What we are is the guarantee of what we will become.
A people define themselves by what they propose to become.
It was not until the nineteenth century that we knew what we wished to become.
Cuba’s past is the best guarantee of its future.
It cannot be said of the Cubans that they lack a history. That is why, some say, we are unhappy.
It is not clear precisely when or exactly how the possibility of a separate nationality insinuated itself into domains of popular awareness. Until late in the eighteenth century, vernacular convention favored the use of criollo as the designation of choice to describe native-born residents of the island, as distinct from peninsular, used to denote Spanish-born inhabitants. At some point early into the nineteenth century, usage changed, and the proposition of cubano acquired currency among the native-born residents, that is, at about the same time that the idea of nation seized hold of the criollo imagination, a time too when the difference between the needs of the island and the interests of the peninsula settled into ever-sharper contrast—or perhaps it was the other way around.
But it was true too that the claim to nation (patria) drew into its premise a complex epistemology, principally as a perspective from which to assemble categories of usable knowledge, at once inspirational and instrumental, as a source of self-definition and means of self-determination. To contemplate the possibility of nation necessarily implied the need to develop a deeper knowledge of the collective modes through which to articulate aspirations to nationality.
The plausibility of claim to nation could not be sustained without the presence of a past: a people possessed of a history of their own as a necessary condition for a nation of their own. Historical knowledge provided the means with which to join past and present in a dialectical relationship, a way through which a people could presume to establish the basis of a separate nationality. The enduring subjectivity of the history of Cuba was thus fixed at its inception. To confer on the proposition of patria the premise of a proper history was to historicize pretensions to a separate nation and inscribe a record of chronology into the claim of a separate nationality, that is, to fashion something of a legitimacy to the proposition of sovereign nationhood. History offered a way with which to differentiate Cuba from Spain, to fashion the past as source of nationality and at the same time promote affection for and appreciation of the reciprocities through which to foster awareness of a shared identity.
Almost from the moment of its inception, the historical narrative was structured around and informed by oppositional intent, for to suggest the possibility of a separate Cuban past could not but challenge the premise upon which the colonial moral order depended. The very paradigm of a past implied the use of history as a means to differentiate Cubans from Spaniards and offered a discursive device of subversive purport. The claim to a proper past served to decrease or otherwise diminish the relevance of the Spanish presence from the Cuban past as a means to eliminate the Spanish presence from the Cuban future. Historical knowledge served at once as a source of national formation, for which it was summoned, and product of national consciousness, to which it contributed. The subjectivity of historical knowledge emerged out of a deepening national self-awareness, a process in which Cubans made an immense leap of faith as a means to will themselves to be subjects of history, as actors and agents, a people possessed of the idea of destiny as the minimum condition with which to aspire to sovereign nationhood.
The claim that Cuba had a past of its own, and that this past was proper to acknowledge and appropriate to act upon, and that indeed a separate history existed to which Cubans could turn and interrogate as a source of self-definition, suggested notions of sovereignty of far-reaching significance. Much had to do with a deepening awareness of the possibility of Cubans as a people apart, bound together by a common past, and to which to attribute common origins and shared sensibilities. This was a past imagined as properly belonging to Cubans as a matter of patrimony, at the very source of consciousness of Cuban, and more: a way to validate the propriety of agency and advance the logic of a separate nationality where “the mere claim to being Cuban,” wrote essayist Antonio Duarte y Ramos in 1896, “was considered by the Spanish Government and its supporters as an unpardonable crime.”1
That these sentiments contained within their very premise subversive possibilities was not immediately apparent or generally apprehended, of course. It would be unduly facile to attribute mischievous intent to the formation of nineteenth-century historical consciousness. In fact, it was more complicated. Historical narratives drew unabashedly upon sentimental attachments and heartfelt affections; they were wistful in tone and celebratory in purpose: all in all—at least at first glance—hardly more than declarations of devotion to place.
But that was precisely where the power of their appeal lay. Attachments fostered affinities, and affections produced allegiances: sentiments that were themselves experienced as the feelings from which the passion of nationality developed. Historical knowledge provided a way to draw distinction and define difference, to call attention to the things that the native-born population of the island shared in common as source of similarity and basis of solidarity.
The power of historical knowledge was contained within its capacity to foster consciousness of Cuban as a function of a newly discerned past, to enhance appreciation of shared antecedents as source of entitlement to nation, antecedents in which all creoles were potentially implicated and from which to advance the logic of a new nationality. Historical narratives propounded a point of view; they drew upon powerful emotions, those sentiments that often bestirred men and women to moral purpose and dramatic action. This was the past as prophetic, a means with which to use history to make history and forge a consensus around shared antecedents as the basis for collective action.
To invoke a separate past was to use history to validate the proposition of “Cuban,” one more way to differentiate Cuba from Spain, to promote affection for and appreciation of the reciprocities of shared experiences by which to advance the claim to a separate nation. This was the stuff from which hazy yearnings emerged, of those earliest of dawnings in which people located themselves in time and place: a proper history possessed of the capacity to anticipate a past as a condition of the future. No longer was the Cuban past viewed as an extension of Spanish history, but rather of a people who possessed a different experience, distinct from Spain, and through which they had developed into a people dissimilar from Spaniards—but most of all as a way through which “memory” of the past could be shared and disseminated as source of consciousness of nationality and constituency for nation.
The Cuban historical narrative was imbued with a sense of purpose at its inception—indeed as a condition of its production. That its formal convention was determined by the intent for which it was designed to serve meant too that instrumental purport was inscribed into the very structure of the narrative, and thereupon deployed in the service of sovereign nationhood. The claim to nation thus produced a historical record, but it also produced a political need for a past, which in turn continued to produce and reproduce the nation. “The historiography of Cuba,” historian Fe Iglesias rightly noted, “has evolved to complement the development of the nation and at the same time has contributed to the consolidation of this process.”2
To have discerned the need at all for history was itself product and portent of a momentous shift in consciousness, evidence of an awareness of the utility of the past as a usable discursive framework through which to confer legitimacy on aspirations to nation. The historical narrative could not but reflect the ambivalence—indeed, the tension—with which temporal distance from Spain was drawn as a means to convey political distance from Spain. To propound a separate past could not but deepen Cuban estrangement from Spain, of course. A proper past enhanced the propriety of agency and promoted a sense of separate selfhood, a means through which to validate the claim of difference and divergence—of the very logic of separation: independence, in a word. This was the meaning of what essayist Jorge Mañach would later characterize as the Cuban “consciousness of being in history,” the point at which historians first propounded the “transcendental concept of agency and a land of one’s own.”3
But it is also true that the formulation of coherent narrative structures of the Cuban past were themselves the product of specific historical circumstances. The narrative must itself be understood as a historical artifact, endowed intrinsically with documentary function in the service of an emerging but still inchoate national project. It was a product of its place, of course, and its time, imbued with purpose as a matter of discursive intent, designed to validate the very circumstances for which it was summoned. The narrative developed as a matter of need, a means by which Cubans addressed the circumstances of their times. “The history of Cuba does not begin to command real interest,” observed poet Pedro Santacilia in 1859, nearly a decade after the rebellions of Narciso López, Joaquín de Agüero, and José Isidoro de Armenteros, “until these recent times, when its pages, bloodied by Spanish despotism, were bestirred by the warm winds of revolution.”4
The historical narrative in this instance implied premonition of nation, which shared the premise of a new collective consciousness to which it contributed. Thus arose the need to historicize the narrative, for embedded in its premise—even without meaning to, and especially because it did not mean to—was the function of discharge of an inherently surreptitious purpose. Like all historical records, the Cuban narrative is possessed of multiple meanings in a constant state of flux, where the premise of interrogation often determines the insights it yields. It acts at once to provide an account of an earlier time, even as it serves as a document of its own time; it addresses the past within the analytical categories most readily available at the time, which means too that in construction and in content the historical narrative bears testimony to the circumstances of its own formation.
The Cuban historical narrative presumed the efficacy of nation as a condition of its structure. “It has always pained me as a good son [buen hijo],” Ignacio de Urrutia y Montoya (1735–95) acknowledged in 1789, “to see my beloved patria without its own history.” Urrutia was entirely lucid in his purpose: “To learn the past, to make judgments on the present, and reflect on the future.” Urrutia offered his history of Cuba—Teatro histórico, jurídico y político militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital, La Habana—as a demonstration of his devotion to “my beloved patria” (mi amada patria) and insisted that knowledge of the past was essential to “the rights of the Island,” adding: “It is disgraceful that a learned man ignore the common rights of his patria and even more so that they be not investigated in their origins.”5 Antonio José Valdés (1780–1836) studied the Cuban past, he explained, out of the “desire to give the patria the history that it lacks . . . in gratitude to the land in which I was born” (agradecido al suelo en que nací) and from the “simple effect of my disposition to be of service to the patria” (útil a la patria).6 In exile far away in Rhode Island, Pedro José Guiteras (1814–90) completed his history of Cuba—Historia de la Isla de Cuba (1865)—out of a desire, he insisted, “to be of service to our beloved patria and to mitigate the sorrow of a long absence.” The historian was duty-bound to write with objectivity, Guiteras acknowledged. But objectivity did not preclude objective. “This impartiality preserves the virtue of teaching future generations,” Guiteras explained, “so that they may be inculcated with the spirit to imitate earlier ones. . . . Without this care history neither explains nor satisfies and what is worse, it has the tendency to demoralize and defile.”7 José Martín Félix de Arrate (1697–1766) explained that his “sole objective” for writing Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales (1830)—published posthumously—was to assure that the city of Havana did “not lack what cities of lesser prominence and reputation enjoy.” Arrate was explicit: “I do not wish to come to the end of my life without offering my patria a modest demonstration of the love I have for it.”8 Historian Vidal Morales y Morales (1848–1904) was obliged to “reveal the genius of a people in its multiple manifestations in order to obtain exact knowledge of the truth.”9 This was the sentiment that informed Jacobo de la Pezuela’s (1811–82) Historia de la Isla de Cuba (1868): a desire—he admitted—to respond to “a vacuum that the decorum of a national literature was obliged to fill.”10 It was inconceivable, essayist José Antonio Echeverría (1815–85) insisted, that Cuba could lack its own history. Echeverría contemplated the need for a history of Cuba with a sense of urgency. “In truth,” he warned, “for a people to be without a history is like a child without parents, who does not know who he is, or where he comes from, because he has not been educated, and cannot contemplate his future.” The importance of history, Echeverría affirmed, lay in its capacity to “inspire love of the patria and provide the strength to defend it.” The stated purpose of his unfinished Suma historial de la Isla de Cuba was explained succinctly: “To know how this Island developed and to foster the greatest love [for Cuba] among its sons.”11 For Echeverría, historical knowledge served to “contribute to the advance of science and art, improve the customs of a people, and infuse a love of patria and convey the spirit with which to defend it.”12 Historian Eduardo Torres-Cuevas was indeed correct to observe in 2006 that “the first historians sought to establish the historical foundations of creole sentiment . . . and created the firm basis by which to convert the vague sentiment of the creole into the rationale of a new identity: the point of departure of Cuban nationality.”13
It is thus possible to speak of a discernible nineteenth-century historiography, dedicated explicitly to advancing the proposition of nation and itself evidence of a deepening national consciousness: history as a means by which Cubans affirmed that they were indeed formed within a different experience, distinct from Spain, an explanation of how they had developed into a people dissimilar from Spaniards, but most of all a way to configure a specific epistemology as source of consciousness of nationality and the basis of nation.
Point of view was inscribed into the very premise of the historical narrative and fixed the perspective with which the history of Cuba was structured. This implied the development of historical knowledge explicitly as a surrogate narrative of nation, as a matter of individual remembrance and collective memory, of course, but also as a function of politics. Knowledge of the past contributed to the confidence with which Cubans inscribed themselves into history, that is, the proposition of a shared past as a necessary condition for a common purpose, a people bound together as a nationality in an inexorable reciprocity, dependent upon one another to make good on the promise implied in the idea of national sovereignty.
All through the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Cubans consciously participated in the “making” of history. The men and women who participated in the nineteenth-century wars for independence had a past to share and lessons to teach. They carried history forward by example and experience, within themselves, self-consciously in the form of first-person testimony. The past and present collapsed upon one another, shaping consciousness and influencing conduct, and this too passed as history. “The past is the source of the present,” insisted José Martí in 1889. “It is necessary to have knowledge of the past for the past is found within the present.”14 It was to history that Antonio Maceo appealed, and from which he fashioned the larger logic of liberation. He insisted on the right of peoples “to raise themselves into the subjects of history.” History “authorizes the use of force when rights are trampled,” Maceo was certain, and he concluded: “In accordance with the philosophy of history and reason, I will always defend the right of Cuba to establish a proper and free life [una vida propia y libre] over the impossibility of its union with and under Spain [con y bajo España).” Maceo affirmed his commitment to “the idea to make of our people [la idea de hacer de nuestro pueblo] masters of their destiny, to place in their possession the proper means adequate to fulfill their mission to reach the status of subject of History.”15
At the center of the narratives on nation was the creole claim to Cuba as a place to possess. The proposition of nationality derived its internal logic first as an argument of nativity, expressed principally as a conviction that the island belonged to its people by virtue of their having been born there—los naturales de la isla de Cuba, as Spanish authorities were wont to say.16 Attachment to place, with all its cultural and existential implications, assumed profoundly personal means through the experience of daily life from which to evoke the emotions often associated with memory in the form of sentimentality and nostalgia. Part of becoming Cuban was expressed as a deepening bond to place of origin and to come to an appreciation of how Cubans became who they were and of how being of Cuba implied entitlement to Cuba.
Vast numbers of men and women invested themselves deeply in a personal relationship to place, and that it was personal implied too the possibility of passion: attachment to and affection for the land, sometimes in the form of homeland (suelo natal), often as homestead (terreno), occasionally land as metaphor for country (tierra), at times a combination of all (nuestra tierra natal), and always as something to possess as site and source of community—tierra as “the basic formula of Cuban nationalism” (la formula básica del nacionalismo cubano), as journalist Eduardo Abril Amores insisted.17
To propound nativity was to proclaim a sense of self as one with source of self: patria as place of birth and setting of childhood, the site of forebears and formation, as place of kin and community to which one was bound through memories and modalities of everyday life. Writer Dolores María de Ximeno recalled the conventional wisdom of the nineteenth century in her memoirs: “[There existed] the natural tendency, the sacred right of man to make his own the land in which he is born and in which he has established himself for many generations.”18 Land symbolized resting place, as in burial ground, a place of one’s past in the most personal of ways, often memorialized by cemeteries filled with monuments and markers of sacred purport, which obligated the Cuban, writer Rosario Sigarroa insisted, “to fight to defend his home and the sacred land containing the remains of his forefathers”19—land consecrated by the interment of the remains of forebears, as site to which personal history was inexorably bound. Attorney Mariano Aramburo y Machado wrote in 1901 of his return to Cuba precisely in these terms:
There is found my aging father who is awaiting my return, the coffin that contains the bones of my mother, the land in whose bosom the bodies of my ancestors await the Resurrection, the house of my grandparents that formed my earliest impressions and in which are still found the echoes of my earliest childhood cries, the church that received my earliest prayers, the school that nourished my understanding of the world and the teachers who provided me with rudiments of science and inculcated in my heart the foundations of virtue.20
Place as repository of memories gave meaning to being, which in turn served to intensify the desire to claim Cuba. The bonds reached deep into domains of popular consciousness, whereby a people could not imagine themselves without those attachments through which awareness of self had been formed. This was belonging as an essential facet of being, a way to give temporal meaning and spatial form to assumptions of antecedents and anticipation of descendants. To be denied claim to patria was to be deprived possession of place of formation, to be without those relationships from which the very meaning of being was derived.
Consciousness of Cuban developed as a deepening awareness of a collective condition as both means and end and acted to foster a longing for the kinds of associations not easily accommodated within the framework of Spanish colonial structures. The idea of nation provided reason for association and motive for mobilization, at once a means of empowerment and source of community, but mostly it offered Cubans the prospects of agency as protagonists in the creation of a nation of their own: the one eventuality to which the Spanish presence in Cuba was dedicated to preventing. Indeed, the proposition of nationality contained within its configuration properties incompatible with the premise of Spanish sovereignty. The meaning of nacionalidad cubana, José Antonio Saco insisted in 1859, implied the sum total of “our ancient origins, our language, our usages and customs and our traditions. All this makes up the actual nacionalidad that we call cubana because it has formed on and is rooted in an island called Cuba.” Added Saco: “All people who inhabit the same land, and have similar origins, similar language, common usages and customs—those people have a nacionalidad.”21
Patria as a place-bound source of collective identity expanded into realms of Cuban awareness as a series of cultural revelations, by way of artistic expressions—both highbrow and lowbrow—as classical genres and folk forms: in the aggregate, sensory experiences through which to heighten awareness of place as source of consciousness of self and vice versa. Attachment to nation developed in multiple forms and developed most vividly by way of self-reflective aesthetics, the way that an expanding cultural imagination set a people on a course toward national integration. Sensory knowledge served to forge powerful local attachments, which when fulfilled often assumed the form of emotional exaltation and when thwarted produced visceral indignation. Much of what came together as properly Cuban formed around cultural-specific experiences. Precisely because consciousness of Cuban drew much of its early vitality from aesthetic sensibilities—both inchoate and intuitive, evoked often as a sentiment and at times as entitlement—it also served to transport much of what developed as national identity into deeply emotional domains, thereupon to summon and sustain the peculiar intensity and single-minded ferocity with which successive generations of Cubans mobilized in behalf of nation.
Long before the proposition of sovereign nationhood acquired political meaning, it had inspired deep sentimental attachments, those most powerful of susceptibilities by which cognitive structures of nation and intuitive meaning of nationality were charged with purpose and passion. Consciousness of Cuban obtained powerful emotional content as a source of social cohesion, principally as a moral system from which behavioral modes of duty and conventions of devotion were inscribed into norms of nationality. The proposition of Cuban was registered early as a matter of cultural revelation in the form of aesthetic production, at once as product and portent of a deepening mood, the stirring of cultural awareness of an emerging national temperament. This was not all art for art’s sake, of course, but even when it was not produced for the sake of something else, the reach of its influence could not be contained by the intention of the artist. That moral purpose was not intended did not preclude the possibility that moral meaning was inferred.
It was through the medium of creole aesthetics that the proposition of Cuban was transformed from a source of self-knowledge into a means of self-determination. Poets and painters contributed evocative stirrings to emerging populist notions of nation. They propounded a point of view, very much a politics by another means; the language and symbols of nation directed Cuban aesthetics to outlets in new motifs. They elaborated upon idioms of nation and in the process added vernacular forms to popular aspirations very much conveyed in stylized images and symbols. Cultural production created new interior spaces from which to look out to imagine nation not—initially—as a politics but as a matter of sensation and sentiment, of emotion and passion, ways by which increasing numbers of men and women were drawn into an emerging consciousness of Cuban, where people began to “feel” themselves part of something larger than themselves.
Nineteenth-century aesthetics drew upon those creative impulses through which a people give expression to the concerns of their times: inscribed into the structure of literary genres, implied in the visual arts, and enacted in the performing arts. The creative impulses of the nineteenth century fused together into a new creole sensibility, one in which interior purpose assumed the guise of sentimentality, where the exaltation of Cuban formed and informed meanings of demeanor and disposition, all leading—although not always apparent at the time—to a new mode of politics. Artists strove mightily to efface their presence, to claim the role of presenting their work as reality for objective contemplation, but in fact forging bonds between the audience and the subject of their work. Creative forms contained discernible traces of the premonition of a redemptive vision, which shared something with the emerging collective consciousness to which they contributed.
Successive generations of Cubans arrived at the possibility of nationality by way of highly charged aesthetic genres as a matter of sensory susceptibilities. Cubans devoted to their tierra natal, determined to celebrate the nation through aesthetic representation, were inevitably drawn to the dramatic possibilities offered in literary forms, the plastic arts, music, and dance. Artists summoned sounds, sights, and images of nation with seeming objective specificity. It would be difficult to imagine who could better bring the emerging ideal of nationality “to life” than novelists, poets, musicians, and artists. Medium and message together acted to deepen appreciation for things Cuban and in the process fashioned usable aesthetic motifs from which an emerging sensibility of Cuban found expression.
Consciousness of Cuban deepened within the logic of successive cultural revelations, drawing upon tradition and custom, on folkways and popular forms, a people of diverse social origins and dissimilar racial identities coming over time to recognize themselves as part of and participants in a common national project. Notions of nation drew upon local fauna and flora in lyric poetry and landscape painting, in the elegies of folkloric writers, in the sentimentalized renderings of melody, in the verse of the ten-line décimas, in the choreographies of popular dance: all as new expressive genres that contributed to a heightened subjectivity of nation.
Attributes of nationality assumed multiple aesthetic forms, often the result of determined, self-conscious efforts to develop usable modes of self-definition. Poet José Jacinto Milanés called for the development of a creole idiom, one that eliminated the presence of Spanish influence in Cuban poetry. “Why cannot we in Cuba popularize poetry, making it a mirror of our usages and the many preoccupations contained therein?” Milanés asked rhetorically in 1836. “Of what use are those sonnets, those odes, those long serious compositions that are not understood by the Cuban people [el pueblo cubano]. . . . Do you not think that this type of [Cuban] poetry, in addition to the pleasure it brings to our compatriots for being entirely criolla, would also please foreigners who are interested in the true state of our usages and opinions at the present time?”22
Representations of nation drew freely upon the ways of the folk, in their most ordinary and commonplace forms: in recreational pastimes and leisure pursuits, as local custom and rural manners, always as celebration of things Cuban. Local motifs insinuated themselves into Cuban genres at about the time that the idea of nation was gaining currency, what historian Juan Remos described as the “imagery that depicted public and private life in Cuba, both in an urban setting and a rural ambience.”23
The costumbristas, as the exponents of folkways became known, included Luis Victoriano Betancourt, Manuel de Zequeira, José María de Cárdenas, Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, and Anselmo Suárez y Romero, among many others.24 One of the early collections of published costumbrista essays, Los cubanos pintados por sí mismo: Colección de tipos cubanos (1852), featured a narrative exposition on Cuban “types” identified by occupations and associated with corresponding personality idiosyncrasies, including the milkman, the country doctor, the peasant, the midwife, and the country lawyer, among others. In the prologue to Los cubanos pintados por sí mismo, writer Blas San Millán drew the relationship between the celebration of costumbrismo and nationality explicitly as intimations of national character: “Cubans have also wanted to represent themselves [pintarse á sí mismo], for the same reasons that have impelled the French and Spanish . . . : to demonstrate their worth. Their intent is not to create caricatures but portraits of specific types . . . of the population. . . . Cubans have to know themselves to portray themselves faithfully, they have to value who they are and what they are.” He concluded: “Within this context, the work they present has far more importance than appears at first glance and its completion is a true service to the country.”25
The stirrings of national self-awareness found new expression in the development of distinctly Cuban musical idioms. It was not that music was politicized, exactly, but rather that politics was music in another form, the way a people began to assert agency in formation of themselves. Cubans adapted Spanish music and dance to local influences and idiosyncrasies and thereupon fused it with folk forms and African rhythms. A highly textured and multilayered idiom developed out of a process of cultural synthesis at a historic moment: the incorporation of new instruments, the fusion of new rhythms, and the development of new orchestrations, all drawn together selectively from what was at hand and most readily available.
Music was deeply implicated in the emerging consciousness of Cuban, itself an acknowledgment that received musical forms no longer fit the temperament of a new nationality in the process of formation. “The first reports we have of music on the island,” early ethnographer José María de la Torre wrote in Lo que fuimos y lo que somos, o La Habana antigua y moderna (1857), “are very unpleasant; it is sufficient to note that black women sang in the church and among the instruments used was the gourd [güiro], used today in the vulgar dances [changüis] of the countryside.” De la Torre continued:
It is known that the provincial music and dance are the zapateo and contradanza. . . . The origin of the music of the zapateo appears to be from La Mancha in Castile. The origin of the dance is also from the Peninsula, but one and the other have experienced such variations that it can be said today to constitute a Cuban specialty [una especialidad cubana]. The contradanza music had captivated even foreigners and when it is composed by people of color, it has greater acceptance among criollos.26
By mid-century, local idioms had evolved fully into discernible Cuban genres—“the ‘Danza Criolla’ is the patriotic music of Cuba,” observed traveler Walter Goodman in 187327—as the embodiment of the creative energy with which a people invested themselves in something that was uniquely theirs, including the contradanza, the habanera, the danzón, the guaracha, the guajira, and the punto: all forms, Fernando Ortiz would later write, that evoked “our palm groves, the spirit of our history, the sentiment of love for the patria, and faith in its future.”28 The danza, journalist Ramón J. de Palacio insisted in 1883, “was nothing more than the old Spanish contradanza, modified by the warm and voluptuous climate of the tropics.”29 Few indeed were the number of travelers who visited Cuba during the nineteenth century who failed to take note of music and dance. “The Cubans are remarkably, and indeed passionately, fond of music, vocal and instrumental,” Allen Lewis wrote in his travel journal in 1852.30 “Never in my life have I seen such exciting and provocative dancing or listened to such enthusiastic and delicious music,” Spaniard Antonio de las Barras exclaimed during his travels to Cuba in the early 1860s.31 At mid-century, Fredrika Bremer similarly commented on the Cuban fondness for music, describing “that Cuban contra-dance, and its music so peculiar, so delineative of the Creole temperament.” She added: “Wherever one may be, or wherever one goes in Matanzas, this dance-music may be heard. The time and measure are derived from the children of Africa, the peculiar music from the Spanish Creoles of Cuba.”32 Louisa Mathilde Woodruff visited Matanzas almost twenty years later and also noted “the celebrated Cuban dance, a strange, monotonous, half wild and half sad melody, which makes you doubtful whether it was intended to set you dancing madly, or to lull you to a dreamy sleep.”33
There was a performative dimension to the emerging cognizance of Cuban: a people coming together to play music, to sing, and to dance, but most of all coming together self-consciously as Cubans, in the process fostering those solidarities around which the sense of nationality took hold. This was music as a language, in its own way substantiating the claim to the credibility of Cuban. Music and dance developed into one of the principal modes by which to articulate nationality, as aesthetic forms that insinuated themselves into an emerging national sensibility: another way to subvert the idioms by which culture sustained the colonial consensus.34 The danzón, argued historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals, was “a palpable manifestation of national integration.”35 The compositions of Nicolás Ruiz Espadero (“Canto del guajiro” and “Canto del esclavo”), the habaneras of Manuel Saumell Robredo (“La amistad,” “Recuerdos tristes,” and “La celestina”), the contradanzas of Gaspar Villate (“La virgín tropical” and “Adios a Cuba”), and the danzas of José White (“Danzas para piano” and “Bella cubana”), among others, gave melodic expression to sentimentalized renderings of nation, to what historian Jorge Ibarra aptly described as “the new music of a national popular tendency.”36 The danzas of Ignacio Cervantes gave subtle and often haunting piano renderings of what was called el criollismo romántico, melodies that exuded reverence for and exaltation of things Cuban. Nothing captured better the idealized melodic images of patria than the danzas of Cervantes—in the brooding melancholia of “Adios a Cuba,” written as he departed into exile, or the flushed joy of his return (“Vuelta al hogar”), or the spirited exuberance of “La camagüeyana.” Novelist Alejo Carpentier was prescient to discern an “interior cubanidad” in the compositions of Cervantes, whose music “advanced the idea of a national character that could be best addressed by the composer.”37 A new music for a new nation was in the making, properly described by musicologist Elena Pérez Sanjurjo as “musical nationalism.”38
The ten-line décima gained currency as a musical idiom all through the nineteenth century and indeed insinuated itself deeply into popular culture. Typically transmitted by itinerant performers traveling from one community to another, often improvised and always informative, the décima served as a source of news and a way by which people learned about each other—and themselves.39 The verse was used principally, wrote historian Liliana Casanellas Cué, to sing to the patria, “in almost all times addressing political and patriotic themes, reaching their greatest notoriety in the exalted and well-known décimas of liberation [décimas mambisas]” and addressing what historian Antonio Iraizoz characterized as “that unquenchable yearning for liberty and national decorum.”40 Folklorist Virgilio López Lemus insisted that the décima early acquired separatist content and was “transformed into an instrument of war, a means by which to ridicule Spain and attack the morale of enemy forces [and] served as a means by which to raise popular consciousness into pro-independence sentiment.”41 The décima as a form of popular poetry, wrote Mariano Aramburo y Machado in 1901, served “to enliven the insurgent camps, and certainly under its influence the mambí felt more virtuous, more important, more Cuban, and more manly. We pay homage to the décima, because it is the voice of the people [es la voz del pueblo].”42 Playwright Carlos Felipe gives voice to Pascual in the play Tambores (1943), who proclaims himself to be “the poet of the décima. We were the poets of the Cuban homeland [la tierra cubana]. We were loyal to the Cuban homeland.”43
Consciousness of Cuban deepened within stylized—and subjective—representations of local fauna and flora, that is, Cuba as a physical environment to contemplate and celebrate. Landscape art presumed an observer for whom to evoke sentimentality of place: the idea of a geography which, when deployed as subject, implied nation in visual form. Loaded with ideological purport, the landscape evoked nation as a geographical entity, a visual image of nuestra tierra natal accessible to all to behold. It registered something of an identity politics as exaltation of place, suggesting a high moral ground, and once visualized suggested patrimony to possess and pass on, another way to foster attachment to place. The landscape artist “reconstructed” the image of the nation with concrete specificity and geographical verisimilitude. Art historian Narciso Menocal discerned in Cuban landscape art “an indication of the poetry and beauty of the national environment,” which served as a means to “facilitate an assertion of national identity.”44 The landscape works of Federico Amérigo, Teódulo Jiménez, Miguel Arias Bardou, Valentín Sanz Carta, José Joaquin Tejada, and the three Chartrand brothers from Limonar—Esteban, Felipe, and Augusto—exuded a wistful tranquility for all to ponder. The landscape implied a truth and invited inference to what being and belonging meant, a way to envision—literally—a nation. There was consequence to this genre, perhaps not always by design but certainly by deduction. This was patria as a place to contemplate and celebrate, compositions based on the configuration of what nature had bestowed on the island and reverence for the natural world, one more way to differentiate the island from the peninsula. Romantic landscape artists (los paisajistas románticos) depicted the countryside by way of an intense visual realism, with a solemn semblance of presence achieved through the use of the brilliant light patterns of the tropics to render unabashedly sentimental paintings of pastoral tranquility, what ethnographer and novelist Miguel Barnet characterized as “romantic creole nationalism” (nacionalismo romántico criollo).45 The paintings evoked all at once climate and ambience, terrain and sentience: geography as a matter of transcendental significance. The relationship between landscape and identity is imperfectly understood, but the sentimentality with which Cubans celebrated their geography must be considered as a source of the passion with which they contemplated nation: this was patria not as setting but as protagonist, where geography itself implied historical significance. Landscape was transformed into representation of national virtue, as something intrinsically Cuban, depicted variously as expansive groves of Royal Palms and expansive fields of sugarcane (cañaverales), set against breathtaking vistas of valley landscapes and sweeping mountain elevations—all in all, an art form that emerged at about the same time that consciousness of nation developed.
Nineteenth-century paisajes also took in wide panoramas of the ingenio, the towering smokestacks of the sugar mill against verdant fields of plumed sugarcane in muted tropical pastels. The graphic work of Federico Mialhe appeared in successive publications, Isla de Cuba pintoresca (1839) and Viaje pintoresco por la Isla de Cuba (1848). The lithographs of Eduardo Laplante that were used to illustrate Justo Cantero’s Vistas de los principales ingenios de Cuba (1857) provided breathtaking expanses of cañaverales and ingenios. The mill as site of exploitative social relationships and execrable labor conditions was concealed, of course, and obscured from the history in which it developed. The depiction of the mill from a distant exterior view served to romanticize sugar production as subject to an aesthetic solemnity, celebrated as evidence of industry, technology, and enterprise that spoke to Cuba as a place of progress and prosperity: art as ideology in celebration of dominant production modes.
It would be unduly facile to suggest that nineteenth-century aesthetic forms, including the décimas, danzas, and paisajes románticos, propelled Cubans to rise up in revolution, of course. In fact, they served another purpose. They were themselves the means to affinities and attachments, possessed of the capacity of bringing ever-larger numbers of Cubans to sites of mutual self-recognition. They “worked” as sensory experiences and as forms from which feelings insinuated themselves into national identity; and insofar as they fostered development of identity with place, they contributed powerfully to the formation of the emotional content of nationality.
The possibility of sovereign nationhood also expanded into realms of the popular imagination through multiple literary forms and genres, perhaps most dramatically through the literary realism of the nineteenth-century novel. There was in fact a compelling relationship between political events that shaped the liberation politics and literary developments that formed the independentista sensibilities. “Nineteenth-century Cuban literature was dedicated principally to awaken[ing] the consciousness of Cubans,” literary critic Max Henríquez Ureña correctly noted. “What do the poets and costumbristas do if not look inward, toward the essence of feeling Cuban [sentir cubano]? To what other purpose if not to seek the essence of lo cubano. . . . The history of Cuban literature represents in general terms the continual determination to enable the Cuban people to develop full consciousness of their historical destiny.”46
The nineteenth-century novel provided an opportunity for Cubans to look in on themselves, as privileged insiders, but also with a spatial distance that could at the same time render them as outsiders, that is, the construction of perspective. The novel was at once representative and revelatory and served to set in relief the complexities of race relations, class contradictions, and gender hierarchies as a condition of a deepening disquiet of contemporary history, all explicitly situated within those unsettled domains of deepening colony-metropolis tensions. Daily life in Cuba was structured around multiple social layers, compressed tightly upon one another, interacting and interlocking, to be sure, but also separate and self-contained. The nineteenth-century novel presumed the formation of national character as intrinsic to its subject, and to which it bore witness, and indeed contributed to a shared content by which to forge the terms of unity. To depict plausibly the lives of men and women as subjects in circumstances of history as lived served to transform novelists into chroniclers of their times, as commentators and critics, often calling into question the very assumptions upon which the calculus of colonialism was based. Cubans all through the nineteenth century came to a deeper understanding of their times through the novels of Cirilo Villaverde (Cecilia Valdés), Ramón Piña (Historia de un bribón dichoso), Ramón Meza (Carmela and Mi tío el empleado), Domingo Malpica la Barca (En el cafetal), José Ramón Betancourt (Una feria de la Caridad en 183. . .), Esteban Pichardo (El fatalista), Francisco Calcagno (En busca del eslabón and Don Enriquito), José de Armas y Cárdenas (Frasquito), and Nicolás Heredia (Leonela). The antislavery novels of Anselmo Suárez y Romero (Francisco), Antonio Zambrana (El negro Francisco), Félix Tanco (Petrona y Rosalía), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Sab), Martín Morúa Delgado (Sofía and La familia Unzúazu), Pedro José Morilla, (El rancheador), Francisco Calcagno (Romualdo, uno de tantos), and Julio Rosas (La campana del ingenio) set the abolitionist narratives in wider circulation to a larger public and called attention to the iniquitous conditions to which men and women of African descent were subject within the colonial regime.
The novel served to acquaint the expanding middle class with a range of social knowledge often beyond its immediate experience and in the process prepared Cuban sensibilities for far-reaching changes in the offing. “[Cirilo Villaverde] has a purpose to accomplish,” literary critic Roberta Day Corbitt wrote of the novel Cecilia Valdés in 1950. “He has pictured the epoch in almost every class of society in the capital and in the country; his is a photographic, not an artistic picture.”47 The nineteenth-century novel subsumed social commentary into emerging literary modes, as allegory and allusion, not always—to be sure—with the intent to subvert the moral authority of colonial conventions but almost always revealing the contradictions of colonial conventions as a condition of daily life. “With a plot that develops fully in Cuba,” Max Henríquez Ureña wrote of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel Sab (1841), “the author describes landscapes and customs [paisajes y costumbres] with which she was familiar since her childhood, and as the first novel inspired within slavery it acts at the same time to condemn and repudiate slavery.”48 It was a “sentimental novel,” literary critic Luisa Campuzano affirmed, that “reveals and condemns the subjugated condition of slaves, women, and the poor.”49
The nineteenth-century novel served as a source of self-reflection and a means of self-expression: knowledge that contributed to an evolving national consciousness. “The burst of inspiration [el soplo de inspiración] that informed Cecilia Valdés,” journalist Diego Vicente Tejera wrote in 1886, “is the burst of patriotism, of compassionate affection for the abused colony, . . . of passionate love for a new Cuba that struggles to arise and to advance.”50
Poets similarly rendered the abstract notion of nation into a readily accessible sensory experience. There is indeed a profound truth to the proposition that consciousness of Cuban obtained its greatest evocative resonance in the form of poetry—as José Lezama Lima mused, “The history of our Island begins within its poetry.”51 What gave the genre such enduring force had to do with its capacity to evoke affection, which, although not exactly political, certainly possessed the possibility of politics as emotion. “The best productions of the Cuban mind,” American tourist George Austin noted during his travels to Cuba in 1875, “must be sought in the realm of poetry. As in older lands, the poet, the morning-star of the mind, is also the patriot in the minstrel, and is recognized as such by the government.”52
Poets proclaimed an unabashed love of place, a celebration of the sublimity of Cuban as a matter of emotional exaltation: the sights, scents, and sounds of the island evoked with poignancy and passion and subsumed in modes of sentimentality and solemnity. “My sweet Cuba,” exulted poet Ignacio de Acosta in 1882, “the sweet scents of your breezes / the perfume of your flowers / the brilliance of your sky.”53 Poets summoned awe of Nature (la naturaleza cubana) and stirred a national imagination in wonder of what was Cuban, a poetry dedicated to the landscape (la poesía del paisaje): the products of the land, the fragrances in the air, the change of seasons, undulating fields of sugarcane (cañaverales), and expansive vistas of palm groves (palmares). “From this poetry,” literary critic Raimundo Lazo insisted, “emerged in the nineteenth century the sentiment of nation [el sentimiento de la patria]. . . , conceived and experienced as a genuine love for the native land [tierra nativa].”54 Poets Francisco Iturrondo, Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo (“El Cucalamabé”), José María de Heredia, Manuel de Zequeira, José Fornaris, Julia Pérez Montes de Oca, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, José Victoriano Betancourt, Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces, Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, José Jacinto Milanés, and Carlota Robreño, among many others, celebrated nation as a real place—not imagined, but experienced—as site and source from which Cuban sentimental attachments were derived, bonds that were themselves the source of an emerging national identity. “There was not a poet of any significance,” historian Juan Remos correctly observed, “who did not contemplate liberty for Cuba. . . . On Cuban soil, they used symbolism; in exile, they were explicit.” Nineteenth-century poetry, Remos suggested, provided “a powerful inspiration that mobilized the will and motivated personal decisions in support of the cause of patria, and maintained the flame of patriotism burning bright . . . and on more than one occasion pointed the way to realize the objective of the just and legitimate aspirations.”55 Diego Vicente Tejera expressed the same idea in slightly different terms: “The poet in Cuba has been an eternal rebel.”56
The degree to which poetry influenced behavior is difficult to ascertain, of course, but that it did cannot be doubted. Not a few of the men who enrolled in the armed ranks of Cuba Libre—mambises, as they were known—commented on the influence of poetry in their lives. Eduardo Lores y Llorens recalled his military service years later: “It was the reading of patriotic poems that contributed to the forging of my desire to struggle against Spanish domination.”57 Poetry also summoned Horacio Ferrer to bear arms on behalf of Cuba Libre in 1895. He reflected years later: “I have always said that it was our poets who aroused the earliest spirit of combat in the generation of 1895.”58 This was poetry drawing on an aesthetic tradition given to an inherent—if not intentional—subversive exaltation. Subversive in the sense that it drew a people deep into those emotional realms where nation was experienced by way of feelings, what historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez characterized as “the gospel of the patriotism of the nineteenth century . . . that worked slowly in the national consciousness to prepare Cubans for the epic feats of 1868 and 1895.”59
The nineteenth century was a time of tumult, successive decades of displacement and dispersal. Many tens of thousands of Cubans sought refuge in flight abroad. Poets played a vital part in the adaptive processes of expatriation, almost always with a fierce affirmation of nationality. Cubans were never more Cuban than when away from Cuba. “Distance,” observed poet Cintio Vitier, “was the place of the myth of the island, and would always play a decisive role in shaping our sensibility.”60 It was out of a sense of place lost, from the experience of exile (destierro), that patria assumed its most compelling and indeed often its most impassioned representation. Place and past fused into remembrance of homeland not as an abstraction but as a real place: to return to, to reclaim, to redeem. Men and women of all classes, black and white—los emigrados, as they self-identified—departed and dispersed widely in foreign lands. They remained transfixed in their gaze homeward, ever so susceptible to the sway of nostalgia as the principal sentiment by which attachments to patria were sustained. Emigré Salvador de la Fe wrote in 1889 of his memories of “the leafy fronds of the perfumed sapota tree and the delicate caimito, the corpulent mango tree heavy with fruit, and the fragrant orange blossom.”61 Poet Belén de Miranda gave poignant lament to her eighteen years in exile: “One memorable and horrible day I found myself obliged to abandon my patria. . . . My soul filled with bitterness and pain, I left my beloved corner, where I left behind my youth, my golden memories, my cheerful expectations, and where the ashes of all those who I loved so dearly were laid to rest. . . . Goodbye Cuba! Goodbye my blue sky! Goodbye my sweet home!”62 In “El desterrado,” poet Pedro Santacilia wrote: “Far from my Cuba / Banished and in a foreign land / I have only tears in my eyes / And pain in my heart.”63
The poetry of destierro—of exile and expatriation—dwelled on longing and the loss of place, on heartache and homesickness. It fostered powerful sentiments of nostalgia and melancholia, and it produced a highly charged emotional poetry of such distinction as to assume fully the form of a genre unto itself. The verse of exile contributed to the creation of community out of commiseration, for which remedy was to be found only in the redemption of the distant homeland, that is, a politics.
It would be a mistake to view the process by which deepening self-reflection contributed to consciousness of Cuban as limited to the celebration of folk culture and exaltation of fauna and flora. Cubans in the nineteenth century were a people deeply absorbed with multiple ways of learning about themselves, dedicated to the production of knowledge across broad fields of learning. They were engaged continuously in constituting themselves culturally, and in the process they forged a rich intellectual tradition that served to inform the meaning of nationality within well-established conventions of erudition and education. These were decades noteworthy for a rich literary production—in quantity and diversity of books and professional journals, as periodicals, pamphlets, and newspapers, dedicated variously to economy and education, literature and literary criticism, medicine, music, and meteorology, science, agriculture, religion, and jurisprudence. The number of newspapers increased across the island. Visiting Havana at mid-century, Robert Baird could not conceal his surprise upon learning “that there should be a considerable number of newspapers in Havanna. But such is the fact.”64 By late in the nineteenth century, nearly two hundred newspapers were in circulation across the island, published in all six provinces: Havana (ninety-nine), Las Villas (twenty-five), Oriente (twenty-five), Matanzas (twenty-one), Puerto-Príncipe (nine), and Pinar del Río (six), dedicated to politics, economy, literature, medicine, law, and the professions. The city of Havana had the largest number of newspapers, with eighty-five, followed by the cities of Santiago de Cuba (thirteen) and Cienfuegos (eleven).65 “The character of some of these papers,” observed traveler John Wurdemann during a mid-century visit to Havana, “in point of literary contributions, is . . . as good as that of many in the United States. . . . Metaphysical, scientific, and moral subjects are often well discussed . . . and rival in their excellence many of the contributions to our periodicals. Indeed, whoever takes up one of these papers will soon perceive that there is no lack of talent or learning in Havana.”66 A literary culture had indeed taken hold. Poet Julián del Casal took due note of the changing reading habits in Havana, observing in 1888 that “the merchant as well as the head of families can hardly begin their daily tasks without having previously read the newspaper. The reading of the daily newspaper has become one of their primary necessities.”67
The nineteenth century was a time of population censuses, endlessly it seemed: in 1817, 1827, 1841, 1846, 1861, 1877, and 1887. Few indeed were Latin American countries that had, in the nineteenth century, as much census information as Cuba on topics as diverse as population, property, and production, fauna and flora, professions and occupations, the composition of households, and the demographics of race. Cuba had produced a corpus of interior knowledge unrivaled in the nineteenth century.
New knowledge about the island was produced continually by geographers, cartographers, economists, and naturalists, including an extraordinary number of treatises on political economy, geography, and cartography, in the works of Ramón de la Sagra, José García de Arboleya, Esteban Pichardo, Jacobo de la Pezuela, Miguel Rodríguez Ferrer, Felipe Poey, Francisco Javier Báez, Rafael Rodríguez, José María de la Torre, and Félix Erenchun, among others. “Serious study has a following far more numerous that commonly believed within the ranks of the young as well as among older and more mature men,” observed Spaniard Dionisio Alcalá Galiano during a mid-century visit to Cuba. “Cubans read a great deal, especially in matters of political economy, and not only read but also understand and absorb its significance.”68
These were years too in which Cubans acquired wider knowledge of the world at large, a world in which—often to the dismay of many—the place of Cuba seemed insignificant indeed. By the many tens of thousands, Cubans all through the nineteenth century traveled abroad, some as tourists and vacationers, others in pursuit of education, some in search of livelihood, many as disaffected exiles and displaced émigrés. Cubans “either live as outcasts in the land of their birth,” wrote journalist Rafael María Merchán in 1896, “or they wander, like a people damned, over distant lands, spending their energies in foreign countries.”69 Emigration developed as a salient facet of the Cuban condition through much of the nineteenth century. The experience in the world provided Cubans with a vantage point from which to bear witness to far-reaching changes overtaking societies in Europe and the United States: societies in the throes of transition, transformed by advances in science and technology, by commerce, manufacturing, and industry, during decades of accelerating material progress and economic development.
These were not always felicitous experiences, however. Knowledge of the world at large often invited invidious comparison and could not but contribute to deepening Cuban discontent with the circumstances of daily life. Increasing numbers of men and women came to see their own society from the point of view of outsider—and did not like what they saw. Cuban self-esteem was often bruised by nineteenth-century encounters abroad. “Here is found all one can desire and even what one could not imagine existed,” poet Federico Milanés wrote from New York at mid-century, adding: “It is difficult to understand how, after one has seen this, one can live in Cuba.”70 The experience abroad looms large in Domingo Malpica La Barca’s novel En el cafetal (1890), where Leonor decries life in Cuba as “insufferable” and vows “to leave Cuba as quickly as possible and never think of it again.”71
The experience abroad produced a peculiar Cuban angst, a deepening disquiet having to do with a sense of thwarted self-fulfillment, a people beset by a presentiment of exclusion from history, bearing witness to transformations to which they also aspired but sensed too that they were neither part of nor participants in. “I am reminded of Cuba and I weep for its backwardness,” essayist Manuel Pichardo brooded during an 1893 visit to the United States72—a sentiment shared by Enrique Hernández Miyares, editor of La Habana Elegante, who wrote from New York one year later: “I think of Cuba with tears and in pain, despite how much I love her, because of how poorly it measures up in comparison.”73 Attorney Raimundo Cabrera visited the United States in 1892 and could only marvel at “the stupendous growth and development of the great [North American] Republic . . . and at the same time think with sadness that in our land, more fertile and perhaps with better possibilities for equal development, we live in conditions as poor as those peoples who inhabit barren lands.”74
Encounters with the wider world could not but contribute to Cuban discontent. Cuban dissatisfaction with the prevailing order of things deepened, and the prevailing order of things was attributed almost entirely to Spain. “Cubans who had visited free countries,” recalled Manuel J. de Granda years later, “Cubans who read and learned, those who shared a sense of common good, who analyzed and compared, could not tolerate the feeling of being subject to an archaic and retrograde nation [that is, Spain] . . . and were determined at all cost, exposing themselves to all sacrifices, to be free and independent, to govern themselves and not have to wait to receive everything from those who could give nothing.”75
Cuba had produced a middle class fully imbued with aspirations of modernity and for whom the prospects for collective fulfillment were invested in the promise of the sovereign nation. This was an expanding middle class, of poets and writers, journalists, educators, physicians, dentists, attorneys, and engineers, small property owners and merchants, many educated abroad, bearing new ideas and returning as proponents of new ways. Their status was not necessarily derived from inherited property and family lineage, and they increasingly came to exercise decisive moral authority and intellectual influence over the expanding separatist movement. It was the result of years of travel in the United States and Europe, journalist Eduardo Machado Gómez later reflected, that made him determined “to awaken my people from the political lethargy in which they existed.”76
Cubans invested themselves deeply in paradigms of progress and modernity. They thought much about a nation of their own, a sovereign nation whose destiny they would most assuredly direct, persuaded that Cuba had a rightful place among the advanced nations of the world. They thought highly of themselves, and indeed were unabashed in their patronage of high culture and pretensions to cosmopolitan respectability, dispositions so commonplace within creole sensibility as to appear as an attribute intrinsic to lo cubano. “From the personal communications of the many Cubans who have lived abroad,” Enrique José Varona boasted in 1896, “and as a result of the marvelous facility with which today ideas are disseminated, there has emerged in Cuba an artistic, scientific, and judicial culture that while not general throughout the island is nonetheless extensive. In the cities and towns, the life that the Cuban is developing reaches very high on the scale of civilization.”77
Middle-class Cubans were noteworthy for their vanity, and nowhere was this conceit more on display than in the affirmation of refined manners and tastes, in home furnishings and fashion, in demeanor and deportment, in style and social graces. “There is something strangely cosmopolitan in many of the Cuban families,” American tourist Richard Dana observed of the Cuban middle class during a visit to the island in 1853: “education in Europe or the United States, home and property in Cuba, friendships and sympathies and half a residence in Boston or New York or Charleston, and three languages at command.”78
The development of a creole aesthetic disposition provided one more way to affirm distinctions from things Spanish and in the process validate a claim to nationality on the basis of a superior cultural sensibility. These were years when the idea of progress assumed fully the form of an article of faith, where the very claim to inclusion among the civilized nations of the world was itself registered as an emerging creole temperament. Cubans never doubted they belonged. What added powerful cultural dimension to pretensions to sovereign nationhood was something of a haughty criollismo, expressed most typically as a deepening scorn for things Spanish. “There is no hatred in the world to be compared to that of the Cuban for Spain and all things Spanish,” observed Italian tourist Antonio Gallenga during his visit to Cuba during the 1870s.79 Traveler Richard Levis arrived at the same conclusion at about the same time: “The hatred of the Cubans against their Spanish rulers is extreme. . . . I know from intimate communication with the people [of] its heart-felt intensity.”80
Nothing undermined Cuban pretensions to cosmopolitan standing more than status as colony—and especially a colony of Spain: a country deemed hopelessly resistant to the promise of modernity and impervious to the possibility of progress. Simply put, to be a colony of Spain in the Americas in the late nineteenth century was a source of embarrassment. The mere existence of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, journalist José Mayner y Ros insisted, was itself “in defiance of civilization and progress.”81
For many Cubans, despair over colonial status often had less to do with amor patrio than with amor propio, less with political differences than with cultural ones. But there was always a politics to culture, of course, and a people feeling culturally compromised would also be susceptible to a political remedy to their discontent. A deepening self-esteem was itself very much a facet of an emerging sensibility of Cuban, one that could not be accommodated within the constraints of the colonial condition. Cuban identification with the idea of progress was total, from which corollary notions of modernity and civilization were derived and around which a specific paradigm of nationhood took decisive form. In this scheme of things, Spain was perceived as an obstacle to Cuban aspirations to self-determination and an encumbrance on Cuban hopes for self-fulfillment, conditions that persuaded increasing numbers of men and women that only by shedding the “weight” of Spain could Cubans realize the full potential of the promise of a separate nationality.
The proposition of Cuban as cosmopolitan resonated among proponents of sovereign nationhood precisely because it spoke to shared self-esteem as source of solidarity and means of common identity. Cubans drew the obvious moral. The faith in paradigms of modernity and the promise of material progress suggested that Cubans belonged and Spaniards did not and went directly to the heart of why Cubans were not Spaniards. Through much of the nineteenth century, Cubans defined themselves through denial and disavowal; they distanced themselves from Spain and differentiated themselves from Spaniards and strove mightily to discard and otherwise diminish the ways that served to identify them as Spanish.
Spaniards visiting Cuba at mid-century readily discerned the widening breach between the metropolis and the colony. “Between the Peninsula and Cuba,” Dionisio Galiano observed in 1859, “there exists a complete and absolute divergence. The material civilization of this Island is in its essence [North] American, and radically opposed to values that rein over the provinces of our monarchy,” and further: “Society in Cuba, exclusively mercantile and industrial in its tendencies, . . . is animated by the spirit of speculation that recalls the go-ahead of our North American neighbors.”82 Spanish tourist Antonio de las Barras visited Cuba two years later:
The great mass of freight and steam ships promote the prosperity of this people [este pueblo]. It is wealthy as a result of its valuable products and commerce, always active and expanding. More than anywhere else in Spanish America, Cuba has been inoculated with the Go-Ahead progressive spirit of the United States, with which it is in very close contact as a result of education and commerce. Since the United States is without doubt the most advanced country in the world, Cuba, by virtue of a necessity that continues to expand on par with its fabulous wealth, meets its needs by way of the newest and most ingenious machinery and technology in every branch of science.83
The narrative of progress and modernity provided Cubans a compelling discursive framework in which to advance the proposition of the sovereign nation as a means of collective fulfillment. Manuel Linares anguished, “If we are to be Spaniards only to represent the Motherland as one of the most backward people in the world . . . , we must insist with devotion and resolution: at that cost, we do not wish to be Spaniards.”84 To remain with Spain was to remain hopelessly outside the mainstream of civilization and progress. Merchant Fidel Pierra gave voice to widely held sentiments: “If the Spanish have any virtues at all—and we do not deny that they have some—they are so enveloped and lost among their innumerable vices that to attempt to conserve the former we incur the risk of being contaminated by the latter.” Spanish civilization was “pernicious,” Pierra insisted, and it was necessary for Cubans, “at a very early date, to blot out even the last vestiges of it from the island.” Spain had revealed its “incapacity . . . as a nation to evolve a civilization promoting and securing the well-being and happiness of those living within its folds.” Cubans, on the other hand, were “endowed with those [qualities] of ready adaptability to new and more favorable media” and possessed “a great capacity for rapid and solid improvement and advancement.”85
Continued association with Spain offered Cubans nothing. On the contrary, in the realms of industry, business, commerce, technology, and science, Spain was uniformly reviled as an obstacle to Cuban development. Advances of modernity in Cuba were proof of backwardness in Spain. “We had railroads before Catalonia,” Juan Gualberto Gómez pointed out in 1890; “Havana had electricity before Madrid. . . . During the last thirty years Spain has provided us with little or nothing. As a result, our writers and thinkers, our men of science, have had to seek the elements of their knowledge and the source of their inspirations among foreigners.”86 Cubans were “vastly superior” to Spaniards, essayist Antonio Gonzalo Pérez insisted, for “quite early in the [nineteenth] century [Cuba] began to receive all the blessings of modern civilization.” Spain, on the other hand, “situated in a corner of Europe, isolated by custom and tradition and by difficulty of approach, densely ignorant and fanatically religious, lay quite outside the current of progress.” Pérez continued: “[Spain] is still saturated with the superstitions of the Middle Ages, which is equivalent to saying she is about five or six centuries behind the times. Therefore, it is not extraordinary that the Colony preceded the mother-country in the construction of railways and telegraphs, those valuable agents in the conveyance of modern ideas.”87 Fermín Valdés-Domínguez, collaborator of José Martí and officer in the Liberation Army, was categorical: “We owe nothing to Spain, who has despoiled us of our wealth and given us nothing in return: it has not attended to the education of our people, nor developed industry; nor has it even known how to promote commerce.”88 The protagonist in Tomás Justiz y del Valle’s novel El suicida (1912)—set in the early 1890s—is adamant: “We are preparing ourselves to enter the twentieth century with dignity. . . . Cuba will never be truly civilized as long as one Spaniard remains. It is necessary to kill them! War without quarter!”89
Determinants of nationality originated from many sources, one of which had to do with thwarted pretensions to self-fulfillment. No difference was as sharply drawn or as clearly defined as the proposition of Cuba with a bright future and Spain with a dark past, of Cubans possessed of modern sensibilities and Spaniards burdened with backward mentalities. These were not entirely new issues, of course, for the antecedents of being “Cuban”—as compared to being “Spanish”—had their origins in the previous century. What was different in the nineteenth century was the invocation of nationality as identity based not only as a matter of nativity, but on the value assigned to what those differences implied. Cuban implied a different perspective, it presumed a different temperament, it portended a different way of moving about and being in the world. Simply put, to be Cuban was superior to being Spanish. “The Cuban,” Enrique José Varona pronounced outright, “possesses characteristics that denote progress within his lineage [raza], and if he is not absolutely more intelligent than the Spaniard, he is certainly of quicker comprehension and less resistant to change. . . . He is more open, more modern, more cosmopolitan. . . . The Spaniard is ill-prepared for the higher necessities of civilization.”90
The degree to which Spain lagged behind advances in science, technology, and industry, Cubans were persuaded, and the extent to which Spain appeared hopelessly inured to progress implied a larger malaise: that perhaps Spanish normative systems were incapable of accommodating a culture of modernity—and the corollary: to remain with Spain was to remain hopelessly in the past and forever outside the mainstream of progress and modernity. “If we want advance on the path of civilization and progress . . . it is necessary that we separate ourselves from Spain,” costumbrista writer Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros insisted.91 In Justo González’s novel Cubagua, Arturo contemplates the larger meaning of the 1895 war for independence and explains: “This . . . is not a war between Cubans and Spaniards, but between the past and the future, between a spirit that renovates and another that petrifies.”92 The act of revolution was indeed necessary so as to redeem Cuban self-respect. “With a history so filled with ignominy,” Rafael Merchán pronounced early in 1898, “Cuba would be a great stain on the Americas if it had not been revolutionary. Its future was to be found in the revolution. The revolution was its duty, its only hope.”93
High culture provided a means of self-identity by way of self-esteem, a way for Cubans to be part of and participants in the world at large. “Knowledgeable economists,” exulted María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Montalvo in 1844, “distinguished writers, learned men who are fully equal to the level of European progress, writers and even poets: we have all this, and under the proper circumstances the fame [of Cubans] will circulate with splendor all across Europe.”94 Middle-class sensibility exuded a self-conscious cosmopolitanism, a setting of high society and highbrow culture—in theaters, in opera houses, in philharmonic societies, and in concert halls, where Cubans as both performers and patrons came together and obtained a sense of the ways that these shared interests were themselves at once source and outcome of community.
Cubans of means arrived at a sense of themselves as a people apart by way of sophisticated styles and enlightened sensibilities, represented in the development of an architecture that embodied an ideal into which increasing numbers of men and women invested themselves. Much creole wealth in the nineteenth century was allocated to the construction of concert halls and theaters, philanthropy as display of refined dispositions and cultivated instincts as affirmation of Cuban. Philharmonic societies expanded across the island, first in Havana (1824), and later in the provinces: Santa Clara (1827), Matanzas (1829), Santiago de Cuba (1842), Trinidad (1842), Puerto Príncipe (1842), San Antonio de los Baños (1848), Cienfuegos (1849), and Sancti-Spíritus (1855).
Literary societies, artistic associations, and music conservatories flourished in Havana, Matanzas, and Cienfuegos, many with instructors recruited in Europe and the United States to teach music and dance in Cuba. “Many musical academies have opened up during the past few years,” observed the New York Times correspondent in Havana, “to develop the taste for song and furnish the pupils with a knowledge of the technical part of music.”95 All through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, philharmonic societies and literary circles developed into sites of an expanding awareness of those things that men and women of the middle class shared in common: the consumption of high culture as source of shared sympathies and similar cultural predilections, loaded always with latent political purport.96 The clubs included Liceo Artístico y Literario de La Habana (1844), Sociedad Liceo Artístico y Literario de Matanzas (1859), Liceo Artístico de Guanabacoa (1861), Liceo Artístico y Literario de Regla (1878), and Club Artístico de Santa Clara (1892), among others.
It is perhaps impossible to determine with precision the ways Cuban associations contributed to the development of national consciousness. The evidence is anecdotal but suggestive, and indeed the very existence of liceos indicates the presence of mobilized sectors of Cuban society. Gatherings at literary clubs and philharmonic societies served as occasions for discussions about art and literature, to be sure, but they also provided opportunities for conversations dealing with the politics of nationhood.97 “In my humble opinion,” Spaniard Antonio de la Barras suspected in the early 1860s, “these literary events that ostensibly have the appearance of literary functions . . . conceal a sentiment of a different type [related to] separatist tendencies. I have had an opportunity to confirm my suspicions, for every time I attend an event I notice the prominent presence of Cubans [hijos del pais] known for their disaffection with Spain.”98 Revolutionary plotting in the Philharmonic Society of Havana prompted Spanish authorities to revoke its charter in 1849. The Sociedad “El Pilar” of Havana, founded in 1848, dissolved after 1868 when its members joined the armed ranks of the insurrection during the Ten Years War. The Spanish captain general closed the Sociedad Liceo Artístico y Literario de Matanzas in early 1869 due to suspected separatist sympathies.99 Among the most prominent founders of the Philharmonic Society of Bayamo was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.100
Cosmopolitan pretensions provided other ways to advance the claim to civilization, to establish Cuba as a respectable concert venue in the world of performing arts, a way to transcend the stigma of colonialism and participate in high international culture. Cubans derived great pride from their performance facilities, celebrated as rivals to the most famous concert halls and theaters of Europe and the United States. The construction of theaters—almost all privately funded—proceeded apace across the full length of the island all through the nineteenth century, what historians Hernando Serbelló, Pilar Ferreiro, and Carlos Venegas characterized as an “explosion of theater constructions”:101 the Coliseo Theater (1822) in Santiago de Cuba; the Principal Theater (1839) in Sancti-Spíritus; the Brunet Theater (1840) in Trinidad; the Centro Theater (1849) in Santiago de Cuba; the Fénix Theater (1851) in Puerto Príncipe; the Avellaneda Theater (1860) in Cienfuegos; the Sauto Theater (1863) in Matanzas; La Caridad Theater (1885) in Santa Clara; and the Terry Theater (1890) in Cienfuegos. The Diorama (Teatro Nuevo) of Havana was completed in 1827. The spectacular Tacón Theater was completed ten years later, claiming a seating capacity of 3,000 people. “One of the three finest theaters in the world,” Richard Henry Dana pronounced it in 1859, and it was considered by American publisher Samuel Hazard as among “the largest and handsomest of the world.”102 Charles Rosenberg accompanied soprano Jenny Lind to Havana in 1850 and could hardly contain his exuberance over the Tacón Theater: “Compared with that of the Scala, the French Opera at Paris, or Her Majesty’s Theater in London, it must decidedly have the preference.”103 British tourist Edward Robert Sullivan agreed, writing two years later: “The opera is really first rate, and the house, the most beautiful one I have seen in all respects; it holds five or six thousand people, nearly as large as the Queen’s Theatre in London.”104 Spaniard Antonio de las Barras marveled at the “greatness of the public programs” in Havana, observing that “the best and most notable Italian opera companies have come and continue to come here, and in this regard [Havana] has no reason to envy New York, or London, or Paris, or Madrid.”105
The opera had indeed captured the fancy of high society, certainly in Havana. “The opera house in Havana . . . is far more difficult of access than that in New York,” wrote winter visitor J. Milton Mackie in 1864. “The Havanese mind seems to be smitten with a perfect rage for the opera. This is the grand and fashionable entertainment—the most expensive luxury of the town.”106
Theaters served as venues of high culture and sites of high status, as historians María Elena Orozco and Lidia Sánchez characterized nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, where “theater, modernization, and city joined indissolubly together” to provide “a vector of modernity and the transformation of the mentality of the people of Santiago [mentalidad del santiaguero].”107 There was an ideology embedded in the architecture of neoclassical forms of nineteenth-century Cuba, to be sure, theater having to do with privilege and power. But it also had to do with display as definition, a way that consciousness of Cuban as a matter of civic virtue and cultural vitality insinuated itself into an emerging sense of nationality, another way that the drama of nation was unfolding. This too was a facet of Cuban, a shared cosmopolitan aesthetics as a source of national affinity. It provided alternatives to Spanish forms, and more: it served to give expression to Cuban aspirations to transcend the colonial and identify with the international as an attribute of the national. “The Havanese do not indulge in [Spanish musical programs] any more,” observed the New York Times correspondent in Havana in 1867, “as they consider them out of date and no longer in fashion. Verdi and Bellini have assumed the right of preëminence, the time-honored Zarzuela has been cancelled to retire before its more fashionable competitor, the Grand Italian Opera.”108
Tacón Theater, ca. 1870. From Samuel Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil (London, 1871).
The proposition of nation gained adherents among multiple creole constituencies, sometimes in complementary relationship with one another, other times in competition, occasionally in conflict. What mattered most, however, was an emerging consensus on the primacy of Cuban, and what mattered more and more was how to translate the primacy of Cuban interests into a politics of nationality. Consciousness of Cuban developed in many ways, among Cubans of all social classes, middle class and working class alike, among men and women, white and black. It is not certain that they all came to an awareness of nationality in the same way, or at the same time, or by the same means, or with the same expectations. And not all who arrived at a sense of nationality enrolled in the ranks of armed separatism. What is certain, however, is that they shared in common the conviction of the propriety of the claim to a nation of their own. These were dispositions that informed the meaning of Cuban, a deepening dedication to the proposition of the sovereign nation from which the promise of nationality obtained plausibility.
National formation involved a complex process of negation and affirmation as one and the same imperative, often by way of the same set of acts, in discharge of the same sense of purpose. Aspirations to nation expanded simultaneously as an awareness of the past and a sense of the future, a process of both subversion and conversion, of displacement and replacement, of a people at one and the same time engaged in the development of a narrative of nation and absorbed with ways of inserting themselves into that narrative. The claim to a separate nation was acted upon as a commitment to a politics; it was actualized as a matter of cultural adaptation, in the form of changing tastes and changing patterns of conduct, as old practices passing into desuetude and new preference coming into being, and which when examined in the aggregate reveal a society in the throes of far-reaching social transformations.
The complexities of national formation were at work in many places: in concert halls and union halls, on the opera stage and in baseball stadiums, in Protestant churches and Masonic lodges. It is from this perspective that the nineteenth-century project of liberation must be understood: a multiclass, made up of men and women, and with biracial mobilizations, within shifting cultural sensibilities, to create a modern nation, the principal attributes of which were informed by notions of national sovereignty, progress, social justice, and democracy, a movement self-consciously embedded in a paradigm of voice and volition and which would not be reproduced in the world again until 1917.