Cubans who fought for independence) were mobilizing to petition the government for their rightful share.[16] The creation of El Partido Independiente de Color (PIC, the Independent Party of Color) served as the political vehicle to force the government to consider seriously its rhetoric of racial equality. The PIC did not advocate black separatism; rather, it called for integration, specifically the elimination of racial discrimination, equal access to government jobs, and an end to the blanqueamiento policies. By the end of the Spanish-American War, 50 percent of the rebel army and 40 percent of the officers were of African descent. Most lost the little land they possessed to foreign investors and white criollo (born on the island) entrepreneurs. These former soldiers formed the PIC to pressure the government to establish justice. In effect,
Blacks openly protested in 1912, which immediately led the white elite to label the protest as a "race war" between "white civilization" and "black barbarism." The 1912 "race war" is generally ignored in the official remembering called Cuban history. Yet thousands of black Cubans, mostly unarmed, were deliberately butchered by white Cubans, mostly for "resisting arrest" (a Latin American excuse for assassinating captured prisoners). Rather than using the term race war, it would be more accurate to label the conflict a race massacre. No trace of the rumored uprising could be found, no cache of arms was ever discovered, no demonstration occurred outside of Oriente, no white woman was ever raped or cannibalized (contrary to newspaper accounts), and no destruction of valuable property occurred. Yet thousands of white Cuban volunteers were given arms and paid by the government to rove across the nation putting down the revolt in any way possible (Helg 1995, 177–215). Bernardo Ruiz Suárez, a witness to the massacre, wrote:
All the bitterness, all the hatred, all the ancestral prejudice of the white race against the black, were let loose. While the machine guns of the government troops were mowing down thousands of colored men, not alone those in arms, but the peaceful inhabitants of towns and villages,… [in] the larger cities and even in the Capital of the Republic white men armed to the teeth went about ordering any and every black man to withdraw from the streets and public places on pain of death, and the mere color of his skin was sufficient reason to send a man to prison on the charge of rebellion. (1922: 43)
The "success" of the massacre settled the black question. The massacre of Afro-Cubans who challenged those with power and privilege limited future social protest by terrifying the surviving blacks into conformity. The Cuban worldview became white once again, because the black voice was effectively silenced.
Viewing history from the underside of Cuban society reveals racism to be an inherent part of Cuban history, existing before and after the 1959 Revolution. As such it is also an inherent part of Cuban religiosity, which
According to José Elías Entralgo, sociologist, proponent of a Cuban version of eugenics, and chairperson of the 1959 Movimiento de Orientación e Integración Nacional (Movement of National Orientation and Integration), a cause-and-effect relationship exists between "mulattoization" and national integration. He applauds the "seduction" (that is, rape) of African women by their white masters as the necessary cause of bettering Africans, allowing white Cuba to be integrated:
The day… when a white slave master first had intercourse with a slave Negress in the bush or in the barracoon was the most luminous for mankind. … A vivifying transfusion took place that engendered a fertile and plastic symbiosis. From such miscegenation was to emerge new physical attributes and ascending psychic and moral virtues. (Moore 1988, 47)
Mulatez, as a process of whitening blacks, becomes a project of machismo, in which the seizing of the black female body by the white Cuban is celebrated as a fraternal embrace across color lines. The "savage" black female body willingly awaits insemination from the white Cuban's male seed of civilization.
Cuba's prized myth of racial equality persists on both sides of the Florida Straits. This myth contains two components. First, it credits the masters for the abolition of slavery. Manuel Sanguily, the lawyer-journalist-veteran of the earlier wars for independence celebrated the heroism of the wealthy whites who supposedly abolished slavery on the island. In 1893 he wrote:
[These Cubans] shed their blood and ruined themselves voluntarily to repair, at the cost of their treasures and their blood, of the fortunes and their lives, the errors and iniquities that others have committed, in order to purify with their sacrifice and to sanctify with their martyrdom the profaned soil of their nation. We have all suffered for the other: the black for the white, the Cuban for the slave. (Ferrer 1999, 122)
Sanguily concluded that the slave-insurgents gained their freedom, at the expense of the master-insurgents, who lost their lives and fortunes so that blacks could be free. In reality, Cuba's refusal to abolish slavery during the first war for independence was a calculated strategy to gain the political support of planters from the western part of the island whose livelihoods depended on slaves (Pérez 1988, 125).
Revolutionary fervor developed in areas where sugar and slavery were not significant; nonetheless, slave owners were somehow absolved of their participation in slavery, and the slaves were rendered dependent on their masters’ generosity, even though 43 percent of the population were of African descent, while representing 70 percent of the military ranks.[17] As already mentioned, one of the main reasons the first war for independence failed was that whites were fearful about the ascendancy of black military leaders to positions of power in a postcolonial government (McGarrity and Cárdenas 1995, 81–82).
The second component of the myth of racial equality is the assertion that equality was achieved in the military forces through fighting against Spain. Martí hoped the shared struggle of the liberating army would eliminate racial discrimination and serve as a catalyst for all of Cuban society. He wrote, "Facing death, barefoot all and naked all, blacks and whites became equal: they embraced and have not separated since" (OC I, 487–89). This embrace between men was to give birth to the nation through the macho act of war, which transcends whiteness and blackness. Racial union for Martí was less a product of miscegenation, which creates a mestizo Cuba, and more the product of machismo as heroism forged on the battlefield. Birthing a nation through the machista act of war rather than through the sexual union of mixed races eliminated women from the equation and relegated them to the role of birthing macho patriots. This new nation, born from the macho's embrace, transcended race and converted whites and blacks into Cubans (Ferrer 1999, 126–27).
This myth of racial equality was validated through the appointment of a few blacks to positions of prestige. During the war for independence, Maceo, Cuba's greatest general, became "proof" that racism had ceased to exist, even though the most prominent black freedom fighters were relatively
Yet some black men who saw the future of Cuba through the eyes of white men were placed in positions of power. After the war, Juan Gualberto Gómez, a black politician (but never elected to Congress), became the advocate for the nation's views on race relations. He insisted that before claiming equal access to public employment, blacks needed first to become civilized through education. Additionally, Martín Morúa Delgado, the only black Cuban ever elected senator, was responsible for sponsoring legislation outlawing black political parties. Both men served in the Constituent Assembly, proving that civilized blacks could rise to national prominence. The end result of the myth of racial equality is that white Cubans excused themselves from restitution for slave exploitation, branded any organization protesting racial discrimination as racist, vilified black consciousness as a threat to national unity, and portrayed Cuban whites as superior to racist Anglos, living under the abomination of Jim Crow (Helg 1995, 16, 106).
Undergirding the construction of race is the perception that blacks are nonmachos.[18] Quoting anthropologists like Gustav Klemm from Dresden, Germany, Ortiz placed humans into two groups: active or masculine, and passive or feminine. Ortiz, like Klemm before him, reduced race to a polarity in which white Europeans were manly, while all others were womanly. Yet as in some marriages, a codependent relationship develops in which the stronger sex ultimately dominates the weaker sex. Likewise, Europeans, who have reached the apex of civilization, will through domestication save the entire world from savagery. Additionally, through the use of morphology, Ortiz supports this thesis by demonstrating that African skulls reveal feminine characteristics (Ortiz 1975a, 60, 88). Machismo manifested as racism can be observed in the comments of the nineteenth-century Cuban theologian José Augustín Caballero, who wrote, "In the absence of black females with whom to marry, all blacks [become] masturbators, sinners and sodomites" (Lumsden 1996, 50;
Blacks, it was claimed, although they could be strong as mules, could not be men, for they lacked the means of proving their manhood. The reality of Cuba's plantations made it impossible for black men to carry out the "masculine" responsibility of providing for or protecting their families. Yet for the black man to place himself willingly in the female position was also unacceptable. In 1902 there was a wave of arrests of black Cubans suspected of practicing African-based religions. For example, several members from the Abakuá society were executed for alleged homosexual activities (Helg 1995, 108). Skewed gender ratios made black males the targets of white masters, who as bugarrones could rape them. The wives and children of male slaves were also understood as the master's playthings. It was even believed that white Cuban males contracted an illness that could only be cured by having sex with a black woman. Esteban Montejo, the former slave, describes it thus: "There was one type of sickness the whites picked up, a sickness of the veins and male organs. It could only be got rid of with black women; if the man who had it slept with a Negress he was cured immediately" (1968, 42).
Paradoxically, while the African man is constructed as a nonmacho, he is feared for his potential machismo, particularly as asserted with white Cuban women. White women who succumb to the black man, it was thought, are not responsible for their actions because they were bewitched by African black magic (Ortiz 1973, 325–30). Thus attraction becomes witchcraft and rape. Quoting Gunnar Myrdal, in An American Dilemma, Ortiz shows how the myth of the black man's overly extended penis (when compared to the white man's) and the white woman's small clitoris (when compared to the black woman's) creates a need for precautions lest the white woman be damaged as well as spoiled (1975, 87–88). In reality, the white woman who lay with the black man may very well have been seeking her own emancipation from patriarchal structures. Her rebellion, through her sexual encounter with the male black body, afforded the white woman the means by which to take control of her own sexuality.
Likewise, the seductive negra (black woman) is held responsible for compromising the virtues of the white man. A popular Cuban saying was "There is no sweet tamarind fruit, nor a virgin mulatto girl." The function
Fanon captured the white Caribbean's sentiments about black sexuality:
As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes…. One is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis. (1967, 157–59, 170; emphasis mine)
This construction of black Cubans as sex objects is best demonstrated by their overrepresentation in numerous La Habana tourist guidebooks published between 1930 and 1959, which directed the uninhibited Euroamerican to the nightly sex shows, predominately featuring blacks (Fox 1973, 278).
The African Cuban may be a walking penis, as per Fanon, but a penis that lacks cojones. White Cubans project their own fears and forbidden desires onto the African Cuban through a fixation on the black penis, which threatens white civilization. Yet the black penis is kept separate from the power and privilege that come only through one's cojones. Lourdes Casal documents this white Cuban fixation on the black penis in recounting the oral history of blacks being hung on lampposts by their genitals in the central plazas throughout Cuba during the 1912 massacre of blacks (1989, 472). The massacre was fueled by news reports of so-called black revolts leading to the rape of white women.
Important to the concept of la lucha is the fear among Resident Cuban blacks that national reconciliation with Exilic Cubans might lead to silence being reimposed. They fear any attempt by Exilic Cubans to change radically the present government in La Habana, lest it once again create a one-way empowerment of white Cubans. The danger of the religious expression of la lucha is that any post-Castro Cuba involving Exilic Cubans may lead to a type of "reconciliation" among white Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, to the exclusion of black Cubans. In contrast to la lucha, ajiaco Christianity calls for the dismantling of systemic white racism and elitism constructed to oppress the descendants of Amerindians, Africans, and Asians (De La Torre 1999b, 59–74).