A Revolution the World Forgot
In the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of people on the island of Cuba made a revolution against a four-hundred-year-old Spanish empire. By several measures, the timing of their efforts was surprising. They came not in the Age of Revolution, when almost every other Iberian colony in the hemisphere won political sovereignty, but rather in the late nineteenth century. Thus as Europe scrambled for colonies in Africa and Asia, the revolution in Cuba attacked Europe’s oldest colonial power. In the process of mounting that attack, the revolution came to challenge another of the principal ideological currents of the late-nineteenth-century world. In an age of ascendant racism, as scientists weighed skulls and as white mobs in the U.S. South lynched blacks, Cuba’s rebel leaders denied the existence of race, and a powerful multiracial army waged anticolonial war. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that revolution—of how it emerged from a colonial slave society, how it re-created and subverted within its ranks the presumptions of that society, and how, in the end, it produced a most peculiar independence, one that transferred Cuba from the direct rule of one empire to the indirect rule of a new one.
Cuba’s nineteenth-century revolution emerged from a society that seemed highly unrevolutionary—a society that in the political ferment of the Age of Revolution earned the designation “the ever-faithful isle.” Between 1776 and 1825, as most of the colonies of North and South America acquired their independence, Cuba remained a loyalist stronghold. The story of Cuba’s deviance from the Latin American norm is, by now, a familiar one: in the face of potential social revolution, creole (Cuban-born) elites opted to maintain the colonial bond with Spain. With that bond, they preserved as well a prosperous and expanding sugar industry built on the labor of enslaved Africans. After the Haitian Revolution of 1791, Cuba replaced colonial St. Domingue as the world’s largest producer of sugar. Content with their new position in the world market, Cuban planters did not want to emulate Haiti again by becoming the hemisphere’s second black republic. Thus colonialism survived in Cuba even as it was defeated to the north and south; and peace and slavery prevailed over insurrection and emancipation.
The colony that outlived those Atlantic revolutions was, however, a fractured and fearful one. In 1846, 36 percent of the population lived enslaved. Even well into the nineteenth century, a thriving (and illegal) slave trade continued to replenish the supply of enslaved Africans. More than 595,000 arrived on the island’s shores in the last fifty years of the trade, between 1816 and 1867—about as many as ever arrived in the United States over the whole period of the trade (523,000). About half those slaves labored on sugar plantations. Under brutal work regimes, many continued to speak African languages and to have only minimal contact with the creole world outside the plantation. Free persons of color constituted another 17 percent of the population. Though legally free, they faced numerous constraints on the exercise of that freedom: prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol, bans against marriage to white men and women, and restrictions on the use of public space, to name but a few.1
At midcentury, then, enslaved and free people of color together constituted a majority of the population, outnumbering those identified as white. That white population, educated in the fear of black and slave rebellion, looked to Haiti and clung to Spain in fear. Haiti’s slave revolution served as a perpetual example of what might happen to whites in the midst of armed rebellion; but there were smaller, local examples as well. The most famous, perhaps, was the alleged conspiracy of 1843–44, said to comprise a massive number of slaves, free people of color, and abolitionist statesmen from England. Even as late as 1864, only four years before the outbreak of nationalist insurgency, authorities uncovered a conspiracy in El Cobre in which slaves from seven area farms were allegedly to join forces to “kill all the whites and make war in order to be free.” When the would-be rebels were captured and tried in a Spanish military court, translators had to be hired, for the enslaved suspects spoke no Spanish.2 In this context of slavery and division, the colonial state and many influential white creoles asserted that to risk expelling Spain was to invite a more horrible fate. Cuba, they said, would either be Spanish or it would be African; it would be Spanish or it would be another Haiti. For those with the power to decide, the answer came without hesitation: Cuba would remain a Spanish colony. There did exist a handful of prominent intellectuals willing to consider, if hypothetically, the founding of a Cuban nation independent from Spain. But, always, they were careful to specify that the Cuban nationality they desired—“the only one that any sensible man would concern himself with—[was] a nationality formed by the white race.”3
It was onto this world that revolution erupted on October 10, 1868; and when it did, it seemed to defy the fear and division that formed the society from which it emerged. Led initially by a handful of prosperous white men, the revolution placed free men of color in local positions of authority. It also freed slaves, made them soldiers, and called them citizens. And that was just the beginning. The movement formally inaugurated on that day went on to produce three full-fledged anticolonial rebellions over the thirty years that followed: the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), the Guerra Chiquita, or Little War (1879–80), and the final War of Independence (1895–98), which ended with the Spanish-American War. All three rebellions were waged by an army unique in the history of the Atlantic world—the Liberation Army, a multiracial fighting force that was integrated at all ranks. Historians estimate that at least 60 percent of that army was composed of men of color. But this was not just an army in which masses of black soldiers served under a much smaller number of white officers, for many black soldiers ascended through the ranks to hold positions as captains, colonels, and generals and to exercise authority over men identified as white. By the end of the thirty-year period, estimates one historian, about 40 percent of the commissioned officers were men of color.4
If this integrated army was one pillar of the revolution, the other was significantly less tangible. It was a powerful rhetoric of antiracism that began to flourish during the first rebellion and became much more dominant in the years between the legal end of slavery in 1886 and the outbreak of the third and final war in 1895. This new rhetoric made racial equality a foundation of the Cuban nation. Espoused by white, mulatto, and black members of the movement’s civilian and military branches, it asserted that the very struggle against Spain had transformed Cuba into a land where there were “no whites nor blacks, but only Cubans.” It thus condemned racism not as an infraction against individual citizens but as a sin against the life of the would-be nation. Revolutionary rhetoric made racial slavery and racial division concomitant with Spanish colonialism, just as it made the revolution a mythic project that armed black and white men together to form the world’s first raceless nation.5
That this revolution emerged from that slave society makes the story of Cuban independence a remarkable and compelling one. That it emerged from the late-nineteenth-century world makes it seem even more so—for the Cuban revolution unfolded as European and North American thinkers linked biology to progress and divided the world into superior and inferior races. Those ideas, espoused or encouraged by the work of thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, had a profound influence in Latin America.6 Yet in that world “under Darwin’s sway,” the Cuban movement’s principal intellectual leader, José Martí, professed the equality of all races. Indeed, he went further, boldly asserting that there was no such thing as race. Race, he and other nationalists insisted, was merely a tool used locally to divide the anticolonial effort and globally by men who invented “textbook races” in order to justify expansion and empire.7 Here, then, were voices raised not only in opposition to Spanish rule but also in opposition to the prevailing common sense of their time.
While the antiracist presumptions of the revolution defied the central tenets of North Atlantic racial theory, they also differed significantly from racial thinking in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Elsewhere in Latin America politicians and intellectuals came to define their nations in multiracial terms, but they did so relying principally on the notion of miscegenation. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially by the first decades of the twentieth, they argued that biological and cultural mixing had produced a new national type: mestizo, mulatto, and uniquely Mexican, Brazilian, Venezuelan.8 In such formulations, the nation’s inclusiveness was the result of sexual and cultural proximity and contact; and, at least in the case of Brazil, that union seemed to reflect something of the imputed openness of the European colonizer, who mixed with and allegedly accepted the native and the African. This was a vision of unity essentially physical and cultural, and a vision in many ways premised on the agency of Europeans and the passivity of the other. In late-nineteenth-century Cuba, by contrast, national unity was cast as the product of joint political action by armed black, mulatto, and white men fighting in a war against the colonizer. The distinction is a meaningful one, for in the case of Cuba, the nation was imagined not as the result of a physical or cultural union but as the product of a revolutionary cross-racial alliance—a formulation that ostensibly acknowledged the political actions of nonwhite men and therefore carried with it powerful implications for racial and national politics in the peace and republic to follow anticolonial insurgency.9
What Cuba’s nationalist leaders preached and (less perfectly) practiced stood in starker and more concrete contrast to the emerging racial order of its neighbor to the north. Cuban rebels spoke of a raceless nation in the period that represented the nadir in American racial politics. Thus the escalation of racial violence, the spread of spatial segregation by race, and the dismantling of political gains made during Reconstruction in the South occurred in the United States precisely as black and mulatto leaders gained increasing popularity and power in Cuba. Arguably the most popular military leader of the nationalist movement was Antonio Maceo, a mulatto who had joined the movement in 1868 as a common foot soldier and rose to the rank of general. By 1895, he led the insurgent army across the entire territory of the island and won the allegiance of white and nonwhite men and women—a national, multiracial following that in the United States would have been rare in local contexts and unthinkable at the national level. Thus as the color line in the United States grew more and more rigid, and as the consequences for crossing that line became more and more brutal, a revolutionary movement in Cuba appeared willing, sometimes eager, to eradicate those lines in Cuba. And it was the victory of this revolution that American intervention helped block.
To frame the revolution in this light—as an ambitious anticolonial and antiracist project—forces us to reconsider certain questions. First, it suggests potential lines of inquiry for the study of American imperialism. American historians of empire invariably discuss U.S. intervention in Cuba, for it has traditionally been viewed as one of the events that signaled the emergence of the United States on the world stage. But Cuba itself is largely absent from their discussions, as they search for the causes of intervention within the United States (in the frenzy for markets for expanding capitalist industry, or in the closing of the frontier, or in the need to unify the country in the wake of the Civil War and social unrest). So as Teddy Roosevelt ignored Cuban insurgents, so too have Americanist historians generally neglected the complex history of insurgency and counterinsurgency that unfolded in the three decades preceding the United States’ declaration of war on Spain. As a result, they have overlooked the extent to which conditions in Cuba—and the internal story of the revolution itself—shaped the possibilities for U.S. intervention.10 With Cuba and race at center stage of the story, there may emerge new motivations, meanings, and dynamics behind American intervention and new avenues for linking the history of race with the history of empire, for it is clearly significant that in an age of ascendant racism, the United States opted to temper the victory of a multiracial movement explicitly antiracist.
Second, interpreting Cuba’s nineteenth-century rebellions as an ambitious anticolonial and antiracist revolution makes all the more conspicuous the absence of that revolution from historical canons. Given the character of the movement described, it seems strange that few people in the United States, or elsewhere in the non-Cuban (or Spanish) world, have ever heard of this revolution. The explanation for this apparent paradox lies largely in the unusual transition to peace in 1898, when Cuba’s anticolonial war ended not with the founding of an independent Cuban republic but with the emergence of the modern world’s most powerful empire. That fact alone has been sufficient to render Cuba’s thirty-year revolutionary movement invisible in historical canons, sufficient to turn it into a “revolution that the world forgot,” to borrow Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s characterization of the Haitian Revolution a century earlier.11 By broadening the geographical and temporal focus of the war the world knows as a 113-day conflagration, we can thus help rectify that absence and that forgetting.
But to leave the story there, to show merely that there existed a significant, even revolutionary, anticolonial and antiracist movement, would be gravely inadequate. To understand the revolution that preceded American intervention, another kind of challenge is required—a challenge not only to the revolution’s invisibility in American historical consciousness but also to its centrality and coherence in Cuban national memory.
If the exigencies of empire in the United States rendered the thirty years of anticolonial struggle that preceded American intervention largely irrelevant, then the dictates of state-sanctioned revolutionary nationalism in post-1959 Cuba made those same struggles indispensable. The revolutionary government that came to power under the leadership of Fidel Castro forty years ago embraced the independence movement as its spiritual and ideological predecessor. It extolled the anti-imperial and antiracist nationalism of nineteenth-century figures, and it excoriated the intervention of the United States. By its own account, the revolution of 1959 represented the fulfillment and embodiment of nineteenth-century patriotic ideals, thwarted by the intervention of the United States in 1898 and by the decades of direct and indirect American rule that followed. Thus if anticolonial struggle between 1868 and 1898 was reduced to roughly four months of the Spanish-American War in imperial nomenclature, in the new revolutionary lexicon it became “one hundred years of struggle”—from the first anticolonial uprising in 1868 to the revolutionary present of the 1960s. Nineteenth-century struggles were thus central components in a new historical consciousness and a central feature of the new state’s attempt to win historical and national legitimacy.12 This was true in the years following 1959, and it continues to be true today, as placards around the city declare transcendent links between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, and as the country’s political leader continues to talk about 1868—and especially about revolution gone awry and imperialism run amok in 1898—to advance political positions for the present.
Because the post-1959 state construed itself as the fulfillment of the political ideals and desires of long-dead patriots, there was little room for discussion about the character and complexities of nationalist revolution. The nineteenth-century movement appropriated by the revolutionary state was thus so abstract and instrumental that, in effect, struggles and protagonists of 1868–98 were almost as absent and shadowy in nationalist scholarship as they were in imperial historiography (despite their radically different political orientations). Thirty years of conspiracies organized and betrayed, of alliances made and broken, of courses altered and modified, became simply an abstract—though admittedly rousing—tale of a People’s struggle for a Nation. Thus the obscurity around anticolonial insurgency, imposed initially by the contempt and arrogance of empire, remains in many ways unchallenged by the romance and teleology of nationalist narratives.13
To recapture and reinterpret Cuba’s nineteenth-century revolution, then, requires an assault on both imperial silences and nationalist pretensions. This book challenges the latter not by questioning the links between political movements a hundred years apart but by questioning the very nature of the original revolution to which modern revolutionaries have laid claim. Rather than a hostile debunking of national mythology, this is a study that places the complicated nationalist trajectories, the constant pull between racism and antiracism, and the movement-defining inconsistencies and contradictions at center stage of the revolution’s unfolding and undoing. Here, then, the alternative political goals that appeared within the nationalist movement (such as annexation to the United States or home rule under Spain) are not treated as aberrations in the story of the quest for nationhood. Episodes of regional, class, and racial division, likewise, are not seen as deviations along an otherwise straight path but as constitutive of the nationalist project itself, for it was conflict, not consensus, that defined Cuba’s nineteenth-century revolution.14
Of the tensions and contradictions that defined and shaped Cuban nationalism, none seemed as pressing and complicated as those that centered around race. The nationalist movement gave rise to one of the most powerful ideas in Cuban history—the conception (dominant to this day) of a raceless nationality. In rebel camps and battlefields, as well as in newspapers, memoirs, essays, and speeches, patriot-intellectuals (white and nonwhite) made the bold claim that the struggle against Spain had produced a new kind of individual and a new kind of collectivity. They argued that the experience of war had forever united black and white; and they imagined a new kind of nation in which equality was so ingrained that there existed no need to identify or speak of races—a nation in which (to borrow the phrase of the mulatto general Antonio Maceo) there were “no whites nor blacks, but only Cubans.”15 Thus the rebel republic declined to record racial categories of identification on army rosters, and a great many citizens repeatedly asserted (and today continue to assert) the nonexistence of discrimination and the irrelevance of race. This study of anticolonial revolution, then, is also a story of the emergence of a particularly powerful racial ideology. It is the story of the tensions and transformations that produced that ideology and of those that it, in turn, produced.
As that ideology of raceless nationality emerged, it clashed with longstanding colonial arguments about the impossibility of Cuban nationhood. Since the end of the eighteenth century, advocates of colonial rule in Cuba had argued that the preponderance of people of color and the social and economic importance of slavery meant that Cuba could not be a nation. Confronted by threats to political order, they invoked images of racial warfare and represented the nationalists’ desired republic as Haiti’s successor. Such arguments worked well in the Age of Revolution, when Cuban elites decided to forgo independence and to maintain a prosperity built largely on the forced labor of Africans in sugar. These arguments continued to work, in modified form, even after the start of anticolonial insurgency in 1868, when nationalist leaders of the first rebellion (the Ten Years’ War) began to challenge traditional formulations about the impossibility of Cuban nationhood. They established a rebel republic and placed free people of color in public office at the local level; they mobilized enslaved workers and declared (falteringly and ambivalently) the (gradual and indemnified) end of slavery. Spanish authorities and their allies responded to these challenges by deploying familiar arguments about the racial dangers of rebellion. As usual, the references to Haiti became ubiquitous. But they were almost always brief and nebulous—as if merely to speak the name sufficed to call up concrete images of black supremacy: of black men who raped white women and killed their husbands and fathers, of political authority exercised by self-anointed black emperors, of wealth and property annihilated, of God and civilization spurned.
The movement’s detractors utilized the same images and arguments again—to even better effect—during the second separatist uprising known as the “Little War” of 1879–80. Colonial officials, however, did more than merely label the independence movement black. They also consciously and skillfully manipulated features of the rebellion to make them more closely correspond to their interpretation. They tampered with lists of captured insurgents, omitting the names of white rebels; they made surrendering white insurgents sign public declarations repudiating the allegedly racial goals of black co-leaders. And the blacker colonial officials made the rebellion appear, the more white insurgents surrendered, and the blacker the rebellion became, and so on. Race, and its manipulation by colonial authorities, are therefore absolutely central to understanding the limits of multiracial insurgency in the first half of the nationalist period.
Thus, as independence activists prepared to launch a final and, they hoped, successful rebellion against Spain, they faced not only the challenge of uniting different separatist camps and of amassing men, arms, and money for the struggle. They faced as well the imperative of combating colonial representations of the independence movement. To succeed at anticolonial insurgency separatists had to invalidate traditional claims about the racial risks of rebellion; they had to construct an effective counterclaim to arguments that for almost a century had maintained that Cuba was unsuited to nationhood. “The power to represent oneself,” they had come to realize, was “nothing other than political power itself.”16 The struggle for that power of representation required that patriot-intellectuals reconceptualize nationality, blackness, and the place of people of color in the would-be nation. In the process, black, mulatto, and white intellectuals constructed powerful and eloquent expressions of raceless nationality, of a nationality that had antiracism as a solid foundation. Among these intellectuals were José Martí, white son of a Spaniard and a Cuban, who in 1892 founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York; Juan Gualberto Gómez, a mulatto journalist born to enslaved parents, educated in Paris and Havana; and Rafael Serra y Montalvo, a prominent journalist who began his career as a cigar worker. All wrote of the union of blacks and whites in anti-colonial war, and in that physical and spiritual embrace between black and white men in battle they located the symbolic and material birth of the nation. In their vision, black and mulatto men could never threaten that nation with aspirations to a black republic. Such portrayals thus explicitly countered colonialist claims about race war and the impossibility of Cuban nationhood. To powerful notions of racial fear and unrest they juxtaposed equally powerful images of racial harmony and racial transcendence.
But if this complex process of reconceptualizing race and nationality occurred in dialogue with the racialist claims of the colonial state, it also emerged from—and produced new—tensions within the nationalist community itself. By declaring that there were no races and by asserting that racism was an infraction against the nation as a whole, nationalist rhetoric helped defeat Spanish claims about the impossibility of Cuban nationhood. That same rhetoric, however, also provided a conceptual framework that black soldiers could use to condemn the racism not only of their Spanish enemies but also of their fellow insurgents and leaders. Thus the ideology of a raceless nationality, even as it suggested that race had been transcended, gave black insurgents and citizens a powerful language with which to speak about race and racism within the rebel polity—a language with which to show that that transcendence was yet to occur. And, in fact, throughout the period of insurrection, especially during and after the final war of independence in 1895, black soldiers and officers used the language of nationalism to expose and condemn what they perceived as racism within the nationalist movement. Thus the language of raceless nationality, a language of harmony and integration, became also a “language of contention.”17
Just as nationalist rhetoric and insurgency shaped black political behavior, so too did black participation profoundly affect both the discourse and practice of nationalism. The mobilization of free and enslaved Cubans of color helped radicalize Cuban nationalism and made the rebellions militarily viable. Black participation was even celebrated in the nationalist prose of the period. But black mobilization—in the beginning because its only precedent lay in slave rebellion and later because it was accompanied by significant black leadership—also created anxieties among insurgents and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Black political activity and power led some white leaders to impugn the motives of black co-leaders; and it led others to abandon the movement altogether and ally with Spain to secure its defeat. Black participation in insurgency—and representations of that participation—thus had the power, on the one hand, to compromise the success of nationalist efforts and, on the other, to strengthen the appeal of the movement.
It is this tension between revolution and counterrevolution and between racism and antiracism that defined Cuba’s nineteenth-century revolution and that forms the heart of this story. Only by placing the tensions uncomfortably contained within the anticolonial movement at the heart of our examination can we begin to understand the apparent disjuncture (first) between the racist slave society and the antiracist revolution it produced and (second) between that antiracist revolution and the ambiguous independence it produced in 1898—an independence that turned Cuba into the formal (and not entirely unwilling) charge of the United States.
Choosing a language or a set of terms with which to write about race and racial categories is always difficult. And this book, like so many others written in the last ten or fifteen years, must necessarily weave back and forth between asserting the constructed character of what we call race and then speaking about black people who did this and white people who did that. The tension is, in this kind of project, irreconcilable: for the fact that race is not a biological category does not mean that historical protagonists spoke, thought, and acted as if it weren’t. The conviction that race is historically and socially contingent does, however, make it imperative for historians to avoid projecting onto their subjects categories derived from other times and other places.
This tentative solution—of relying on categories derived from the period and setting under study—poses, however, additional difficulties when one is writing about racial categories across national borders, and especially when one is writing about race in Latin America and the Caribbean for audiences in the United States. Transcribing (and translating) categories directly from documents means using racial labels that have a dissonant and occasionally pejorative ring in the United States. Mulato comes to mind right away—a word with still powerful negative connotations in the United States but that in Cuba has long had a ring almost of celebration.18 Some scholars, faced with such quandaries, opt to Americanize their language, using terms that sound more familiar to North American ears: Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, and so on. This language, though smoother in English than many of the alternatives, creates other problems. In the case of Cuba, the term “Afro-Cuban,” which sounds so neutral and natural in American English, has its own local history. And within that history, the term has traditionally invoked exoticized and racist representations of African culture in the early and mid-twentieth century. If the phrase creates problems within Cuban contexts, it creates equally discouraging ones in American contexts, for the label “Afro-Cuban” (like its equivalents Afro-Brazilian or Afro-Venezuelan) erases differences that appear to have been observed by historical protagonists. To translate the terms mulato (or pardo) and negro (or moreno) simply as Afro-Cuban is to blur distinctions clearly drawn at the time the words were written, spoken, or heard. The term, in other words, creates the mistaken impression that Latin American racial identities can be contained within current North American racial categories.19
For these reasons, I have tried, like other recent historians of race, to use categories and descriptors used by the actors in the story itself. Sometimes these are self-ascribed labels; more often (of necessity) they are categories ascribed to individuals and groups by others around them: colonial bureaucrats, enemy soldiers, judicial interrogators, political allies, or commanding officers. That I have used the labels that appear in surviving documents does not make the categories I use more real than others, but it does mean that they are categories that emerge from within nineteenth-century Cuba. Throughout, I have used “black” when the records use negro or moreno, and “mulatto” when the records say mulato or pardo. I have also used the sometimes awkward phrase “of color” to refer to those people identified as either black or mulatto.20 The term was used in the 1880s and 1890s by black and mulatto activists who thought that building black-mulatto unity would aid politically in the struggle for civil rights and national independence. It was used as well by proponents of colonial rule who frequently sought to discredit their political assailants by labeling them all “people of color.”
Using racial categories as they appeared in historical documents does more, however, than observe alliances and identifications made more than a century ago. It also, I hope, makes clear the impossibility of relying on a single and uniform system of racial denomination, for in the sources what one observes almost immediately is a high degree of inconsistency in the ways people ascribed racial labels. Sometimes people and institutions drew distinctions between blacks and mulattoes (as in pardo and moreno), and sometimes they did not (as in de color). The point here is not whether Cuba, like the United States, had one color line (between black and white) or two (one between black and mulatto, another between mulatto and white), for even in cases in which multiple lines existed, they were not always observed. Sometimes historical protagonists drew multiple lines, sometimes one, and sometimes (more rarely) they drew none. By using categories from both biracial and triracial systems of racial categorization, I do not answer the familiar question about the number of Latin American color lines; that is not my purpose.21 But I do hope that using language from both binary and ternary racial systems shifts the terrain of the debate somewhat—from structural questions about lines drawn a priori to questions about the way race, racial boundaries, and ideologies of race are made and remade on the ground.22 And if the racial labels sound sometimes strange, it is my hope that this strangeness, rather than deterring readers, will function to remind them, first, of the nonuniversal nature of North American understandings and, second, of the unnatural character of all these categories.