A Republic organized on the solid basis of morality and justice is the only form of government that promises to guarantee citizens their rights and is at the same time the best safeguard in pursuit of just and legitimate aspirations.
We demand the Independence of Cuba and of all Cubans. . . . Our mission is to obtain Independence so that the Cuban people can thereupon proceed to establish their political institutions and organize the public administration that best serve the needs of the nation.
The War was confused with the Revolution: the War was a means, the Revolution was the end. The task was left unfinished.
Almost from the beginning, from the point at which we began to establish our national identity, the idea of nation was associated with moral duty.
The nineteenth century was a time of deepening discontent, mostly as an incremental condition, to be sure, but an inexorable one. Vast numbers of Cubans experienced daily life in a state of disquiet, borne principally as a circumstance to which men and women across the island accommodated themselves as a matter of course, conditions so commonplace as to pass for a normal state of affairs, without apparent recourse to remedy and certainly without immediate means of redress. This was discontent as a facet of daily life, discerned—if at all—as one’s lot, often carried as grievance but borne in compliance, in accordance with the conventions of the natural order of things. Grievances deepened and widened and seemed never to get resolved. So they multiplied.
But these were also years of change, and what was changing most was the Cuban capacity to articulate discontent, accompanied with—or perhaps because of—a growing awareness of the possibility of agency—consciousness, in a word: that the condition of injustice was neither immutable nor unassailable and with the deepening conviction that the collective power of proponents of change was at least equal to the institutional strength of defenders of the status quo. The capacity to arrange consciousness of discontent into a coherent narrative implied cognizance of disaffection not as a personal and individual situation but as a social and political condition, itself a source of solidarity, where a grievance changed from the particular to the general, thereby drawing a people together to act in concert to seek remedy through collective means. More Cubans had more knowledge about more things, especially as it involved the circumstances in which they lived their lives. This too was part of national formation: all occurring in the ordinary course of events, sometimes as a matter of slow realization, other times in the form of sudden revelation, whereby the discontent with which men and women across the island lived everyday life was revealed as an untenable circumstance, and suddenly a system of oppression was exposed in full view and its vulnerability was revealed. It was often a matter of people simply sensing that things were not quite right, men and women living uneasily with their discontent, perhaps oblivious to the adaptations they had made because it was normal to adapt and because it was probably easier that way, in any case.
Changes of other kinds were under way, those types of changes that often release the great “forces” of history but whose consequences were neither readily apparent nor immediately experienced. Old allegiances were in transition and new attachments were in formation; loyalties were reordered and thereupon reconfigured around new categories of self-definition and self-interest. On all counts, and all at once, Spanish colonial rule was straining to contain the social forces transforming Cuban society—and increasingly revealing itself as incapable of doing so. That Cuban aspirations could no longer be accommodated within existing colonial structures was apparent, at least among Cubans; so too was the need for change—a powerful consensus indeed. To contemplate the need for change was itself a source of change, a way to induce thinking about how to “do” change: where the liabilities of colonialism became an ever-more-intolerable condition and where even the most fundamental assumptions of colonial relationships were called into question and increasingly lost credibility—all of which created a readiness for more change and suggested the need for faster change.
The implications of change were not always immediately apparent, of course, but the effects were at work always, inexorably and relentlessly. Gone were old certainties. Old habits of authority were no longer tenable; old assumptions of hierarchy were no longer sustainable. Commonplace truths seemed no longer to correspond to life as lived. The anomalies of time-honored deferential systems were exposed to be increasingly untenable—they had outlived their times and revealed existing normative systems to be ill-suited to Cuban needs. Long-standing conventions and customs were under challenge: everything, it seemed, and everywhere, it seemed, was subject to new scrutiny, an occasion to interrogate received wisdom and challenge conventional knowledge. Cultural displacements of far-reaching implications were in progress. Uncertainty was endemic, placing in doubt the very efficacy of the existing belief systems and inevitably raising new questions about their relevance, which contributed to further uncertainty. Each displacement was itself a symptom of a larger dislocation, and each provided an occasion to articulate discontent and act out dissent. New egalitarian notions were gaining currency. Systems of domination of all kinds were under increasing pressures from above and below, within Cuba and without. New ideas of selfhood, all very much about self-esteem and self-reliance, admitted the propriety of disobedience and defiance and could not but challenge prevailing conventions of entitlement and the practice of privilege.
Tensions within colonial society deepened and widened all throughout the nineteenth century, becoming ever more pronounced and sharply defined: between the colony and the metropolis, between criollos and peninsulares, between free and slave and black and white, among social classes and within the privileged classes, among whites themselves as cultural distinctions and ethnic divisions between Cubans and Spaniards increasingly hardened into multiple irreconcilable enmities, some social, others cultural, and eventually all political.
Economic good times served to deepen colonial contradictions; hard times acted to reveal them. Failed efforts at colonial reform in Spain seemed to make the need for colonial rebellion in Cuba more compelling. These were years of continuous movement: a people in motion, commodities in transit, new ideas in circulation. People and ideas moved so much more quickly: travel by steamship and railroads, communications by way of telegraph and telephone. Market forces were at work changing fundamental facets of daily life. Newspapers and magazines proliferated. Emigration from Cuba and migration within Cuba: workers emigrated abroad, peasants migrated to the cities, slaves escaped into the interior. All through the second half of the nineteenth century, Cubans—middle class and working class alike—traveled abroad, in pursuit of livelihood and learning, in flight from political repression and economic depression. They settled in New Orleans, Key West, Tampa, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York, among other cities in the United States. They took up residence in Europe, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Cubans organized: into trade unions and political parties, into baseball teams and literary societies, into cabildos and cofradías, in evangelical denominations and Masonic lodges, as outlaw gangs and insurgent bands.
At home and abroad, Cubans bore witness to the political transformations and social dislocations of their times. The challenge to the premise of power and practice of privilege unfolded in full view of successive generations of Cubans, even as they were self-consciously absorbed with the ways to assemble the meaning of nationality. What made these experiences especially momentous was that they were occurring simultaneous with deepening dispositions to change, during precisely the decades in which Cubans were engaged in the process of change, contemplating the raison d’être of nationhood, forging new social relationships in pursuit of new ways to form and inform nationality, searching for the means through which to articulate their separateness. Possibilities of remedy to social injustice were everywhere suggesting possibilities of the purpose to which the sovereign nation would be dedicated, and these possibilities acted to define much of what would shape the character of an emerging national sensibility.
The meaning of nationality—what being Cuban signified—bore discernible traces of the time and circumstances of its formation. A people engaged self-consciously in the process of national formation could not but have been susceptible to the transformations of their times, and indeed could contemplate the meaning of a nation of their own only by way of the normative systems most readily available to them. The independentista purpose drew upon multiple sources, some reaching deeply into the very antecedents of national consciousness, others influenced by circumstances of the times. It was informed by the moral philosophies of Cuban thinkers of the nineteenth century, including Félix Varela (1788–1853), José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), and Antonio Saco (1797–1879). The project of nation expanded in the form of a moral imperative, one that shaped the purpose with which successive generations of Cubans evoked the idea of national sovereignty. It obtained meaning not as an abstract notion of freedom and liberty, however much those ideas aroused Cuban passions, but as something profoundly personal, very much inscribed in the interior histories of the many hundreds of thousands of men and women who invested themselves in the promise of nation. The process of national formation was experienced as a succession of paradigm shifts in which norms of nationality developed around shared normative attributes, where the claim to Cuban drew its proponents into a new moral order from which determinants of nationality emerged.
No idea shaped the meaning of nationality more decisively than the conviction of collective well-being and individual self-fulfillment derived from the promise of sovereign nationhood. Men and women in the nineteenth century committed their hopes for a better future to the promise of nation, with the expectation that a nation of their own would provide the means to remedy the sources of their discontent. The project of nation was a work in progress through much of the nineteenth century, an ongoing process of negotiation to accommodate competing interests and reconcile conflicting claims within larger consensual domains of nationality.
The constituencies for sovereign nationhood increased in number and diversified in kind, and in the process the meaning of national sovereignty itself broadened in scope and widened in purpose. The idea of nation took in notions of racial equality, universal suffrage, social justice, and representative democracy inscribed within narratives of progress, socialism, capitalism, nationalism, and romanticism: a complex dialectical exchange from which consciousness of Cuban developed. Everything would be better in the sovereign nation, Cubans were certain. “The Republic is the realization of the great ideals that consecrate liberty, fraternity, and equality of men,” insisted Antonio Maceo. “And equality above everything else. . . . Let us establish a Republic on the unshakeable base of equality before the law.”1
The proposition of nation evolved into multiple meanings all through the nineteenth century, changing with changing times, a process shaped by the very historical circumstances from which it emerged and to which it contributed, where the promise of sovereignty as a means of self-determination placed the possibility of desired outcomes within reach of increasing numbers of Cubans. Nation implied community, of course, a people bound together in a common cause for shared goals. But nation also contained within its premise a summons to ameliorate the divide of race and the distinction of class, a call for Cubans to surrender themselves to the transcendental ideal of nation. Nation was something to surrender to and to which to subordinate all competing identities and into which all were welcomed unconditionally. The solidarity of nationality formed around the ideal of sovereign nationhood—in part by design, to be sure, but also in part by necessity—for the very success of the independentista project depended on a purpose that privileged nation as the means with which to transcend class conflict, racial tensions, and gender hierarchies. Cubans of diverse backgrounds, men and women of different racial origins and dissimilar social status, joined together and in the process contributed to the development of a single national culture forged by the circumstances of its creation. The independentista project engaged successive generations of men and women in common purpose and deepening mutual dependency: that is, the very process by which Cubans fashioned the bonds of national solidarity. It had become appropriate to acknowledge—and indeed necessary—to accommodate within the expanding independentista polity grievances of multiple origins as the condition necessary to sustain the solidarity of national purpose. The proposition of sovereign nationhood as means of self-determination transformed the very meaning of nationality.
The nineteenth-century meditation on nationality developed around an emerging stock of social values, a process through which to inform belief systems, shape canons of self-representation, and influence norms of conduct: in the aggregate, the ways by which the collective sensibilities of a people found expression in a common purpose. This was a complex process. It lacked symmetry and uniformity and must be understood to have been an incremental development, over long stretches of time, implicating men and women of all social classes, black and white, at different times and in different ways, acted upon with the material resources at hand and within the moral systems most readily available.
The possibility of a people bound together as a separate nationality and a single people within a sovereign nation was itself a product of a deepening self-awareness of shared similarities as source of community and from which the logic of lo cubano obtained plausibility: a people coming to consciousness of collective self within a single nation. Its principal expression implied a reflexive knowledge through which to register cognizance of sovereign nationhood as the basis to link a like people together through shared experiences and common purpose. A powerful sense of collective selfhood formed around a deepening sense of self-worth, based on the conviction that Cubans had a destiny to pursue, that they had a right to independence, and most of all that they had a claim to national sovereignty as the means of self-fulfillment. “We will make independence for all,” Maceo vowed, “and Cubans will be masters of the future of their patria.”2 For the vast numbers of men and women implicated in the premise of Cuban, realization of nationality could not be imagined under any circumstance other than by way of national sovereignty: a people apart in possession of a nation of their own, central to which was the proposition of a sovereign nation as means of collective fulfillment, that is, nation in the service of nationality. “The objectives that we Cubans have ardently sought,” Provisional President Bartolomé Masó affirmed, “are to be masters of the destiny of our country to attend by virtue of our own merits to the solution of its needs, and to meet public interests.”3 Antonio Maceo alluded often to “a free and sovereign patria” as the minimum condition of Cuban well-being. “With national sovereignty,” he predicted, “we will obtain our natural rights, a quiet dignity, and the representation of a people free and independent.” Repeatedly Maceo spoke of the Cuban purpose defined as the pursuit of “the national sovereignty of our people.” Cuba possessed the right, Maceo insisted, “to move within the concert of free nations, that is to say, responsible for its own destiny.” On the matter of sovereign nationhood, Maceo was unequivocal: “What moves us is the idea of rendering our people masters of their own destiny, of placing them in possession of the means to fulfill their purpose as subjects of History.”4
Inscribed into the properties of national sovereignty was the proposition of egalitarian purpose—nation as the means to enable redress of grievances, mediate social tensions, and ameliorate the sources of discontent—nation as a commitment to collective well-being, the promise of José Martí: “With all, and for the good of all.”5 Sovereign nationhood implied the possibility of allowing Cubans to become the people they wished to be: a better people, joined together through a shared faith in the promise of a better future for all. The promulgation of the Constitution of Guáimaro (1869) inspired poet/essayist Luis Victoriano Betancourt to lift his voice in celebration of the egalitarian ideal to which the Cuban purpose was dedicated: “Cuba has a republic in which women are equal to men, in which the poor are equal to the rich, in which blacks are equal to whites. . . . Its constitution has made men into citizens, citizens into a people, and the people as sovereign; Cuba has the freedom of thought, the liberty of action, and the freedom of life.”6
The proposition of sovereign nationhood entered the Cuban imagination in multiple forms, charged with diverse functions and imbued with divergent meanings. It drew sustenance from many sources: some possessed of sentimental value and ends unto themselves and others invested with instrumental purpose as means to other ends. The boundaries among these categories were neither inalterable nor always discernible. They shifted often; sometimes they collapsed altogether, whereupon the promise of nation conveyed many things all at once. These elements coexisted in close proximity to one another, not always in congruent juxtaposition, to be sure, but rather as an amalgam of shifting representations by which to contemplate a frame of reference for affinity and affiliation.
The men and women who responded to the promise of nation brought with them multiple interior histories, bearing grievances of many kinds, experienced by different Cubans differently: some having been endured for many years, some of recent origins. It could hardly have been otherwise, for the sources of Cuban discontent tended to align along a wide arc of injustice, experienced as discrimination and disadvantage, having to do with color and class, gender and ethnicity, made all the more urgent by the deepening conviction that things did not have to be that way.
Multiple voices contemplated the meaning of nationality within different sets of value systems, corresponding to different hierarchies of moral imperatives and implying different modes of collective fulfillment; each privileged different attributes of Cuban, drawing upon a different ensemble of normative systems through which to propound different ways of political participation and imagine different forms of social inclusion. The constituencies of Cuba Libre represented a disparate and at first glance incongruous combination of class interests and political persuasions: capitalists and socialists, anarchists and Baptists, the intelligentsia and the illiterate, property-owning planters and propertyless peasants, former slaves and former slaveholders, workers on the sugar fields of rural Cuba and workers in cigar factories in Tampa. Interests of such diversity were not easily accommodated within the emerging independentista polity, to be sure, and indeed on more than one occasion the contradictions within the separatist movement erupted into internal disputes and plunged the project of nation into disarray.
But what appeared at the time as discord and dissension within the multiple constituencies of nation was in fact a process of complex negotiations among competing versions of Cuban. The character of the liberation project was forged as a continual state of adaptation and accommodation, intrinsic to its internal logic of an all-inclusive representation of the nation, given most of all to efforts to establish the basis of collective action as the means of a national polity. “The Revolution was organic,” Manuel Sanguily wrote of the Ten Years War in 1893. “It was born of its antecedents, it had its reason for being, its logic, that is: its internal process. It consisted of multiple elements, and acquired a special structure. It developed and accommodated itself to its circumstances and its internal constituencies. It adapted . . . continually to changing conditions.”7
On the matter of the primacy of nation, Cubans were nearly unanimous: a deepening awareness of devotion to place as source of common affiliation and shared purpose by which national solidarities took form. It was the perspective that sustained the emerging narrative of nation, indeed it was at the very core of the idea of the Cuban purpose, in the words of José Martí: “Patria is community of interests, the unity of traditions, the indivisibility of purpose, the sweet and consoling fusion of love and hope.”8 The founding of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) by Martí in 1892 provided the institutional framework in which to integrate Cubans of all classes, men and women, black and white, into a single revolutionary project. The PRC dedicated itself to the preparation of a war of liberation even as it forged the consensual terms of nationality. Cubans bearing multiple forms of discontent joined together in a single unified movement for the specific purpose, José Martí announced, of mounting a “common revolutionary action” to obtain the liberation of Cuba, to unite all Cubans to wage war, and to provide the moral and material support necessary to secure the independence of the island.9
The enduring achievement of the independentista project was registered as the affirmation of a particular representation of Cuban, a version imbued with attributes that endured as the dominant embodiment of nationality deep into the next century. The emerging formulation of nationality acquired its definitive characteristics as much through means as ends, specifically through the conviction that the promise of nationality could not be realized in any form other than through national sovereignty, that any reconciliation with Spain on any basis other than independence was unacceptable, and that independence could be better secured by war and revolution than by negotiation and evolution: a new war to continue the war of 1879–80, which was a continuation of the war of 1868–78. “We were committed to the titanic struggle,” General Carlos García Velez reflected years later, “to realize the ideal of independence by force of arms with the knowledge that independence would have been impossible to achieve through peaceful evolution [evolución pacífica].”10 Colonel Fermín Valdés-Domínguez was certain: “Cuba, my beloved Patria, cannot achieve its independence by any means other than war.”11 José Martí alluded variously to “the necessary war,” to “the indispensable war,” to “the inevitable war,” and insisted: “War appears to be the only means with which to redeem the patria.” There was “no other way to save our country except by war.”12
Independence was far from merely political. The ideal of sovereign nationhood was the product of a particular version of Cuban, one deeply embedded within the proposition of national sovereignty not as an end but as a means, to enable self-determination as a way to well-being and source of self-fulfillment, of rising expectations lifting Cuban hopes for a better future and sustained by a commitment to the primacy of Cuban interests as the purpose for which the sovereign nation would be consecrated.
The challenge to the external sources of Cuban discontent in the name of liberty and freedom served to set in place a parallel discourse having to do with the internal causes of Cuban grievances, also in the name of liberty and freedom. Cubans aspired to end more than external forms of oppression, for which national sovereignty was the obvious end. They sought also to confront the internal sources of injustice, for which self-determination was the necessary means. Independence promised to make possible a new nation and a new order of things, the means to remedy Cuban discontent, a way to give Cubans a new place in society. The cause of Cuba was about the promise of political participation and social inclusion, about assembling a new value system as the normative basis of a new nation. The independentista purpose subsumed moral imperative into the idea of sovereignty, and in so doing transformed the meaning of nation from an abstract ideal to something real with actual consequences.
The ascendancy of the independentista ideal as embodiment of Cuban must be considered as a development of singular importance in the formation of nationality. If the liberation project was to have any prospect of success over the long run—and it was indeed over the long run that Cubans contemplated the pursuit of independence—it was obliged to render those attributes necessary to sustain Cuban resolve into properties of nationality. Inscribed into nineteenth-century formulations of nationality was the commitment to nation as a way to Cuban betterment—the creation of a nation possessed the capacity to ameliorate Cuban discontent and to provide collective fulfillment and individual well-being: a people who were persuaded they possessed the moral authority to make a history that met their needs. Aspirations to nationhood were about making life better for all Cubans. “There is no salvation of Cuba other than independence,” pronounced Antonio Maceo, “not as an end, but as an indispensable condition to achieve larger goals in conformity with the ideal of modern life.”13 As a means of self-fulfillment, liberation implied empowerment; as a basis of mobilization, it offered the prospects of mobility; as a movement, it promised membership.
National sovereignty implied the prerogative of power: power at the service of a national community without mediation, without intermediary; power to fashion the institutional structures of nation; power to assure the ascendancy of Cubans in Cuba; power to advance the primacy of nation as the basis upon which to constitute nationality. Aspirations to sovereign nationhood as a means of self-fulfillment implied making life better for all Cubans. That was the point: the creation of a nation entrusted with the defense of Cuban interests as the very reason for existing in the first place.
Acknowledgment of Cuban discontent was not a novel insight. What was new was the idea that Cubans acting in concert and with common purpose could do something about the circumstances of their discontent, that they were indeed joined together by a shared past and dependent upon one another for a better future, that they could seize history and make it respond to their needs.
The capacity to articulate discontent as a matter of actionable grievances and to imagine the possibility of redress as an outcome of collective action were themselves evidence of a shift of consciousness, a revelation of sorts, whereby conditions of oppression could no longer be sustained as “normal” and the circumstances of inequality could no longer be defended as “natural.” The act of agency, profoundly embedded in the ideal of national sovereignty as a means of self-determination, provided a way to contemplate the possibility of changes of other kinds, a people bound together into mutually dependent constituencies upon which the purpose of nation developed. Historian Lillian Guerra correctly characterized the liberation project as a movement of “popular nationalism,” described as “a diffuse but radical set of principles for self-determination that included a commitment to racial (and, in some cases, gender) equality, socioeconomic access, and political justice through a grassroots-controlled democracy.”14
The promise of independence was contained in the possibility of becoming and being someone, to be party to, part of, and participant in the creation of a new nation, for all Cubans, of course, but especially for the dispossessed and displaced, for Cubans who felt despised and disenfranchised: all in all, an entirely plausible formulation because it implied an all-encompassing paradigm of nationality, national inclusion as something real and important, a place in a community of agency, of collective well-being and the promise of a better future. José Martí envisioned a “moral republic,” one that implied “not so much a mere political change as a good, sound, just and equitable social system, without the fawning of demagogues or arrogance of authority,” and added: “We must never forget that the greater the suffering, the greater the right of justice.”15
Solidarity of purpose was sustained by the proposition of nationality as the embodiment of virtue and value, by the promise of nation as a source of dignity and well-being, that is, national sovereignty possessed of the capacity to transport its adherents across new thresholds of political participation and social inclusion. The idea of national sovereignty seized hold of the Cuban imagination for its promise of agency as the exercise of voice and volition, of inserting Cubans as protagonists into their own history in the creation of a nation of their own. They lived the experience of the nineteenth century as self-conscious agents of their own history, a process that was itself source of the affinities with which they came to a cognizance of shared attributes of nationality. A sentiment of agency insinuated itself early into the emerging sensibility of Cuban, the idea of individual resolve as source of collective fulfillment. “Those of us who went into the field of battle,” reminisced General Carlos García Velez, “were imbued with the idea that through our efforts we could contribute to the independence of Cuba.”16
There was populist intent to the Cuban purpose, a commitment to national sovereignty conceived as political change as means of social betterment and economic well-being. “Without question,” attorney Raimundo Cabrera wrote of the 1895 war for independence, “this has not been like the Ten Years War—not in its origins, or in its means, or in its expansion, or much less in its social, political, and economic aspects. Cuba today is revolutionary. . . . Everything is undone and in transition.”17 The premise of nation had fully expanded into a promise of social justice and racial reconciliation as the basis of national integration. “We do not undertake this revolution to expel the Spanish from the island in order to take their place at the banquet of shame and exploitation,” affirmed Diego Vicente Tejera in 1897. “On the contrary, it is undertaken to bring an end to that banquet, so there will no longer be those who fatten and laugh at the expense of those who grow thin and cry, so that—in a word—there no longer exist neither exploiters nor exploited.”18
The discursive structure of sovereign nationhood developed fully into a redemption narrative. To participate in the purpose of patria implied nation as a means of salvation. Fermín Valdés-Domínguez often wrote of the war for independence as “the redemptive revolution” (la revolución redentora).19 José Martí repeatedly invoked the idea of a movement to join all Cubans around “the burning idea of decent redemption,” as he proclaimed in 1891. “A war for the redemption and benefit of all Cubans” and “a nation redeemed” (la patria redimida), he reiterated the following year.20 Nation as the basis of Cuban well-being, a means by which to fulfill the destiny of a people, the moral premise from which the ideal of nation expanded into the normative determinants of nationality: a conviction central to the rationale of the cause of Cuba, which meant too that it created expectations of nation.
The independentista appeal, with its commitment to collective well-being within the paradigm of nation, promised entrée into a national community as a means of a better life and drew vast numbers of Cubans into its purpose, especially Cubans of African descent. Contained within the formulation of the sovereign nation was a parallel narrative addressing the circumstances of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans of color and the means by which the emerging domains of nationality were to accommodate racial equality, what Diego Vicente Tejera insisted was to be “not solely equality before the law but social equality, the only equality that acts to promote and preserve fraternity among men.”21
On the eve of the abolition of slavery (1886), African-descended people, both slave and free, constituted fully one-third of the total population of Cuba, approximately 500,000 out of 1.5 million inhabitants. The abolition of slavery raised as many issues as it resolved. Vast numbers of people of color, both men and women who had been born free and those who had been enslaved, were in a condition of transition and change even as Cuba itself was in the throes of transition and change. For the vast majority of Cubans of African descent, these were conditions in which the rules appeared to have changed—but not really: where the freedom implied by emancipation was often more apparent than real, and where the possibility of mobility and security was circumscribed at every turn by custom and conventions that revealed themselves resistant to change. “Freedom” in this instance meant mostly that many tens of thousands of black Cubans were not legally slaves. For many Cubans of color—perhaps most—the legal distinction was a moot point, for the material conditions and moral circumstances in which slavery had obtained validation persisted well after slavery itself had ceased to exist. No amount of “freedom” was sufficient to offset persisting conditions of injustice and inequality. The ranks of free people of color increased—and increased exponentially all through the nineteenth century. A vast constituency for change expanded across the island among the many tens of thousands of men and women of color who were “free” but subject to discriminatory policies and baneful practices. They had demanded the abolition of slavery and subsequently demanded recognition of rights to pursue a livelihood unmolested, to attain a standard of dignity, and to find a place of security in Cuba. “To arms!” Antonio Maceo exhorted Cubans of color. “Expel from Cuba the government that exploits you and oppresses your race. Yes—expel those enemies of the black humanity that are the source of your misfortune.”22
The liberation project offered people of African descent the promise of entrée into the emerging national community, an opportunity to participate in the formation of nation and thereby claim access to the promise of sovereign nationhood. “We want liberty and independence from Spain and every other nation,” proclaimed a manifesto of Cubans of color in Key West in 1881:
We want to see a republican form of government established in our nation. We want positions of public office distributed on the basis of merit, and not favoritism and caprice. We want full political rights and civil liberties for all sons and daughters of Cuba. We want the establishment of schools across the island on the basis of free and obligatory education. We want education to serve as the means to eradicate the social inequality that still exists in our patria. We want an end to the obstacles that the Spanish government has imposed on the development of Cuban agriculture, industry, and commerce. In a word: we want an independent Cuba to embark on the path of prosperity and greatness that will lift our people to the same level as the most advanced nations in the world.23
The participation of men and women of color in the process of national formation was essential to complete the representation of nationality as the embodiment of Cuban—and more: to advance the proposition of nationality as a construct of racelessness. To the degree that people of multiple racial identities invested themselves in the transcendental category of Cuban, the independentista project served to underscore the power of the appeal of patria. The liberation movement, historian Ada Ferrer correctly observed, “gave rise to one of the most powerful ideas in Cuba history—the conception . . . of a raceless nationality.”24
The project of liberation could not admit the formulation of racial purpose in any function other than in the service of nation: specifically, people of color subordinating racial identity to national identity. The intent was to confer unanimity of purpose and unity of politics, to subordinate competing identities and potentially divisive attachments to the proposition of the transcendental nation as source of solidarity, which implied too the promise—and expectation—of nation as means of redress and source of security. Whatever divided Cubans from within and weakened them from without was rejected as divisive, an obstacle to the fulfillment of the sovereign nation. The moral was plain: unity of nation promised to transcend the division of race. “There is happily no longer whites and blacks [in Cuba], pronounced Eusebio Hernández in 1895. “We are all sons of the same nation, all equal before the law, which has no other purpose than to guarantee the rights of everyone . . . to benefit the intellectual, moral, and social condition of the community.”25 To affirm color was deemed divisive and detrimental to the solidarities seen as necessary for the success of the independentista purpose. “Cuba means more than whites, more than mulattos, more than blacks,” José Martí insisted: “To insist on racial divisions and differences of race among a people already divided is to impede the attainment of national and individual well-being, [goals] that are to be achieved by the unity of racial elements that constitute the nation.”26 This was the promise inscribed into the very premise of nation. “We are going to work to remove obstacles that impede unity,” vowed Juan Gualberto Gómez, “and to strengthen our efforts with the maximum cooperation possible so that equality may prevail and upon which we will fasten permanent goodwill between blacks and whites.”27 As a transcendental category, the idea of sovereign nationhood could not admit the division of race. “Ask for nothing as black,” Antonio Maceo enjoined, but ask for “everything as Cuban.”28
To surrender to the promise of nation was to commit to the creation of a new society which, by the very terms of equal participation and shared sacrifice with whites, was to guarantee people of color a place of equality in the nation. “The independence war,” historian Tomás Fernández Robaina observed, “in large measure contributed to the creation of a multiracial nation, in which blacks could not be ignored and their claim of rights to public positions had been more than adequately substantiated by their valor in the battles for independence.” Further: “Expectations were virtually unanimous that in the imagined nation, the Republic of Martí, the bane of racial discrimination would be eliminated.”29
Vast numbers of Cubans of color responded, and many tens of thousands enrolled in the military ranks and civilian positions of the liberation project, adding their grievances with the prevailing order of things to the Cuban purpose, confident that sovereign nationhood would provide remedy to the sources of their discontent. And because they did, it would be to the nation that Cubans of color would subsequently make demands.
The plausibility of Cuban as a transcendental category of self-identity was understood early to be contingent on possession of nation, unmediated and unencumbered, sovereignty as the minimum for collective fulfillment. The liberation project developed within an all-encompassing paradigm deeply inscribed within the proposition of the sovereign nation as source of political integration and means of social unity. This implied first and foremost a deepening recognition of the need to relocate power within Cuba and reorder the purpose of power in behalf of things Cuban, but most of all the affirmation of the prerogative of Cuban in Cuba as the basis of future well-being: “Our independence is the basis of our future happiness,” affirmed General Calixto García in 1878.30 To the degree that Cubans invested selfhood into nationhood, the former could not be imagined without the latter. In late 1897, as Spain prepared to offer insurgent Cubans limited home rule, the Republic in Arms roundly repudiated any proposed settlements that did not include independence:
We feel the need to affirm again in a loud and clear voice the firm and determined purpose that has motivated Cubans in this desperate struggle sustained against Spain. . . . Not special laws, not reforms, not autonomy—nothing that could under any circumstances and in any way continue Spanish domination of Cuba can bring an end to this conflict. Independence or death has been, is, and will be our determined and sacred precept. We have not taken up arms, or endured the ruin of our properties, or abandoned our homes, or risked our lives to settle for political measures that fail to resolve definitively the issue of independence. . . . We want absolute and immediate independence of the entire island. We wish to constitute ourselves as a free people, in an orderly manner, with prosperity and happiness. . . . Without independence Cuba will always be a site of discontent, a place of disorder, a theater of interminable convulsions. . . . We need to prevail—and we will prevail. Only with victory or through death will we leave the fields of Cuba Libre.31
Norms of nationality developed around a particular set of dispositions, a value system as a way of being, derived principally from the independentista purpose and proclaimed as the sum and substance of Cuban. These were complex formulations: national consciousness at once as cause and consequence of nation, even as the means used to create nation acted to shape the moral meaning of nationality. This implied a politics of national identity, of course, but it also had very much to do with the purpose for which the nation was conceived, which affected too the way that the norms of nationality formed.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the narrative on nationality had expanded beyond the category of simply “Cuban.” The men and women who subscribed to the independentista project spoke of “true Cubans” (verdaderos cubanos), “good Cubans” (buenos cubanos), and “true sons of Cuba” (verdaderos hijos de Cuba)—as compared to those Cubans who supported Spanish colonial rule—in whatever form—variously characterized as “espurios cubanos,” “malos cubanos,” and “falsos cubanos”—those José Martí scorned as “weak Cubans” (débiles cubanos) and Antonio Maceo vilified as a “degenerate son of Cuba” (degenerado hijo de Cuba).32 True Cubans were the men and women who by virtue of political persuasion and moral commitment had dedicated themselves to the purpose of sovereign nationhood as the means of collective self-fulfillment, and—at least as important—who subscribed to the proposition of sacrifice for patria as the duty of being Cuban. The expansion of the insurrection into western Cuba in 1896, Colonel Avelino Sanjenís remembered years later, “was when the true Cuban people came to believe in the cause of independence.”33 All “true Cubans,” Colonel Gustavo Pérez Abreu insisted, were obliged to answer the summons of the patria, while Colonel Ramón Roa insisted that the “duty of every good Cuban” (todo buen cubano) was to the fulfillment of the sovereign nation.34 “The cause of independence,” affirms Tomás in Raimundo Cabrera’s autobiographical novel, Ideales (1918), “is the only one that a good Cuban should have [la única que debe tener un bueno cubano].”35 Poet Martina Pierra de Poo was lyrical about the need “To offer at the holy altar [of patria] / If necessary / The supreme sacrifice of life,” adding: “And if there were a soul indifferent / To the call of his idolized patria / He could not be Cuban.”36 Emilia Casanova de Villaverde proclaimed that the “devotion of all true Cubans” centered on the cause of liberation.37 José Martí alluded often to “all good Cubans” and “true Cubans of the nation.”38 Years later, Manuel Arbelo recalled enrolling in the Liberation Army, persuaded that “the time had arrived for every heartfelt-Cuban [todo cubano de corazón] to confront with determination all the sacrifices necessary for independence.”39 Antonio Maceo was unequivocal: “Honorable men and true patriots [hombres honrados y verdaderos patriotas] are those who above all other considerations love the independence of their country.”40
The singular achievement of the independentista polity was to seize control of the master narrative of nation and thereupon to construct the terms through which—among other things—the “true” character of nationality—lo cubano—would be measured. The standard of Cubanness was fixed in the proposition of verdadero cubano, one inextricably inscribed in the defense of the sovereign nation. Diego Vicente Tejera divided the island’s population into “the true Cuban people,” “heartfelt Cubans” (los cubanos de corazón), who supported the cause of independence, and “the bad Cubans” (los malos cubanos), those who supported Spain. It was necessary to choose sides, Tejera insisted, “to be with Cubans or with those who kill Cubans.”41
The definition of verdadero cubano implied total commitment to the cause of sovereign nationhood as central to the normative content of nationality, explicitly as condition of entrée into nationality. Anything less implied disloyalty—or worse, it suggested treason. José Martí often characterized Cubans who by acts of commission or deeds of omission hindered the cause of independence as traitors to the nation.42
For the men and women dedicated to the independentista cause, proponents of anything less than sovereign nationhood—annexationists, for example, or autonomists—were suspect and indeed denounced as traitors. “All who by word or print express ideas contrary to the independence of the nation,” proclaimed the Provisional Government during the Ten Years War, “will lose the right of citizenship and will be considered as traitors.”43 Cubans who supported Spanish rule, proclaimed the Republic in Arms, were deemed guilty of “treason to the patria.”44 The protagonist in Raimundo Cabrera’s novel Ideales (1918) drew a stark dichotomy: “Between Spain that always oppresses us and the Cuba that rebels anew to remove its yoke, there can be no indecision: with our people to struggle and to die. Those who do not come with us will be [considered] in the future as traitors and cowards.”45 Autonomists who supported limited home rule within the Spanish colonial system “were not worthy of being called Cubans,” the weekly El Vigía decried in 1897, “because they refuse to sacrifice, and openly and secretly serve the enemy,” alluding ominously to the necessity “to cross the foreheads of these false sons [hijos espurios] of the patria with ashen marks for future action.” El Vigía proclaimed outright: “They are traitors,” men that the Revista de Cuba Libre similarly characterized as “a handful of traitors.”46 Autonomists were “false Cubans,” insisted Fermín Valdés-Domínguez: “They are all simply traitors.” The day of reckoning would come, Valdés-Domínguez vowed, for “those of us who fight for the independence of the patria with weapons in our hands must some day punish them for the statements they make. We would be cowards if we forgive those who in such a traitorous manner have aligned themselves with the Spanish and before our very eyes use insults and lies as weapons against us.”47
The character of Cuban acquired specific moral attributes, all very much derived from the commitment sustained in behalf of the sovereign nation. The weekly El Cubano Libre was unequivocal about the meaning of Cuban:
[Independentistas] are the only ones who can and should call themselves Cubans. [Autonomists] are without consciousness of their duty and throw themselves at the feet of tyrants. . . . Although sons of Cuba, they repudiate their patria, and their patria rejects them as unworthy sons. Those who kneel before tyrants to receive alms obtained from the pillage of the patria cannot be Cuban. Those who live in defeat, hiding their shame and cowardice in the shadows, do not form part of the Cuban people. Those who witness violence and pillage in silence, lacking the courage to raise their voice in protest, cannot be Cuban. That group of weak men, without faith and without hope, whose very pettiness makes them incapable of great aspirations, cannot be part of the Cuban people. The Cuban people are made up of those for whom the cry of “Patria and Liberty” kindled their dreams and who abandoned their homes and families and committed themselves to armed struggle.48
The mambises, insisted Raimundo Cabrera, “were the expression of the sentiment of rebellion of the country, and no one who is not blind or driven by ill-will can deny that they were the true representation of the country.”49 The independentista newspaper La República was categorical: “[The future of Cuba] will be determined only by those who are exposed to danger in the field of the insurrection, those who have shed their blood in combat after having been despoiled of what they owned, those who have sacrificed on the altar of the patria their family, their positions, and their possessions, those who by their own hand have reduced to ashes all their worldly belongings.”50 Only those engaged in the armed struggle—“those who have embraced the principle of ‘Independence or Death,’” future president of Cuba Tomás Estrada Palma insisted—possessed the moral authority to speak as Cubans and to serve as “the representatives of the Cuban people, for they are the only ones who have the courage of their convictions, who endure danger and make the sacrifice of lives and interests on the altar of principles against the government of Spain,” adding: “All Cubans [los hijos todos de Cuba] are situated between two extremes: either on the side of their compatriots in arms or on the side of those who kill their compatriots. . . . Simply put: who is not with me is against me.”51
The process of liberation advanced intermittently and haltingly. From a distance of more than 150 years it may appear to have progressed on a straight-forward course, but it was not experienced in this fashion. Advances alternated with setbacks; defeats followed victories and were often followed by more defeats: all in all, progress so erratically registered as to have often been hardly discernible at all, decade after decade, and with prospects often in doubt and outcomes never a foregone conclusion.
Cubans undertook the nineteenth-century wars for independence with the presentiment of endless sorrow—“the history of the past insurrection has demonstrated indisputably that the war in Cuba may well be interminable,” Antonio Maceo wrote in 1895.52 They were resigned to the prospects of a vastly unequal struggle: Cubans over-matched and under-equipped, of civilians against soldiers, of machetes against Mausers, where the only advantage possessed by Cubans was the will to win and the willingness to die. “I am certain that our Independence will necessarily cost us much blood and many tears,” Fermín Valdés-Domínguez confided to his diary.53 Luis Rodríguez-Embil offered poignant musings of life within the insurgency in his novel La insurrección (1911): “It was composed of individuals the majority of whom had never thought of being soldiers, who had never known the meaning of constant danger, who had never experienced such hardship and suffering. And notwithstanding the rigors of this life and its dangers, had committed themselves unflinchingly with resolve to the cause. . . . Everything—jobs, home, family—everything had been abandoned heroically so as to commit themselves to sacrifice for liberty.”54
The call to arms was a summons to sacrifice and struggle. “The revolution needs lives,” exhorted essayist Ramón Céspedes Fornaris from within the ranks of the insurgent forces in 1871, “mass numbers of lives, it needs immense suffering in all forms, for the tree of liberty bears fruit only in those places where the tears of the good fertilize the soil.”55 To be Cuban—to be a verdadero cubano—implied unconditional devotion to the cause of the sovereign nation: to be among those “good and honorable Cubans [buenos y honrados cubanos],” José Calero explained, “who cherish their beloved patria and who are disposed to die for it gladly, with a smile on their face, with conviction and serenity.”56 The weekly La Revolución de Cuba commented at the close of the Ten Years War: “Without arms, without resources, without the material elements necessary to triumph, the Cuban people plunged into a cruel and bloody war . . . because much sacrifice and many lives given up as offerings are the price that freedom demands. The Cuban people have not hesitated to meet the cost.”57 Domingo Goicuría was succinct. “There is no choice but to prevail or perish,” Goicuría wrote to his daughter on the eve of his execution for the act of rebellion in 1870, “and it is to this purpose that those of us with the Cuban heart [el corazón cubano] are committed.” The destiny of the Cuban was set, Goicuría insisted: “We have come into the world to be martyrs.”58
To be Cuban—verdadero cubano—implied conviction enacted as conduct, principally as dedication to duty and disposition to sacrifice, a way of being as means of becoming, proclaimed as the sum and substance of Cuban: briefly put, the way a people assemble the norms of national character. The independentista purpose acquired internal coherence by way of a set of beliefs and practices, shared among its proponents and transacted as an obligatory attribute of Cuban. “It is necessary to have faith and confidence in the holy ideals that enjoin us to suffer so that we may not lose heart,” Fermín Valdés-Domínguez entered into his field journal on June 29, 1897, “in order not to lose patience, in order not to be frightened by a life—that in reality is not a life—that leads us to illness and perhaps death. It is necessary to be Cuban above everything else, to suffer and hope, the way we should all suffer and hope.”59 Carlos Loveira speaks through his protagonist in the partly autobiographical novel Generales y doctores (1920): “That’s why we are Cubans. To endure all the suffering and the sacrifices necessary.”60
The character of Cuban emerged out of the experience of a people who forged its meaning in the act of defining themselves, under specific historical circumstances, incrementally and over time, in response to the demands of their times and as a function of the requirements of their purpose. Nationality was endowed with specific attributes and attitudes, shaped within the experience of liberation as deeds and dispositions and thereafter transfigured into the terms of national self-representation. Much of the content of nationality developed as a matter of context and contingency, fashioned over the years of adversity—in part informed by the moral imperative of liberation, in part as pragmatic response to the needs of war, but mostly out of the realization that consensus of purpose and concert of action were indispensable conditions for the realization of Cuban aspirations. “We will accept nothing other than the independence of Cuba,” vowed General Calixto García in 1897. “There is not a single man, however humble a soldier he may be, for whom the question of independence is negotiable, and since our cause is not the result of some improvised idea but of mature reflection, of a necessity felt for so many years [una necesidad sentida de muchísimos años]. . . we are disposed to prevail or perish in its behalf.”61
Nationality developed within a value system, principally around discursive formulations conspicuous for their utility in the project of nation, out of practical need, deployed as moral strategies of mobilization, shaped into usable representational motifs, and thereupon subsumed into the larger cosmology of Cuban. For Fermín Valdés-Domínguez, it was the war of liberation itself from which the character of Cuban was to be forged and sustained: “Our war must serve as an example of virtue and principle of the new order of things that will summon into existence the stable and unifying great Republic.”62 The ways Cubans adapted to the necessity of struggle and sacrifice, decade after decade, transformed the very culture by which they were in the act of being formed. “Fortunate it is indeed,” observed Diego Vicente Tejera in 1897, “that Spanish oppression—who would have believed it!—has had a salutary effect, for it has given the entire Cuban people a single soul, and as a result of the injuries suffered in common has forged a community of sentiments and ideas.”63
Successive generations of Cubans came of age within a process of national formation, socialized in a moral system informed principally by the imperative of the sovereign nation. Historian Rafael Tarragó attributes “the cult of the recourse to violence” to José Martí, not sympathetically, to be sure, but in a manner that serves to underscore the formation of the character of Cuban:
I suggest that we consider the effect on Cubans of those regular patriotic celebrations where Martí’s words extolling physical courage and martyrdom have been read or explained, and those who disagreed with his methods have been condemned as traitors. Respect for diverse points of view cannot be developed where the population is steadily exposed to readings and speeches denigrating as inefficient the recourse of political negotiations and extolling war as necessary. It is inevitable that the population of that country will eventually consider civility to be pusillanimity. If the first hero of a nation is always quoted advocating intransigence, it is logical that the average citizen of that nation will value intransigence as a virtue.64
José Martí was formed by and he contributed to the normative system in which “physical courage and martyrdom” were deployed as dispositions necessary to obtain the sovereign nation. This was a value system in formation, to which Martí offered by word and deed prescriptive conduct as relevant to the imperative of nation. There was indeed something of a deepening intransigence to the Cuban purpose, a determination that developed into a celebrated attribute of the mambí ethos. It could hardly have been otherwise.
Deeds celebrated as heroic expanded fully into conduct corresponding to Cuban and from which to model behavior—and thereupon celebrated as an attribute intrinsic to nationality. This implied above all the need to inscribe into the normative structure of nationality behavioral norms in fulfillment of the independentista purpose, especially dedication to nation as an attribute of nationality, an assumption so taken for granted that it ceased to be apprehended in any way other than discharge of moral responsibility just by virtue of being Cuban. “Sacrifice for the patria was so commonplace,” General Enrique Collazo later wrote, “that no one saw these efforts as anything extraordinary; to die for the patria was something so accepted by everyone that survivors saw nothing noteworthy in the deed, for it was understood that such a fate would befall everyone, sooner or later. The choice was clear: dishonor by joining the enemy or to die honorably.”65
Decades of struggle and sacrifice registered deeply on the sensibility of a people for whom the process of liberation served as the circumstances in which the moral structure of collective selfhood developed. Cuban character, historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez suggested in 1921, was the product of “enduring and fervent efforts which Cubans have had the necessity to sustain [and] the suffering that they have had to endure in the course of the wars of independence.” He added: “The tenacity and spirit with which the Cuban people defended their ideals during the last [nineteenth] century, with indomitable perseverance . . . engaged in the fundamental purpose of independence and liberty, have fortified and unified their character.”66 Nation was a cause to live for and, of course, to die for. But, more important, the process—of living and dying for the patria—was itself source of nationality and the purpose that shaped the people that Cubans became. Historian Sergio Aguirre was entirely correct in his observation that the Ten Years War was a phenomenon as much about an emerging nationality as it was “nationality consolidating into nation.”67
For Cubans drawn to the promise of liberation, nation assumed something of sacral meaning, approached with reverence and devotion, for which the logic of sacrifice was a matter of discharge of faith corresponding to Cuban. Socialization into norms of nationality was transacted within an ethical system in which verdaderos cubanos were implicated by virtue of their claim to nationality. José Martí repeatedly invoked sacrifice as the central normative element of the condition of Cuban. Nationality was “a brotherhood of sacrifice,” he insisted. “The patria needs sacrifice,” Martí exhorted, understood always as the need “to rise, with nobility, at the time of sacrifice and die without fear as an offering to the patria.” He was blunt: “A sincere patriot should sacrifice everything for Cuba.”68 Novelist Luis Rodríguez-Embil described in La insurrección (1911) the gathering of new recruits into the Liberation Army who looked upon the flag “as a symbol that belonged to them, and to which they had a duty imposed by they did not know who. And all, obedient to this mysterious duty raised their hands . . . to proclaim ‘Viva Cuba Libre!’”69
The measure of Cuban developed out of the narratives of nation, a combination of pragmatism and principle, means expressed as ends and ends exemplified as means, at one and the same time an affirmation of nationality as confirmation of nation. Cubans conferred on the cause of nation virtuous intent and honorable purpose, men and women fashioning a collective sense of nationhood within their understanding of the needs of their times, which meant too that nationality increasingly assumed the form of a moral system, an amalgam of attitudes and attributes assembled under specific historical circumstances given to the purpose of nation. Vast numbers of Cubans, over the span of three generations, came of age within a moral order forged by the circumstances of a war of liberation: planning for war, making war, recovering from war, and preparing for more war. General Carlos García Velez thought much about what he characterized as the Cuban “state of mind” during the nineteenth century, something he described as “a psychological state very similar to patriotic dementia [un estado psicológico muy semejante a demencia patriótica],” adding: “I myself experienced that admiration of those men [of 1868], and I rejected outright every argument contrary to the success of a new Revolution. Our patriotic faith rejected any possibility that we would be defeated, notwithstanding the fact that we knew we faced a superior army. . . . The independentistas persevered in the determination to realize the Ideal [of independence] against all logic, confident in their faith.”70
Norms of nationality developed less from beliefs in abstract principles than from the lessons of lived experiences. For all who passed under its sway—and the numbers were considerable—the ideal of sovereign nationhood was the defining issue of their times. Patria was the purpose to which vast numbers of men and women dedicated their lives, what Raimundo Cabrera would recall decades later as “the supreme ideal of our youthful dreams.”71 Colonel Segundo Corvisón described himself as “obsessed by an ideal,” and Ricardo Batrell Oviedo wrote of his “heart swollen with love for the sacrosanct Ideal and burning with faith for the reason of its Cause.”72 A notation in the field journal of Avelino Sanjenís reflected the sentiment prevailing among many mambises: “There is no one among us who is not disposed to continue for all eternity our struggle for independence.”73 Eduardo Rosell could only marvel at the Cuban capacity for sacrifices, confiding to his field diary: “What extraordinary power the idea of Patria has over us.”74
These were powerful sentiments indeed, ones for which Spain was woefully unprepared. If General García Velez was only partially correct, “patriotic dementia” was an impossible collective state of mind to deal with in any way but one. “Spain has not been able to resolve the problem of Cuba except by force of arms,” Spanish captain general Camilo Polavieja acknowledged in 1879, “and the guarantee of Spanish rule in the future may be possible only through the extermination of the majority of the inhabitants of the island.”75
Cubans in the nineteenth century were a people in continual dialogue with themselves, men and women engaged in and fixed on the pursuit of sovereign nationhood, within the confines of literary societies and labor halls, at work and play, as a matter of political pronouncements, as public discourse and private correspondence, in song, verse, and poetry, texts circulated as printed matter and passed on by word of mouth.
But always—and always most important—this was a history that originated in private spaces, in the deep interior places of the intimacies of households, within conjugal relationships, between husbands and wives and parents and children, within networks of kin and across generations of family, sometimes within the context of gender conventions as they existed, at other times in adaptations of gender norms as required. Men and women found themselves in the ordinary discharge of gender-scripted designations during extraordinary times: women as mothers and primary caregivers and men as providers and protectors, in the process setting into place normative systems from which the terms of nationality took form.
The process of national formation, and specifically the circumstances under which the attributes of an emerging value system were inscribed as the normative basis of nationality, implicated men and women in distinctly gender-differentiated ways. That the commitment to nation was often enacted within the framework of received conventions of gender norms matters less than the degree to which gender functions were themselves informed by the purpose of liberation. Notions of manhood and womanhood were in a continual state of flux, changing to adapt to needs that were changing, and in the process setting in place a host of moral dispositions as attributes of Cuban.
Men and women jointly sustained the logic through which commitment to the duty of sacrifice developed as an attribute of nationality, albeit in vastly different ways. Sacrifice by men necessarily implied sacrifice by women and could not have been enacted without the disposition of women to uphold the very codes by which the determinants of duty were defined. Gendered concepts of duty situated men and women at different points along the spectrum of sacrifice, to be sure, but it is no less true that the assumptions derived from devotion to duty were themselves a shared source of solidarity.
The liberation project summoned into existence a complex system of social reciprocities and moral obligations, in the aggregate structured as a value system that acted to inform the meaning of nationality. Norms of manhood and womanhood—idealized as they may have been—responded to the need to foster those dispositions deemed indispensable for the realization of nation. To understand the independentista polity as an expanding community inalterably opposed to Spanish colonial rule, obliged continuously to replicate itself as the minimum condition for success, is to appreciate the need for Cubans to develop a cultural model of social action appropriate to the task of liberation.
Liberation Army camp, ca. 1898. Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional ‘José Martí,’ Havana, Cuba.
The pursuit of nation drew upon an ensemble of gender-differentiated codes of conduct, the multiple ways that Cubans arrived at an understanding of duty demanded of them as men and as women. These were arrangements in an ongoing state of change, always in response to circumstances of need as experienced, that is, a process of cultural adaptation shaping the very meaning of Cuban: men and women acting not solely as agents but also conscious of agency, aware of the purpose for which they acted, and in the process conferring meaning on their acts. The realization of nation implied dedication to values of duty and commitment to sacrifice, which were inscribed into an all-encompassing paradigm of nationality and thereafter transmuted into the attributes by which nationality itself was gendered.
These were extraordinary times of far-reaching transitions, a time in which existing premises and practices of established gender norms adapted in the course of successive generations of Cubans to accommodate the needs of independence. The model of manhood as a standard of virtue expanded fully into a discursive construct of compelling purport: men as warriors who contemplated the prospects of death with equanimity and as a matter of a destiny foretold. Boys were conducted into realms of manhood by way of a moral system derived from idealized manly deportment, socialized into norms of a value system formed in function of liberation. The independentista discourse extolled ideals of sublime sacrifice, expected of all men by virtue of being male. Codes of manly conduct—“real men”—converged with norms of nationality—“real Cuban”—to celebrate qualities of valor and virility, honor and courage, but most of all the duty of sacrifice demanded of Cuban men. Masculinity in this instance was itself implicated in the cultural transformations attending formation of nation, specifically the construction of an ideal of conduct realized in the discharge of duty to nation.
Women experienced decades of war as an environment for an expanded public presence and participation. They developed new skills, discovered new self-worth, and found a new sense of freedom to participate in the creation of a new nation. The presence of women within the constituency from which norms of Cuban were in formation raised new issues about entrée into emerging nationality, about civic participation and political inclusion, about what women could plausibly expect in a Cuba for Cubans. Women were indispensable in assembling the moral order from which nationality developed. They were changed by change, by which their voices were added to the demands for change. Women entered the realms of nationality conscious of the need to participate in the process of nation, and, like men, they fully endorsed the necessity of sacrifice as a gender-determined attribute. “Women,” historian Juan Remos correctly noted, “were the first and most powerful impetus to move entire families into the Revolution.”76
Women transcended and transgressed existing gender boundaries to assume positions of leadership, in both public places and private spaces. They devoted vast amounts of creative talent to the cause of patria—as propagandists, poets, and essayists; as public speakers and political organizers. They proclaimed their devotion to the cause of nation—“to that beautiful Cuban flag,” exults Lola in René Darbois León’s two-act drama, Un episodio de la guerra de Cuba (1899), “the sacred symbol of our redemption, soaked and darkened with the blood of the martyrs of the Revolution.”77 The surviving correspondence, journals, and memoirs provide powerful testimony to the contribution of women to the moral environment in which the proposition of sovereign nationhood flourished and obtained validation. “The desire to serve the patria and contribute to its liberation is innate in me,” explained Emilia Casanova de Villaverde. “Ever since I was a child . . . I vowed to myself that I would consecrate my life to that sacred and noble objective. To this day I have done little else except to work and dream of the redemption of my patria. . . . My love for the patria has always been greater than my love for anything else.”78 Years later, Rita María Suárez del Villar, a conspirator during the 1890s, reminisced about her childhood. “Knowledge of the oppression in which my beloved Cuba lived produced in me great anguish,” she recalled. “This experience caused me to vow that as soon as I was old enough I would fight without rest until my beloved Patria became free and sovereign.”79
The paradigm of arms-bearing men as defenders of the homeland and child-bearing women as defenders of the home drew upon dichotomies deeply embedded in the practice of received wisdom. The demands of nationality could not but implicate men in a gendered-scripted role as a matter of self-esteem and self-fulfillment: that is, what Cuban men were supposed to do by virtue of being male. But it was no less true—and no less important—that norms of nationality that propounded the ideal of male sacrifice as a function of nationality also required the collaboration of women, who were expected to bear the sacrifice of men with a resignation that was itself rendered as the duty of women. The proposition of sacrifice among men and the resignation to the sacrifice of men among women fused within a mutually reinforcing moral system and served to provide normative credibility to the commitment to necessary forms of collective conduct.
Men and women were drawn together into an accommodation to sacrifice as enactment of an ideal of Cuban, ineluctably, as indispensable for the realization of sovereign nationhood. “I am heartened by the certainty that in your strong angelic soul,” Ignacio Agramonte wrote to his wife in 1872, “you bear everything with resignation, confidently awaiting a future filled with happiness that we will surely enjoy together after we complete the obligations that Cuba has imposed upon us.”80 Years later, Colonel Matías Duque would dedicate his book, Nuestra patria (1925), to his wife Mercedes Cortés for “having endured with sublime resignation the abandonment to which I subjected her upon incorporating myself into the revolution upon its outbreak. She faced that situation with an unparalleled patriotism, applauding and encouraging my conduct as Cuban. . . . Like other patriotic Cuban women, she held back her tears and proudly bore her cubanismo, and in this manner contributed to the triumph of the Republic.”81
Women conferred moral vitality on the emerging norms of nationality by the discharge of gender-specific functions in the roles of wives and mothers. The ideal of Cuban womanhood bearing sacrifice stoically and enduring grief heroically acted to expand the consensual framework of nationality, the very process by which women contributed decisively to the formulations by which the meaning of Cuban was fashioned. Aurelia Castillo de González moved freely among separatist families and would write of the “noble mission” discharged by women during the Ten Years War, who “by virtue of their example strengthened the resolve of men, as examples of energy, abnegation, resignation, of patriotism,” and who themselves contributed decisively to “preserving the sacred flame of the war of independence.” She added: “Think that they swallowed their tears so as to not show weakness when their sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers were killed.”82
The conventions of sacrifice were enacted as resigned acquiescence to the loss of men in the service of the patria. The ideal of wives disposed to suffer personal loss and sacrifice material well-being, to defer hopes for happiness and forgo the aspirations traditionally associated with family and home, assumed a place of prominence in the narratives of nationality. Mothers were drawn into the cause of nation with a special purpose, charged with the duty to form consciousness of Cuban as a central facet of child-rearing practices. The highest purpose to which motherhood could be given, José Martí insisted, was to instill in children love for the patria. Martí praised “the widowed mother who sees without tears her son depart for the wilderness in search of the grave of his father, to die to be worthy of his father, [and] provide with his body one more step toward the achievement of patria.”83 Indeed, this sentiment insinuated itself deeply into celebrated gender conventions of the time. Essayist Africa Fernández Iruela enjoined “mothers and sisters to encourage [sons and brothers] to support the struggle for Liberty, the way our grandparents encouraged their sons through word and deed during the glorious epoch of our Independence. It is not for nothing that we are a people among whom heroism has a throne and liberty a flag.”84 Dolores Larrúa de Quintana affirmed outright that the abiding aspiration of Cuban women was to contribute to the greater glory of the patria. She added: “However, Cuban women do not consider this aspiration as a duty; rather, it develops spontaneously out of her soul.”85
The celebrated ideal of Cuban womanhood developed within the independentista paradigm and readily inscribed itself as attributes by which the meaning of nationality gained currency. “I admire you, mother of mine,” Consuelo Alvarez eulogized Cuban mothers, “and the superior spirit and sublime resignation with which you have endured the sad fate that has befallen you.”86 Juan Remos affirmed outright that “the pro-independence mother [la madre mambisa] was one of the most powerful defenders of the Revolution, whose support accounted for the filling of the ranks of the Liberation Army.”87 The weekly El Expedicionario in 1897 underscored the relationship between motherhood and nationhood:
The Cuban mother, as a result of her particular way of being and feeling [por su modo particular de ser y sentir], above all other mothers, generally speaking, perhaps sacrifices herself with the greatest abnegation. . . . Look at the glorious revolution and see the Cuban mother, through her spirit and often through her material support, encouraging her sons . . . so that they are not disheartened, so that they fight until victory or death, until they redeem the enslaved patria and that they may enjoy the holy liberty that they deserve and which the despicable metropolis seeks to prevent. The Cuban mother is the soul of the revolution of Cuba, for from the time she put her sons to sleep in the cradle and later teaches them always to hate slavery and tyranny, [her sons] learn to love liberty and struggle to achieve it. Bless them!88
Protocols of grief were assembled as attributes of Cuban womanhood as the culture of national formation adapted to accommodate the human cost incurred by the wars for independence. These were profoundly complex psychological adaptations and defy facile explanation, but that they were made cannot be doubted. Certainly the suppression of the public display of grief was vital to the morale and social solidarity of the independentista cause. But it is also true that the act of women bearing grief as exemplary carriage, in the form of pride and purpose, as a matter of public poise, served to confer powerful validation on an undertaking that Cubans knew from the outset would cost them dearly.
The model of stoic bearing, of women discharging the duty of sacrifice as affirmation of Cuban, loomed large in the nineteenth-century narratives of nationality. It suggested a standard of conduct women were enjoined to comply with and expected to conform to—what essayist Concepción Boloña (pseudonym Coralia) characterized at the end of the war as “expressions of sublime abnegation and suffering borne with heroic resignation.”89 There could be no more powerful vindication of the ideal of duty than through the conduct of wives and mothers who commemorated the death of husbands and sons as exemplary deeds in the service of patria and who in the anguish of their bereavement lent the moral force of their grief to consecrate the higher purpose for which sacrifice was rendered. “And our women?” asked Luis Quintero in 1875. “Could we ask for any greater abnegation?” He continued:
Are they not rivals of the daughters of Sparta? Have they not surpassed [Spartan women] in resignation and in suffering? . . . There is no task they have not performed, no misery they have not suffered, no sorrow that has not afflicted their heart. They have lost their dear brothers, their beloved husbands, their adored sons. Their sons! We who know how much a Cuban mother loves her son can appreciate the intensity of her sorrow. And yet these women suffer their exile and their misery and their pain without the slightest complaint against the revolution, and they encourage and support the patriot who wishes to share with his brothers the horrors of war. The sons of such women cannot but know how to be free.90
José María Izaguirre remembered criollas during the Ten Years War possessing “extraordinary commitment and abnegation: from what I saw then I was fully persuaded that Cuban women are truly heroic.”91
The process was dialectical, of course, gender conventions acting on and being acted upon, a complex ensemble of moral dispositions insinuating themselves into the meaning of nationality. The process of national formation was itself the means of the transformation of a value system shaped by the circumstances of liberation. The power of gender conventions to shape meanings of Cuban must be considered as factors of far-reaching consequences and were themselves facets of the larger cultural transformations through which an emerging moral order insinuated itself into the broad consensual norms of nationality.
Men and women together fashioned mutually reinforcing bonds by which they held each other to the task of liberation. Purpose often operated as assumptions so thoroughly understood that they need not have been apprehended at all. In ways perhaps all too imperfectly understood, the role of women in the formation in men of the will to liberation cannot be overstated. The commitment with which men dedicated themselves to the cause of Cuba was very much fashioned within the conventions of intimacies exchanged with women. It was the love and tenderness of women, reflected Francisco Gómez Toro in 1894, that “induces us to give our lives to the Patria.”92 Gender determinants of nationality were negotiated not as a matter of abstract formulations but within realms of complex interpersonal relationships, under circumstances of life as lived, men and women making their expectations of each other known, sustaining one another, each looking to the other for clues and cues as guide to comportment and carriage, seeking to fulfill the hopes they held of each other, and in the process forging the solidarities from which the meaning of nationality developed.93 “I will always acknowledge your Superiority,” Provisional President Carlos Manuel de Céspedes wrote to his wife from insurgent headquarters in 1871, “and accept the example you represent and the reprimands that you provide.”94 Colonel Fermín Valdés-Domínguez provided a poignant chronicle of the relationship between love of patria and love of wife. “I serve only to fulfill my duty as Cuban and to be worthy of your love,” he wrote in March 1896 while on military operations, and two months later: “I have been formed by this life of [military] honor in which—for you—I serve Cuba to make myself worthy of your affection,” adding, “I know you know: I serve Cuba so that I can return to you proud and at peace for having fulfilled my obligations.” In August, he wrote again from the field: “Oh! You know that I would not deserve the affection of those who struggle here by my side for the honor of Cuba; that I would not deserve the honor of dying for the liberty of our patria. . . if I did not feel you within me like the light of heaven, as a source of strength and life of my life. . . . For me you are not only the woman who I adore with the passion of man: you are more. You connect me to life and make me think of virtue. You make me dignified and strong, and give me the courage to feel Cuban.”95
To be worthy of the admiration and affection of women was indeed very much a part of the moral sustenance with which men enrolled in the armed ranks of Cuba Libre. The call to revolution was often embedded in complex gender codes, of the need to acquit oneself honorably in the eyes of men, of course, but also and especially in the eyes of women: self-respect among men was obtained by earning the respect of women. Indeed, the esteem or contempt of women was a powerful moral force. “With what profound scorn,” Carlos Manuel de Céspedes exhorted in an 1870 manifesto to the Cuban people, “would a wife look upon a husband who refused to join the insurrection, would a mother view a pusillanimous son, would a girlfriend look at her fiancé. And with what pride would a woman in any of these three situations look upon a husband, a son, and lover, covered with the dust of combat and bearing the laurels of battle. . . . Every man is a soldier.”96
The interior lives of successive generations of Cubans were shaped decisively by personal experiences within a polity organized single-mindedly around a purpose to which almost everything else was subordinated. The surviving correspondence, journals, diaries, and memoirs of men provide powerful testimony to the contribution of women to the moral environment in which the project of nation expanded into a collective undertaking. Women inserted themselves decisively into the lives of men as agents of cultural formation, which is to say, as proponents of an ethos of nation. This was a complicated process, in which a people took in and acted out the larger social meanings of their times. All through the nineteenth century, women embraced the proposition of patria with unabashed sentimentality and unwavering dedication. They engaged the issues of their times, inserted themselves consciously into history, and contributed powerfully to the normative foundations of nationality. Women defined the moral currency of duty and in the process forged the ethical framework in which established codes of manhood were enacted within the emerging conventions of nationhood. Consciousness of male was inscribed within consciousness of Cuban, principally by women. Historian José Abreu Cardet was entirely correct to note that women “arrived first at the sense that [Cubans] were making history.”97
How to take the measure of the central importance of women in the formation of nation is indeed a complex matter and perhaps impossible to accomplish with any precision. It is to invite attention to the interior workings of the creole household as the source of an inchoate national history, to connect the internal lives of family relations with the historical forces of national formation. Much of the history of Cuba had its origins within the everyday intimacy of the family, as a matter of conventions of kinship and within conjugal intimacies, and especially in those child-rearing practices by which offspring were inscribed into the emerging moral premises of nationality. Children were agents of a family, bearing traditions and values, sent into the future to carry on. It may in fact be impossible to determine exactly the workings by which the idea of nation insinuated itself into the domain of the domestic, to be transmuted into facets of child-rearing practices and transmitted as sentiments by which to shape the sensibility of children coming of age under specific historical circumstances. What is certain, however, is that these attachments were produced and reproduced within extended kinship systems, and in the process they set in place the purpose around which successive generations of Cubans organized their lives. They facilitated the realization of new possibilities by the very act of imagining them.
The experience of the household of a peninsular father and criolla mother was particularly noteworthy. The evidence is anecdotal but suggestive and does indeed serve to corroborate historian Victoria de Caturla Brú’s contention that Cuban mothers “constantly instilled in their children love of things of the land . . . and created an ambience of new customs that acted continually to sever the traditional ties to the Metropolis—something that the Spaniards themselves recognized by observing that they could do anything they wished in Cuba except have Spanish children.”98 Dolores María Ximeno moved freely within the Cuban middle class of the nineteenth century, always an astute observer of the conventions of household intimacy, particularly as it involved peninsular-criolla families. “The suffering of the criolla madre was beyond belief,” Ximeno wrote years later, “who very much in secret and without her husband’s knowledge, resisted the weight of the cruel humiliation inflicted [upon Cubans] by Spain. . . . She demanded justice, a more responsive [colonial] government, [and] equal rights.” The family as constituted was overwhelmingly creole, and the home was filled with the presence of children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—“relatives all of the madre criolla,” remembered Ximeno.99 The loyalties of the children of peninsulares especially rankled Spaniard Mariano Benítez Veguillas. “Do you think they would honor us with the decorous public conduct?” he asked rhetorically in 1897. “Wrong! Upon completing their education, paid by their fathers, those young men shame their fathers and their dignity as Spaniard. Of every 100, no doubt 98 are conspirators against Spain.”100 Correspondent Grover Flint met two aides to Cuban general José Lacret Morlot in 1896—“sons of Spanish officers of rank,” he learned—which “proved the saying ‘from Cuban mothers Cuban offspring.’”101 Spanish captain general Camilo Polavieja despaired over the prevalence of “the separatist tendency,” what he characterized in 1892 as “an integral and principal characteristic of the nature of nearly all the creoles of the Island of Cuba, including the children of the resident peninsulares.”102 George Clarke Musgrave would later write about his service with Cuban insurgent forces: “Hatred to Spain seemed to be imbibed in the air of Cuba, and Cuban-born sons of Spaniards proved invariably rebels, especially when born of Cuban mothers. ‘Take a Cuban wife for a rebel son,’ was a pertinent Spanish aphorism, and the revolution caused houses to be divided, son against father, the mother and daughters usually siding with the son.”103 Fermín Valdés-Domínguez wrote of Spanish colonel Angel Pérez, who planned to enroll his two Cuban-born sons in a guerrilla military unit to fight against the mambises, and whose criolla wife upon learning of her husband’s plan protested, “with tears in her eyes, and told her sons that she preferred to see them dead than dressed in the uniform of a guerrillero.”104
The influence of women reached deep into those psychological domains of personality development, to the very source of national consciousness and the site of formation of gender roles deemed necessary to consummate nation. Women conferred moral validation on the project of nation and, at least as important, contributed to the passion of purpose with which Cubans committed themselves to the project of nation. “No one complains of the heartache associated with the departure of loved ones to join the campaign in the west,” observed General José Miró Argenter of the women in Holguín. “On the contrary, they exude pride that their men have the good fortune to participate in the conquest of Spanish-held territory in the western provinces. They share in the glory that will accrue to the invading army.” Concluded Miró: “Examining these and similar deeds, themselves indications of incomparable virtue, the historian of the future will be baffled in seeking to determine upon whom to confer the greatest credit for patriotism: the man who for political ideals abandons family and treasure to risk all in the war, or the woman who remains resigned in an empty and uncertain home, a prisoner of nostalgia.”105 Demoticus Philalethes observed during mid-century travels to the island that “the patriotism of the Cuban ladies is far greater than that of their countrymen; they manifest a more intense hatred to the Spanish government, and have more courage to evince it.”106
These sentiments were even more pronounced during the Ten Years War. “Women are responsible for the insurrection in Cuba,” Spanish correspondent Antonio Pirala reported. “If they were not the first to feel rage of offended dignity, they were the first to express it. The opinion that women form is irresistible among men. They spoke with clarity and with honesty, fearlessly: to us they spoke of [Spanish] abuses and to their men they spoke of rights and duties. . . . Like the women of Rome and Sparta, they pointed their men to the battlefields and told them, ‘There is your place.’ . . . When women think and act in this manner, men are invincible.”107 Women contributed decisively to Cuban success, Rodolfo Bergés recalled in 1905: “They helped us make the Revolution and obtain Independence, for they harangued their sons and husbands in behalf of their beloved Cuba.”108 The Diario Cubano suggested that men “played a secondary role” in the insurrection, with “women as the will and men as the muscle.” Spanish colonel Eusebio Sáenz y Sáenz of the Guardia Civil also took note of the role of the wives of insurgents during the Ten Years War, observing that “they surpassed their husbands in [revolutionary] ideas . . . and exercised such superiority that the husbands obeyed them blindly.”109 Cuban general Federico Cavada wrote early on in the Ten Years War:
Our women in particular deserve the praise and sympathy of all generous and sensible souls. Having taken refuge in the depths of the forests, they endure hunger, nudity, and illness. . . . They suffer, weep, and pray for the liberty of Cuba. There is much truth to the view that this is the war of the women [es la guerra de las mujeres]. They are the principal objective of Spanish strategy. . . . An effort was recently made in our Representative Assembly in behalf of the emancipation of women and to ratify social equality with men. In Cuba, women do not need the intervention of men in this sense. Women have known how to equal men through their heroism and abnegation. The insurgent woman [la insurrecta cubana] has liberated herself not of the tenderness and decorous attributes of her sex but against the slander that would tempt the vanity of men to characterize her as cowardly and weak.110
Whatever else the emerging consensus on nationality may have drawn upon for sustenance, it was profoundly sentimental, possessed of moral intensity derived unabashedly from a stock of highly charged emotional commitments. This implied the presence of a powerful metaphysics, of course, one that insinuated itself deeply into the formative elements of nationality, the way the moral order that informed the terms of Cuban was acted upon, susceptible always to the passions stirred by certainty of purpose. There was something of a redemptive imperative to the exhortation to nation, one that reached deep into a sublime sensibility. Mothers contributed powerfully to the moral purpose by which the ideal of nation inscribed itself into the consciousness of sons. “The Cuban mother taught her son about the greatness of the men who fought for their patria,” comments the narrator in Juan Maspon Franco’s autobiographical novel of the independence war, Maldona (1927). “Cuban women dispatched their sons, weak or strong, with these heroic words: ‘Go die defending liberty.’”111 Certainly this is what Manuel J. de Granda remembered. “Women were the most determined and the most fervent supporters of liberty for the Patria,” he recalled in his memoirs.112 The evidence is anecdotal, to be sure, but highly suggestive. “I have seen [Cuban] children playing with their mothers,” observed Ramón Céspedes Fornaris in 1871, “jumping up and down with joy, suddenly become angry. I have inquired into the cause of this behavior and have discovered it to lie in the horror their mothers experience at the approach of a Spaniard. There is something in a mother’s look of love or look of contempt that immediately changes the mood of her children.”113
It is entirely plausible to contemplate the formative ethos of nation as the product of female sensibility. This is not to suggest that men were incapable of conveying sentiment and emotion to their children, of course, but rather to suggest that women acting within the received conventions of gender-scripted conduct were far more “authorized” to dwell in realms of sentiment and emotion, especially with sons, and indeed must be considered as one of the principal means by which males were conducted into the moral realms of nationality. This is to ponder, further, the means by which women were themselves socialized to act as agents of the nation and, conversely, the degree to which the very proposition of nation was invested in women. Gendered formulations of Cuban were assembled into highly complex moral hierarchies from which to fashion prescriptive conduct out of ascriptive codes, a process that served to implicate men and women alike in the validation of those formulations upon which the realization of sovereign nationhood depended. In no other way could the commitments that held men and women together over successive generations in the pursuit of nation have been sustained.
Few themes recur with greater frequency in the memoirs of the mambises than the wistful reminiscences of mothers shaping among sons consciousness of nation and inducing commitment to duty. Antonio Maceo reflected nostalgically upon the death of his mother: “It was with the tenderness of her soul . . . that she obliged us to fulfill our political duties.”114 General Enrique Loynaz del Castillo recalled years later a childhood birthday present from his mother: “On one birthday she made me a small altar to the coat of arms of Cuba for my room . . . and adorned it with small Cuban flags. She gave direction to my life.”115 General Carlos García Velez remembered years later the women who contributed to the development of his consciousness of Cuban. “I have never been able to forget,” he confided to his journal late in life, “the stories [of the Ten Years War] that my grandmother recounted to us in Key West and New York every night before going to bed. . . . My deepest preoccupation ever since my childhood was the independence of Cuba. I was raised in an environment of heroic women . . . of my grandmothers, my mother, and my aunts, on both sides of the family. In exile, with them, at home listening with religious respect and intense attention to the stories of the misfortunes of the Cubans who had taken refuge in Key West and New York.”116 Colonel Horacio Ferrer similarly reflected on a childhood moment: “In the bosom of my family . . . we would often exchange impressions about the subject of liberation.” He continued:
I was five years old and was very close to my mother. . . . She began to teach us, inculcating in us love of the truth and of study and of honor. And in talking about history, she told us there was a man named Máximo Gómez, who fought for ten years [1868–78] to make Cuba independent. I also heard from her lips the very first mention of the names of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and Ignacio Agramonte. She inculcated in us a love of the patria. . . . The seed of [my] love for Cuba, instilled in my spirit by my mother during my childhood, flourished during my adolescence. . . . On one occasion, my devoted mother, overcome with emotion but with total presence of mind, concluded one of those discussions by affirming: “My sons have two mothers: the patria and me, and they should attend to the one that needs them the most!” On that day, for my brother and me, our fate was sealed.117
The process of national formation developed within the complexities of personality formation, with its origins located within the intimacies of the creole household. That family was so fully understood to exist as the domain of the “domestic”—and, per established gender conventions, as the purview of mother/wife—suggests the central role women played in the formation of consciousness of Cuban. How utterly natural it was for the women’s club of Güinía de Miranda to affirm in 1869 that “the woman is the home, and the home is patria.”118
Creole disaffection took hold first and foremost within the family, the central social unit of the colonial society, itself a measure of the depth and breadth to which subversive sentiment had insinuated itself into the intimate spaces of daily life. The household must be considered as the site of origins of national consciousness, where the sensibility of Cuban acquired emotional content, whereby the private interworkings of familial systems acted to inform the public purpose of political engagement. The powerful moral authority of the family, with its complex codes of kinship and gender relationships by way of established hierarchies of authority and norms of reciprocity, must be seen as the point of origins of nation.
The creole household was a highly politicized environment, a site of initiation and place of transmittal, where the idea of nation entered realms of shared values in the experience of everyday family life. “With the struggle for liberty across the full expanse of a century,” observed historian Mercedes García, “the spirit of the Cuban family cohered, for there was no greater source of common purpose than shared suffering.”119 Dispositions by which the meaning of nationality developed, no less than conduct necessary to make good on the claim to national sovereignty, emerged from the most intimate spheres of creole family life, within those long-standing conventions and well-established customs.
Conventions and customs more than adequately institutionalized the practice of narrative engagement in multiple forms of family reunions: at wakes and weddings, on birthdays and baptisms, on anniversaries and holidays, on nochebuena (December 24) and Reyes Magos (January 6). Children listened to and listened in on adult conversations—and learned; they entered domains of nationality by way of established conventions of kinship, on occasions of family gatherings and reunions, the times when multiple generations of the same family engaged each other, what Flora Basulto de Montoya later recalled as those special occasions when “large numbers of family members, spanning three or four generations, would come together in each house.”120
Children were socialized within the household even as the home was itself politicized, subject continually to changing historical circumstances. The household served as an environment in which culture and custom served as the means through which to reveal the reality of life as lived. “The Creole’s hatred for the Castilians,” observed one mid-nineteenth-century traveler to Cuba, “and consequently of the government to which he feels constrained to submit, is nourished from early childhood.”121 The household was the setting in which discontent and disaffection were first articulated, in the security offered in those private spaces of the home where remedies could be contemplated and redress plotted. “After dinner,” Benito Aranguren Martínez remembered decades later, “papá would read to us accounts of episodes of the Ten Years War and the biographies of its leaders. His idea that Cuba, for its own well-being and prosperity, would be independent, instilled itself into our hearts [and] influenced us in a decisive manner, fostering a firm love for our flag and a desire to see it flying over the beloved land in which we were born. From the time when we were very young we began to feel the necessity to contribute . . . to the great project of obtaining Independence.” And to the point: “That is how I became a soldier, a mambí, that is how I began to discharge the debt that my father instilled in me and that my stoic mother helped me realize.”122 Mambí officer Alberto de la Cruz Muñoz recalled vividly his coming of age in a creole household. “In the privacy of the household,” Cruz Muñoz wrote soon after the war for independence ended, “during the silence of the evening, the events of the war [Ten Years War] were discussed, always with admiration of the valor of the liberation warriors [los guerreros mambises], whose deeds were recounted in low voices and made a deep impression on my soul, creating in my child’s heart and filling my spirit with a hatred of tyranny and all its defenders.”123 Colonel Segundo Corvisón recalled a childhood listening to stories of the “fabulous war of ten years, of the heroic legends, [which] had for us—the next generation of warriors—the effect . . . of awakening a love of danger and the desire for privation and suffering at the altar of liberty.”124
It was during those moments of intimacy and on those occasions of private conversations, in which parents and grandparents sought to explain the world to their children and grandchildren, that the meaning and measure of Cuban assumed mythical proportions as the model of being, serving as something of a currency of childhood. The larger moral imperative of nationality moved from public domains into private realms, from the outside to the inside, from general to specific, from collective to individual—and then reversed. The pursuit of nation was densely packed with moral certainty, which meant too that this same sense of moral certainty informed the narratives through which children learned their history. The memoirs and reminiscences of scores of men and women involved in the independentista project are filled with accounts of formative childhood experiences. “I was born in Cuba when it was ruled despotically by Spain,” Manuel Sanguily wrote in 1888. “I grew up in a dense atmosphere in which one breathed only hatred of Spain and even of the Spanish people.”125 Memory passed as history, and vice versa. Knowledge of the past conveyed in family settings was the stuff of Cuban childhood memories, suggesting history received in the form of household intimacy, thereupon to assume deeply personal and emotional meanings, associated with family and remembered with sentimentality, and always loaded with point of view. Generations of men and women came to their knowledge of the meaning of Cuban by way of firsthand sources and first-person ruminations, through the lives of loved ones, a telling and retelling of history by which multiple generations bonded together in a running narrative of a nation in formation. “We came of age with the certainty of our triumph,” General Carlos García Velez remembered, “a conviction nurtured from our childhood through the stories of veterans of 1868 and 1879, from our parents, from family members, and friends.”126 History was indeed one way Cuban families organized themselves into a national community. Historian Blancamar León Rosabal was correct to discern in the memoirs of the mambises of 1895 the influence of “the epic events of the Ten Years War . . . which were received as legends of 1868, in well-known heroic figures and at times relatives.”127
Historical knowledge was transmitted across generations as reminiscences and recollections received from loved ones, often remembered as stories of childhood. Girls and boys bore witness to their history, and girls no less than boys were shaped within the household environment and thereupon implicated in the very value system that was shaping the meaning of Cuban. “The legend of the heroism of the ten unforgettable years of war,” Fermín Valdés-Domínguez wrote in 1896, “was the lesson children learned that formed the sacred worship of the Patria that parents transmitted to their children in their daily conversations. These lessons are the basis of the insurrection of today.”128 Rita María Suárez del Villar recalled her household during the Ten Years War, when her “father’s brothers and friends gathered in my home to conspire against the Spanish government.” Years later, she recalled vividly: “I listened to their conversations about the outrages committed by the oppressor of my patria [and] the injustices committed against the poor patriots . . . and that experience affected me to the core of my being.”129
Vast numbers of the mambises of the 1890s were shaped by the first-person stories of their history. Serafín Espinosa reached the rank of colonel during the war of 1895 and recalled a childhood listening to “the accounts of the incidents of the war of 1868, told in the intimacy of the home by my father or by my uncles who had participated in the war.” These accounts made a lasting impression, Espinosa remembered, “for they lifted my spirits and, for that reason, at a very early age, the love of the land [amor a la tierra] and the devotion to its flag took permanent hold of my soul.”130 Manuel Piedra Martel recalled coming to “consciousness of his duty as a man and as a Cuban” during those occasions of family reunions and gatherings at which as a boy he listened to accounts of “Cuban victories and heroism, from the mouth of one or another veteran,” adding: “It made a powerful impression on me and stimulated in my soul the powerful desire to imitate the combative spirit. These were the first moral factors that began to act on the development of my patriotic sentiments.”131 Angel Rosende y de Zayas attributed his decision to join the insurrection in 1895 to “the accounts of the ten-year-old conflict learned from relatives . . . who gave us an idea of what that past signified: the seed of the future.”132
Spaniards long suspected the creole household as a place of subversion, almost always with an abiding sense of betrayal. Mariano Benítez Veguillas denounced Cuban women who raised their children with wages paid by Spanish-owned enterprises—“while the father is mixed up in the liberation hordes [hordas libertadoras]. . . and who repay our generosity by teaching their children, by way of play, running to and fro in their humble households, simulating the killing of Spaniards with the use of a broomstick.”133 Play was indeed a serious matter. Childhood games and play served easily enough to socialize children into the emerging normative systems of Cuban, thereupon shaping those dispositions toward behavior and conduct. Correspondent Grover Flint visited Cuban-held territory (prefectura) during the war for independence and observed children at play:
The children’s games were all warlike. They played Spain and Cuba with sticks for guns, and carried on skirmishes in the underbrush. Sometimes it was a game . . . where one child hid a broom horse in the thicket and another played Spaniard and scouted about with a wooden machete to find and kill it. The first sound the babies mastered was “Alto, quien va? Cuba,” and “Pah, Pah,” “Poom, poom, poom,”—for often sounds of shots came from the high-road, and the infants learned to distinguish between the bark of the Mauser and the slow detonation of the Remington.134
Colonial authorities were not unaware of the depth of disaffection that had taken hold inside creole homes across the island but could respond only with a deepening sense of helpless foreboding. Spanish fiscal agent Mariano Torrente early discerned the widening estrangement between Cubans and Spaniards. “The Cubans,” he wrote in 1852, “however painful it may be to confess but necessary to convey discreetly to the Government, are all with few exceptions heartfelt proponents of independence [adictos de corazón a la independencia], with the only difference being that some are open proponents of these sentiments while others conceal these sentiments with studied dissimulation.”135 Little had changed in six years. “However much it pains me,” Spaniard Dionisio Galiano acknowledged in 1858, “the great majority—perhaps the near unanimity—of the native-born population [los hijos del país] look upon the continuance of Spanish rule in Cuba with displeasure and even contempt.”136 Spanish captain general Camilo Polavieja acknowledged expanding Cuban discontent with a deepening sense of urgency. “[Creoles] wage an implacable campaign against us . . . within their domestic households,” Polavieja brooded in 1892, and he elaborated on another occasion:
Here there is only passion carried to the ultimate extreme on the part of those . . . who aspire to the ideals of independence. . . . These groups thrive on a . . . hatred of us. They do not reason. Every means that contributes to emancipation from Spain appears to them to be legitimate, even moral. They wage a war without quarter against us, as much in the press as in public meetings, in private conversations within the innermost intimacies of their families. They educate their children in hatred of Spain. . . . They see themselves as enslaved by us and hate us the way that a subjugated people hate their conquerors.137
Spanish wartime measures were often directed explicitly against the Cuban household. Early in the Ten Years War, the Spanish army command in eastern Cuba mounted operations specifically against women. A Spanish war proclamation in April 1869 was explicit: “Women who are not in their respective farms and dwellings, or in the homes of their parents, must relocate to camps in the towns of Jiguaní and Bayamo, where they will be cared for. Those who do not voluntarily obey this proclamation will be escorted to [Jiguaní and Bayamo] by force.”138 To view Captain General Valeriano Weyler’s reconcentration program in 1896–97 as a wartime measure designed only to deny the insurgency of material support of the pacífico population is to overlook the far more insidious intent of the Spanish purpose: to shatter the Cuban family as source of moral subsidy of the insurrection. George Clarke Musgrave interviewed Captain General Weyler in 1896 and asked about the release of reconcentrados, and particularly women, to which Weyler answered: “Ah, but these Cuban women have borne rebel sons and will encourage them.”139
Horatio Rubens remembered years later the conventional wisdom during the war of 1895: “There was a saying that if a loyal Spaniard married a Cuban woman his children would be Cuban at heart, not Spanish. Thus if the Cuban breed was to be destroyed, the women, as the breeders, must be destroyed.”140 Weyler’s purpose, recalled Cuban colonel Avelino Sanjenís, “was to exterminate Cuban families which, by virtue of being Cuban, could not but produce Cubans.”141 By the tens of thousands, grandparents, parents, and the wives, siblings, and children of Cubans bearing arms were purposefully singled out for internment—and extinction, in what must be viewed as an act of immense depravity. “The reconcentration arrived [in rural Havana province],” remembered María Josefa Granados years later. “The villages were abandoned. The women and children of the insurgent families [familias mambisas] filled the [reconcentration] settlements, where they died by the thousands of hunger and beriberi.”142 Poet Juan Jorge Sobrado remembered the reconcentration at war’s end: “It made me believe that the intention was to exterminate all Cubans.”143 This belief was perhaps not too far from the truth. Recalled Spanish captain Enrique Ubieta: “I remember that the mayor of Güines presented himself before General Weyler telling him that he had more than 6,000 women and children dying of hunger in his town and that he begged him for resources with which to support them. Weyler answered him that he had effected the reconcentration precisely with the object that all might die, and the mayor went back to Güines and there in the streets of Güines I saw women and children die of hunger.”144
The history of Cuba developed fully into the history of a cause, in the form of a heroic narrative and rendered as a chronicle of sublime sacrifice and steadfast purpose. And this too was a vital facet of national formation. Contained within its discursive boundaries was the understanding of a history very much in progress, of Cubans living within the very history they were making. Most of all, it was understood all through the nineteenth century as an unfinished history, a purpose pending for which the deeds and deportment of the men and women of 1868 served all verdaderos cubanos as the standard of duty. Cubans took their legacy to heart, which served to infuse passion of purpose into their politics. “The new generation [of the 1890s],” observes the narrator in Gustavo Robreño’s autobiographical novel, La acera del Louvre (1925), “did not wish to be any less valiant than the previous generation.”145 Speaking through the narrator in the novel La insurrección (1911), Luis Rodríguez-Embil drew upon memory to recall the telling of tales of the war: “The history of the [Ten Years] war, a war that had ended seventeen years earlier, had little by little acquired fully the dimensions and overtones of legend for everyone in the villages all over Cuba.” Continues the narrator:
The accounts of the suffering endured by the insurrectos, of their amazing deeds, of their endurance that seemed superhuman: a small handful of men taking on the forces of an entire nation, filled Cubans with a natural sense of pride and induced a veneration of those men who had scaled the heights of such heroism. . . . The stories of horrors of the lives of the patriots—their marches under the blistering sun, their thirst and desperate searches for water to relieve their misery, their wounds, the fatigues, the dangers, the pain. These horrors and many others, far from scaring the listeners, served in fact only to make them wish for the day in which they could too prove that they knew how to sacrifice themselves for the patria.146
Historical knowledge served as a source of socialization, the means with which to convey a value system very much inscribed in an emerging cosmology of Cuban: ideals, to be sure, but ideals by which entrée to nationality was obtained. This was history as a source of moral sustenance, at once legend and legacy, a people inspired by the very history they created. Years later, Santiago Rey would reflect on his participation in the war of 1895: “We were imbued with the patriotic enthusiasm inspired in us by the glorious legends of 1868 [and] possessed of the firm resolve of making sacrifices equal to those made by the glorious and giant figures during the Ten Years War who had so aroused our imagination and seized our soul.”147 This was history to learn, of course, but mostly it was history to learn as something to reenact, history engaged self-consciously as a lived experience: at its essence, didactic; in its premise, prescriptive. “With the continuing lessons of our history,” reflected Gonzalo de Quesada only four years before the start of the third war for independence in 1895, “with the accounts of its glories, we will prepare the youth of today for their predestined mission.” Quesada continued:
We will speak to them of the men who challenged the colonial power at La Demajagua [that is, the Ten Years War]; we will speak to them of him who died as liberator, the martyr of San Lorenzo, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. . . . If we need virtue in those times in which it appears to be in short supply, we will remember our past. . . . To teach young Cuban men how to die, we will remember all the martyrs. . . . Honor means war. We, the youth born of 1868, those of us who render homage to the patria, vow never to dishonor the history written in sublime blood; we vow to resume armed struggle with the dignity and honor with which our fathers fought: we vow to struggle, alone or accompanied, to die if necessary, they way they died, to create a free patria.148
The independentista narratives evoked history as a continuum in which Cubans were expected to discharge their duty as a matter of legacy, to commit to continue the cause of sovereign nationhood. The Ten Years War continued the struggles of the 1850s; the Little War of 1879–80 continued the Ten Years War; the independence war of 1895 was a continuation of all previous wars. José Martí exhorted Cubans to fulfill the commitment to historic continuity, “to complete the task inaugurated by our fathers at Yara on October 10.”149 The Manifesto of Montecristi signed by José Martí and Máximo Gómez in March 1895 proclaimed the war of 1895 as a process of continuation: “The revolution of independence, initiated at Yara [that is, in 1868], has now after glorious and cruel preparation entered a new period of war.”150 History was being recorded as it was being made, principally by participants who proceeded to fuse first-person accounts with third-person narratives. Juan Arnao, a co-conspirator with Narciso López, published his Páginas para la historia política de la Isla de Cuba (1877). The participants in the Ten Years War who published their memoirs included Enrique Collazo, Desde Yara hasta Zanjón, apuntaciones historicas (1893); Ramón Roa, A pie y descalzo, de Trinidad a Cuba, 1870–1871 (recuerdos de campaña) (1890); and Manuel de la Cruz, Episodios de la revolución cubana (1890). This was history in the making. “We are passionate converts to the religion of our past,” proclaimed Manuel de la Cruz in Episodios de la revolución cubana.151 The Album de ‘El criollo’ (1888) published a collective biography of the principal leaders of 1868: the Cubans of “that great generation that acted to break the chains of slavery, who set their rich plantations ablaze, and who struggled for ten long and bloody years against a formidable power, and who surprised the civilized world by displaying super-human energy in one of the most horrific wars for independence. . . . Because of them the valor of the Cuban people has rapidly risen and, as a result of their bravery, Cubans have become one of the most heroic people on earth.”152
These were momentous years, during which the pursuit of sovereign nationhood as experienced in the lifetimes of its protagonists produced legacy, and where legacy passed almost immediately as history, and vice versa, the way Cubans used history to make history. It was drawn from those deeply personal experiences of the many hundreds of thousands of men and women implicated in the project of nation. This was history as word of mouth and memory: recounted, remembered, and recorded, inherently subjective, to be sure, but itself the source from which the past reached out to shape the future. “The revolution of the Ten Years [War] in which you and I participated,” pronounced Julián to a friend in Raimundo Cabrera’s novel Ideales (1918), “is not a mere memory; it is the experience and the guarantee of the future.”153
The Ten Years War had a decisive impact on the development of national consciousness. “The Revolution [of 1868] failed only in the sense that it did not in fact fully realize its program,” observed Manuel Sanguily in 1894. “But it succeeded in infusing the entire country with its democratic spirit, its egalitarian purpose, and its restorative justice.”154 The war resulted in “the definitive creation and consolidation of Cuban nationality,” historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez correctly noted. “A nation is in its essence a historical essence, a moral entity with a past and a future. It needs to possess a spiritual patrimony of glory and heroism, of epic and legend. There does not exist a strong people or robust nationality that does not possess it. Before 1868, Cuba in large measure lacked this patrimony, and the Ten Years War created it in magnificent fashion. After [the Pact of] Zanjón, and notwithstanding defeat, Cuba possessed a rich patriotic tradition to revere and cherish.”155 Autonomist Eliseo Giberga recognized in 1897 that the Ten Years War had contributed decisively to forging a Cuban identity. “Every insurrection,” Giberga wrote, “leaves in its wake, in addition to the passions that are the natural consequences of resistance and repression, a condition favorable to the political ideal to which it was dedicated. The Ten Years War has conferred on Cuba its proper history, different from the history of Spain, which until then it did not possess.”156 This was the conclusion that historian Leví Marrero reached almost one hundred years later: “Those ten years [1868–78] forged a people, unified with an unmistakable identity from that time on.”157
A generation of Cubans came of age formed by the memory of the experience of the Ten Years War, history to be sure, but made all the more personal and poignant by the fact that for vast numbers of Cubans this was the stuff of family lore, transformed into a purpose that passed from mothers and fathers to daughters and sons. “History is something more than a random story, without transcendental significance, without influence,” insisted Manuel Sanguily in 1893. “Either it is a moral institution—History as a mirror of the past and a means of education, by way of imitation and suggestion—or it is nothing, useless, without significance.”158 It is certainly an arguable proposition that there were far greater numbers of Cubans disposed to break with Spain in 1895 than there were in 1868, and that this was itself a product of a generation coming of age within the experience of their history. “I am sorry to report,” wrote Captain General Camilo Polavieja in late 1890, “that from the time of the Peace of Zanjón [1878] to now, rather than decrease, the numbers of separatists have increased.”159
Nationality implied solidarity around attitudes and attributes conspicuous for the efficacy with which they served the cause of sovereign nationhood, not always by choice—often not even by design—but rather out of need, as a matter of moral strategies of mobilization, shaped into usable representational motifs of the cosmology of Cuban. The process spanned fully the second half of the nineteenth century and gave shape to the moral system from which norms of nationality formed and thereupon transmuted into the norm of Cuban.
The liberation project has been most commonly understood as a political process, as indeed it most assuredly was. But the process of national formation was also very much about cultural change, in which the experience of liberation acted to forge consciousness of nationality within a larger moral order. This was a revolutionary movement sustained within an evolutionary process, a cultural transformation within political transformation, gradual and uneven, to be sure, but acting inexorably to define the character of the cause of Cuba from the inside out. The proposition of nation as a historical outcome is not fully comprehensible unless it is also understood to imply an all-encompassing cultural system by which the meaning of Cuban was consolidated. The liberation experience contributed decisively to the development of a moral system central to a cumulative process through which culture formed. The emerging moral order adapted to the needs of collective effort, as a matter of a people determined to ascertain the meaning of a new nation and differentiate values of a new nationality. This was culture as the means through which normative systems were dialectically constituted and reconstituted in the process of national formation. The cause of Cuba was experienced as cultural accommodation to political aspirations, and vice versa: to “normalize” the values that informed collective purpose and—perhaps more important—render them as attributes of Cuban. “The war should serve to moralize,” Colonel Fermín Valdés-Domínguez insisted, “an example of virtue and principle of the new order of things that will emerge in the stable and great Republic.”160 This was a complex process, fully spanning the second half of the nineteenth century and occurring simultaneously in the form of cognitive representations and affective responses, and indeed it must be understood as central to the ways that Cubans shaped themselves into a national community. To discern dispositions to act—or not—as a matter of historically conditioned patterns of conduct is to identify the circumstances that contributed to the development of nationality as a value system. Such dispositions were shaped within those moral-forming and action-guiding cultural realms, where a people came to know the cues and learn the codes that governed socially sanctioned behavior—and acted accordingly.
National formation implied the need to forge a new value system, one that corresponded to the purpose for which Cubans joined together as a single people. Between the expeditions of Narciso López, the uprisings of Joaquín de Agüero in Puerto Principe and José Isidoro de Armenteros in Trinidad in the early 1850s, and the end of the war for independence in 1898, three successive generations of men and women had come of age within an all-inconclusive logic of liberation. The experience served as the moral environment in which they were formed and in which they proceeded to raise their children, the purpose to which vast numbers of men and women dedicated their lives. It shaped the defining purpose into which successive generations of Cubans were socialized. To be immersed in the task of liberation as a matter of daily purpose, decade after decade, in the form of a lifelong commitment of personal involvement and political engagement, was to fashion the normative determinants from which the salient elements of nationality developed. “The movement of national liberation,” historian Jorge Ibarra correctly noted, “was of such a nature and of such magnitude that its impact radically transformed the customs, the habits, the traditions, the psychology, and, in the end, the very national character of the Cuban people.”161
The moral determinants of Cuban were configured into coherent narrative order by way of patriotic speeches heard and read, from manifestos, pronouncements, and proclamations, through the telling and retelling of heroic deeds, and through exemplary meanings assigned to heroic deeds—disseminated by word of mouth, sometimes transmitted through poems and song, often as legend and lore, sometimes as fully blown myths, all directed to one overriding end: the triumph of the Cuban purpose. That the narratives would later serve as a “historical source” should not obscure the power of their appeal in their own time, principally their capacity to fix the value system from which the meaning of nationality developed. There was no inherent conflict in assimilating myth and reconstructing historical reality, for “myth” was as essential a facet of the historical record as “truth.” The result was a running narrative of a new nationality in the throes of establishing itself, a way to summon and sustain a people engaged in a process of national formation, at once binding and integrative: as source of inspiration and a way of inclusion, of bringing together the multiple elements of discontent into an expanding voluntary association around the emerging consensus of Cuban. The narrative of liberation developed a coherent vernacular of collective ideals around which to sustain Cubans of diverse social origins to act together in concert for common cause.
National formation was very much about the development of a moral system through which to expand the terms of popular inclusion: interlocking reciprocal ideals extolling the virtue of Cuban, speaking to aspirations and expectations, to be sure, but also to obligations to assume and purpose to discharge as a function of being Cuban. To be Cuban—verdadero cubano—implied an obligation to a set of normative imperatives, propounded within a new ethical system accessible to everyone who embraced the premise of nation. It was to confer moral purpose on the meaning of sovereign nationhood as both means and end, from which to forge canons of collective conduct and convey modes of individual comportment, celebrated as the all-inclusive cause around which the logic of Cuban formed. The process of liberation involved the development of ideals of culturally patterned modes of behavior, assembled into a more or less coherent moral system to which Cubans subscribed and from which conduct was prescribed—that is, a deepening insight informed by the awareness that the actualization of nationality could not be realized without a value system appropriate to the purpose for which the sovereign nation was conceived. Certainly this required the development of a usable political framework to sustain the means. But it required too the development of a value system through which to validate the ends. The celebration of the Cuban purpose served to consolidate the normative foundation of nationality as a cultural condition and established the premise by which the meaning of Cuban obtained plausibility. Its principal expression implied a reflexive knowledge through which to register consciousness of nation as an affinity of a like people linked together through the experiences of a shared past and aspirations for a common future.
The numbers of Cubans who extended moral support and provided material assistance to the armed cause of Cuba Libre cannot be ascertained with precision. Not all Cubans subscribed to or enrolled in the project of liberation, of course. However, the numbers of Cubans who did participate must be presumed to have been vast. Certainly, Spanish authorities believed so. “Creole are divided into three groups,” explained Spanish captain general Camilo Polavieja in a confidential communication to Madrid in 1881. “The smallest group is openly pro-Spanish and supports everything that guarantees our control. The next group in size is made up of good people, loyal and honorable, who desire union with Spain but who, because of their ideas, goodwill, and ties of friendship and family, desire many important things that favor only the separatists, who are the third and the strongest group.” Ten years later, Polavieja wrote again: “The sentiment of nationality . . . is held by the masses, led by educated men of true intelligence. . . . We cannot prevail in the face of these circumstances. One should not enter combat without at least the minimum expectation of victory. We would be engaged in a monumental self-deception not to recognize that everything favors our adversaries.”162 Traveling between Santa Clara and Bayamo during the early months of the war for independence in 1895, Captain General Arsenio Martínez Campos conveyed his “sad impression” that “all the inhabitants hate Spain.”163 In December 1895, as the expanding insurgency reached the jurisdiction of Sancti-Spíritus, Santiago Rey recorded in his field diary that virtually every male fifteen years of age and older had joined the insurrection. “Young and old,” he recorded, “rich and poor, black and white, all contributed to the swelling ranks of the Liberation Army.”164 The expansion of the insurgency into Havana and Pinar del Río provinces in early 1896, wrote Autonomist Eliseo Giberga the following year—and Giberga was no friend of the independentista cause—had galvanized local support for the insurrection. “Entire towns welcomed the insurrectos,” he wrote. “The towns offered their weapons as contributions. They received the insurrectos as liberators. . . . The town councils [ayuntamientos] convened official sessions to welcome the invaders. Banquets, dances, serenades, and other fiestas were organized. Thousands of men joined the insurrecto ranks. Entire towns were left with only old men, women, and children. Entire families passed over to insurrecto camps. There was no lack of women who took up arms and participated in the fierce combats.” By 1897, Giberga wrote, “Few indeed are the number of families in Cuba, without distinction of social class or position, that do not have a participant in the Revolution. Even the brothers, sons, and other relatives of Spanish generals and officers . . . have enlisted in the armed ranks of the insurgency or joined the revolutionary clubs or in some other form support the separatist cause.”165 Years later, General José Lachambre, Spanish military commander in Oriente province during the 1895 war, would look back on the insurrection with lingering bewilderment. “The Government was, in fact, taken by surprise,” Lachambre remembered, “and was quite unprepared to meet such a formidable revolution, and this condition was very seriously increased and intensified by the fact that almost the entire population, especially the rural population, including that of the small villages and towns, was with the insurrection.”166
On the other hand, it is also arguable that numbers are perhaps not the real issue. What matters at least as much is the process by which national formation evolved as a matter of cultural transformation, influenced by the moral imperatives and ethical purpose by which the men and women engaged in the liberation project were themselves transformed and the development of a value system that expanded into the dominant normative framework that served as the model of the ideal of nationality. That the proposition of a discernible Cuban character was advanced within the context of narratives of nation suggests how Cubans thought about themselves, which in turn implicated them in conduct corresponding to their self-identity. Shifting value systems acted on attitudes, of course, and new ideas induced new behavior. No less important, changing attitudes also implied new ways of perceiving and evaluating the world, which necessitated the need to consider new forms of conduct: briefly put, new ways of being. Values took form and accrued over time, given purpose under specific historical circumstances, in response to experience: all in all, a necessary cultural means with which to achieve political ends. “In the final analysis,” noted historian Joel James Figarola, “the revolution [for independence] was a revolution in the culture, that is to say, of mentalities.”167 Once culture became important, the nature of the behavior that was available to imitate was strongly affected by what Cubans learned from each other—as a matter of survival, of course, but also as a means of success.
Nationality evolved in the form of a value system summoned to sustain Cuban resolve through decades of struggle and setbacks and years of sacrifice and suffering, subsequently transfigured into the discursive framework of Cuban. The character of Cuban developed as an ensemble of normative structures, acted out and acted upon by the historical circumstances of national formation, to produce commonly shared dispositions and demeanors: that is, nationality as a cultural condition. National identity in this instance served as the context in which to integrate a people around the value system from which collective conduct was derived and subsequently deemed “normal”: historically determined attributes emerging as pragmatic adaptation to the necessities of the Cuban purpose.
Liberation imposed demands on all who were implicated in its assumptions: to do what had to be done to prevail, at whatever cost, for however long, as discharge and display of Cuban. This was devotion to an ideal and dedication to a task that, once inscribed into the norm of nationality, served to fix the moral boundaries in which the consensus on the meaning of Cuban was formed. The process of national formation fostered social integration in function of moral purpose and contributed decisively to the very construction of Cuban, principally in the form of a value system summoned to sustain the solidarity necessary for success of the liberation project and which endured as the moral source of Cuban. It was the way by which a people arrived at a consensus among themselves on the standard by which the meaning of nationality would be enacted.
Cubans fashioned the moral environment deemed necessary to sustain collective purpose, that is, culturally patterned norms that insinuated themselves into realms of the commonplace and thereupon became an integral part of the emerging value system. It could not have been otherwise, for culture was necessarily the context in which consciousness of Cuban formed as a value system, the way a people acquire the attitudes and adopt the behaviors deemed necessary to the realization of their purpose. Perhaps the enduring significance of the liberation experience was the transformation of a political ideal into a cultural condition, as shared ideas and patterns of behavior, to shape the moral order that expanded into the character of a people. “A national culture,” Frantz Fanon discerned, “is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”168