As a man, as a Cuban, as a patriot, I am filled with anxiety in the face of the horrible and universal bewilderment produced by the American intervention. It has contributed to the dilution of the political consciousness of my nation. The moral consciousness of the nation has dissolved almost instantly, before my very eyes. And it appears to me in this moment of unbearable moral anguish that the soul of Cuba—that our soul—is threatened with extinction.
José Martí lived, dreamed, suffered, and died for Cuba. Antonio Maceo, [Ignacio] Agramonte, [Francisco Vicente] Aguilera, and [Carlos Manuel de] Céspedes died for Cuba. We will not debate if they died for a dream or for a utopia: they died for Cuba. And although everything has been an illusion, it is necessary to close our eyes and continue dying for that illusion, which is our dignity, with which we live among the other countries in the world; and even among the most powerful and the most arrogant countries we can maintain our heads high and our hearts disposed to love.
The great leaders of the liberation wars of 1868 and 1895 struggled to sever the political ties that bound us to the government of Madrid, not solely for the purpose of placing in Cuban hands the capacity to direct the national destiny but also with the goal of fundamentally renovating the bases of our collective existence and transform the manner in which all the national institutions were to function.
Cuba possesses a unity in its tradition, and by virtue of a commonly shared destiny affirms its historical unity [unidad histórica]. And such unity has been intense, sufficiently strong to shape a common psychology within the population which—notwithstanding its diverse origins—allows one to speak of a “Cuban character.”
The truth of the matter is that Cuba has been waiting for a long, long time to become a nation.
The republic was inaugurated on May 20, 1902, an occasion celebrated on a grand scale: a national holiday, in fact, given over to acts of public ceremony and popular revelry. “The greatest day in the history of Cuba,” La Lucha pronounced.1 Cubans across the island surrendered themselves joyfully to public displays of euphoria and elation. Years later, Havana resident Tomás Villoch remembered May 20 as “a day with a splendid blue sky, almost as if God himself had come down to participate in the ceremony,” with street dancing, strolling musicians, and everyone dressed as formally as their means allowed. “There wasn’t a window, a door, a roof, a balcony, or a lamppost on a public thoroughfare without a Cuban flag.”2
But the national mood was not unmixed. General Máximo Gómez was inconsolable. The republic had indeed arrived, Gómez brooded, but “not with the absolute independence we had dreamed about.”3 Thoughtful observers understood that something had gone terribly wrong. “I knew many people who remembered May 20 [1902],” Graciella Pogolotti reminisced years later, “and preserved in their memory a sensation of confusion, of contradictions. On one hand, they experienced—finally—the joy of seeing the raising of the Cuban flag, but, on the other hand, they were not unmindful of the fact that this was a limited independence, an independence only half achieved, that there yet remained much to do and much to realize.”4
Much was made about the transition from colony to republic. But it was not entirely clear that the notion of transition accurately reflected the circumstances of Cuban independence. Just how much had changed and what had changed was difficult to ascertain. Some things had changed, of course, but much had not. And therein lay the problem, for much of what had not changed was precisely what Cubans had set out to change in 1895.
Cuban pretensions to national sovereignty had challenged more than the propriety of Spanish colonial rule. Cuban aspirations had also threatened the presumption of North American succession to sovereignty. For nearly one hundred years, the United States had laid claim to Cuba as a matter of vital national interest, “of the highest importance as a precautionary measure of security” and “essential to the welfare . . . of the United States,” pronounced Secretary of State William Marcy at mid-century.5 The U.S. military intervention in 1898—“the Spanish-American War”—was directed as much against Cubans as it was against Spaniards, a means by which to neutralize the two competing claims of sovereignty and establish by force of arms a third one. The Americans did not start a war, they joined one in progress. They inserted themselves between weakened Spaniards and weary Cubans, to complete the defeat of the former and obstruct the victory of the latter, and thereupon advance claim of sovereignty over the island as a spoil of war.
The Americans took up the war and took over the peace. They were true to their proclaimed interests, if false to their professed purpose. They had arrived in the guise of allies and remained in the role of conquerors. American troops entered Cuban towns and cities as self-proclaimed liberators, to the acclaim and accolades of the local citizenry; Cuban soldiers followed, disarmed and dispersed, often arriving—if at all—at the rear of the victory procession. Serafín Espinosa y Ramos, a colonel in the Liberation Army, remembered years later the bitter-sweet end of the war for independence: “Due to the way that the war ended, the joy of the victory was doled out little by little, in small dosages. . . . On the occasion of the formal entry of the Cuban forces into Santa Clara, I did not experience the enthusiasm or exhilaration that I had long expected to occur on this occasion.”6 General Máximo Gómez confided his disappointment to a diary entry dated January 1, 1899:
Sadly the Spanish have departed and sadly we remain, for a foreign power has replaced them. I had dreamed of peace with Spain. I had hoped to bid the valiant Spanish soldiers farewell, those with whom we had long faced on the field of battle. . . . But the Americans, with the tutelage they have imposed by force, have soured the joy of the victorious Cubans. . . . It is possible that the Americans will dissipate all sympathy here.7
Popular memory passed into popular culture and fashioned a parallel historical narrative. “The [Cuban] liberators entered Havana,” comments the narrator in Gustavo Robreño’s novel La acera del Louvre (1925), “but as individuals, dressed in civilian clothing, without arms and without any of the military attributes with which to corroborate the sublime victory obtained at such great cost.”8 Years later, novelist José Soler Puig gave voice to what many Cubans remembered, in Un mundo de cosas (1989): “It was as if the war had been between only the United States and Spain, and not one between Cuba and Spain. . . . And at the entrance to the town of Caney, the inhabitants saw the mambises arrive, entering the towns from the field of operations, dirty and tattered in rags, disarmed and without military formation. . . . It seemed impossible to believe that the mambises had gone to war to free Cuba from Spain.”9 Memory transmuted as fiction to pass as a facsimile of history.
Depiction of “enthusiastic welcome extended to the United States’ troops by the inhabitants of a Cuban village” in 1898. From Illustrated World News, 1898.
But it was more complex still. The master narrative of a “Spanish-American War” as fashioned by the victors—and corroborated by the vanquished—served to preclude any possibility of Cuban participation in postwar arrangements. The inference was as self-evident as it was self-confirming. The Americans—and not the Cubans—had ended Spanish colonial rule, for—and not with—the Cubans: Spain had been defeated through the resolve and resources of the United States, the Americans insisted, as a result of American efforts and through American sacrifices, at the expense of American lives, and through the expenditure of American treasure. Cubans had contributed nothing.
The claims reflected more than displays of national hubris. In fact, the American claim to have unilaterally ended Spanish colonial government was the basis on which the United States advanced its authority to regulate the terms of Cuban self-government. In simple terms, the United States claimed the island as territory conquered from a vanquished Spain. Secretary of War Elihu Root was blunt: “We acquired title to Cuba by conquest.”10 The United States had defeated Spain and seized sovereignty over Spanish territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, inherent in which was the authority to determine the disposition of the newly acquired colonies. In the case of Cuba, this was registered as authority to supervise, regulate, and otherwise mediate the scope and substance of self-government the Americans would concede to the Cubans. “The United States,” pronounced Root in 1901, “has . . . not merely a moral obligation arising from her destruction of Spanish sovereignty in Cuba, and the obligations of the Treaty of Paris, for the establishment of a stable and adequate government in Cuba, but it has a substantial interest in the maintenance of such a government,” and to the point: “We have, by reason of expelling Spain from Cuba, become the guarantors of a stable and orderly government in the Island.”11
For the duration of the U.S. military occupation (1899–1902), Cubans were relegated largely to the status of audience, transformed from active to passive, cast as spectators rather than participants, from agents of liberation to subjects of occupation. They were converted into supplicants in their own country: as applicants for jobs, as claimants for reparations, as mendicants for alms. Nor were Cubans oblivious to the circumstances of military occupation. “The intervention today is a dictatorship at its apogee,” protested Rafael Fernández de Castro in 1899, adding: “The replacement of Spanish sovereignty on January 1 by the American military occupation did not result in a period of transition given to the preparations for a free, independent, and sovereign Cuba. Rather we have regressed to the regime of military personalism, the elimination of which was the true reason for the struggles, the sacrifices, the pains, the heroism and the martyrdom of generations of Cubans.”12 “Those who raised the first cry of liberty for Cuba,” General Agustín Cebreco protested the following year, “confided in the expectation that upon their death others would continue with the work of liberation.” He continued: “This task has not ended. Cuba is separated from Spanish domination, but has not been emancipated from foreign tutelage. It is necessary to die before allowing the betrayal of the vow given to the oppressed Patria. In order to be a good Cuban [para ser buen cubano], it is not sufficient to have participated in the battlefield. It is necessary to cooperate in everything that serves to obtain absolute independence. . . . Liberty should be our first religion.”13
Independence—when it did arrive on May 20, 1902—was not without conditions. In fact, the United States did not fully relinquish its sovereignty over Cuba. The prerogative of U.S. interests in exercise of that sovereignty were embedded directly into the political structure of the new republic and served to fix the purpose to which the republic was to respond as the very logic of its creation. The exercise of North American sovereignty was institutionalized through the Platt Amendment, written into the Cuban Constitution (1901) as an appendix and subsequently ratified in treaty form as the Permanent Treaty (1903): all properly disguised as the rule of law as a means to obscure the role of force. The republic was divested of properties of national sovereignty and self-determination: Cubans were denied authority to enter into “any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers,” deprived too of the authority to contract a public debt beyond its normal ability to repay and obliged to relinquish national territory for the establishment of a North American naval base. Cubans were required to cede to the United States “the right to intervene” for the “maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.”14 The military occupation would not end, the Americans warned, until Cubans incorporated the Platt Amendment into their constitution, that is, until Cubans renounced their claim to national sovereignty as a condition of self-government.
Cuban opposition to the Platt Amendment erupted into anti-American demonstrations across the island. Municipal governments, civic associations, and veterans’ organizations cabled protests to Governor General Leonard Wood.15 Newspaper editorials denounced the Platt Amendment. The amendment, protested Juan Gualberto Gómez, had rendered Cuba “a conquered country in which the conqueror, as a requirement of evacuation, imposed conditions that had to be met, otherwise it would continue to be subject to the laws of the conqueror.” He continued:
And those conditions are very difficult, onerous, and humiliating: the restriction of independence and sovereignty, the [acquiescence] of the right of intervention, and the relinquishing of national territory. . . . If instead of declaring war on Spain to assist the cause of Cuban independence, the United States had declared war on Cuba itself, for whatever reason, what other conditions would the Americans have possibly imposed on Cubans, except perhaps outright annexation? . . . A people occupied militarily are asked prior to constituting their own government, prior to the removal of a foreign army from its territory, to concede to the military occupier who came as a friend and ally rights and faculties that annul the sovereignty of said people.16
The new republic was thus compromised at the moment of its creation: indeed, as a condition of its creation. The Platt Amendment rendered meaningless all but the most cynical definition of independence. The Americans had fixed the limits of Cuban sovereignty at the point of its origins, institutionally, and made the future of self-government contingent on the efficacy with which Cubans accommodated U.S. interests. The republic was denied at the point of its origins the capacity to defend Cuban interests as the primary purpose of its existence. “There is, of course,” Governor General Leonard Wood wrote privately to President Theodore Roosevelt toward the end of the military occupation, “little or no independence left in Cuba under the Platt Amendment. It is quite apparent that she is absolutely in our hands.”17 The republic was organized as an extension of the North American national system, designed to accommodate American interests as the principal purpose of its existence. “Although technically a foreign country,” Elihu Root acknowledged years later, “practically and morally . . . we have required [Cuba] to become a part of our political and military system, and to form part of our lines of exterior defense.”18
Cubans had obtained independence without sovereignty, self-government without self-determination. Something had gone terribly wrong. For half a century, successive generations of Cubans had dedicated themselves single-mindedly to the pursuit of sovereign nationhood, to expand the scope of political participation and enlarge the terms of social inclusion, an effort committed to the cause of national sovereignty as means to remedy the sources of Cuban discontent and attend to the needs of the men and women who had sacrificed to make the republic a reality.
Rest in Peace: “Here lies the sovereignty of Cuba, gift of Mr. Platt and his accomplices.” From El Mundo, June 6, 1901.
The outcome of their efforts did not live up to the hopes of their expectations. The republic as constituted could not discharge the tasks for which it had been imagined or meet the needs of the people in whose name it was constituted. The sources of Cuban discontent in the nineteenth century continued largely unabated into the twentieth century, the only difference being that the United States had replaced Spain as defender of the prevailing order of things. “The Platt Amendment,” historian Enrique Gay-Calbó wrote in 1934, “subverted the independentista plans, dampened enthusiasm, disrupted and debased the political system, gave rise to the bane of interventionism, and encouraged incapacity.”19 “A humiliation,” proclaims Fernanda in Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta’s novel Sonata interrumpida (1943), “without whose forced acceptance the transfer of power to Cuban hands in 1902 has not been realized.”20
The deplumed rooster. Depicting Senator Orville Platt and President William McKinley offering the rooster (that is, independence) to the Cuban people, who respond: “But friend William, what do you want me to do with that rooster after having been so cruelly mutilated by you and your buddy Platt?” From El Mundo, April 13, 1901.
Cuban disillusionment verged on despair. The United States, disheartened mambí colonel Manuel Piedra Martel was persuaded, “whose only claim to authority in Cuba was force,” had defrauded the Cuban people of their sovereignty: “The source of our sovereignty continues to be foreign. The American government considered the Cuban government subordinate to its interests, and the Republic was a simple juridical fiction without a real existence.”21 Manuel Arbelo was in despair. “That after the immense sacrifice of life and treasure,” he brooded, “of indescribable moral and physical suffering, sustained with extraordinary heroism and sublime resignation at the altar of liberty and independence of Cuba, a foreign power, ignorant of the rights which we claimed to our patria, denied us all the principles of justice with which we protested Spanish rule. . . . We felt despised and treated as pariahs.”22 The aging mambí in Marcelo Salinas’s novel Un aprendiz de revolucionario (1937) reflects: “Every day I become more disillusioned: in the War we were told one thing only to experience something else. The Republic is the same or worse than the government of Spain”—at which point the narrator comments: “It was the pained grievances of the soldiers of the revolution of liberation, of those who went to war against Spain out of the desire for an era of justice and liberty, and who saw their ideals defrauded the day the republic was established.”23
Depiction of the United States as a boar devouring Cuban independence. From El Mundo, April 21, 1901.
Vast numbers of Cubans had emerged from the war in various conditions of indigence and impoverishment. They had sacrificed property and possessions in the hope that, in the end, in a nation of their own—in a Cuba for Cubans—conditions of daily life would be better than before. Collective purpose had formed around the promise of nation as means to enable Cubans to recover their losses, reoccupy their homes, and return to their livelihoods: to resume their former lives under improved circumstances, always with the expectation of a future with better things to come. They had endured wars of ruinous proportions, in whose behalf they had willfully laid waste to the land and willingly impoverished themselves. “The majority of the Cuban people,” wrote General Enrique Collazo in 1905, “have dreamed—and still dream—of absolute independence, in pursuit of which they have sacrificed everything: their wealth, their well-being and entire generations of their children. To achieve independence, Cubans have not hesitated in sacrificing life and family.”24
The Cuban people as Prometheus betrayed by the United States, with José Martí and Antonio Maceo looking on. From El Mundo, May 28, 1901.
Tens of thousands of impoverished Cubans wandered aimlessly about the island asking, “What have we gained by this war?”25 Men and women all across the island took stock of the meager results their sacrifice had wrought. They gave more to free Cuba than they expected to receive from free Cuba—and they received less. They had won, but they had lost everything in the process. Nothing could have prepared them for the impoverishment that their success had produced. As Cubans surveyed the result of their efforts, not a few contemplated a cruel denouement indeed: perhaps they had created a future in which there was no place for them. “Where do I start?” a soldier ruminates in Salvador Quesada Torres’s partly autobiographical short story “El silencio” (1923). “I have suffered much, a great deal, so much that were I to describe my suffering in detail it would result in a sorrowful book. . . . It is the story of humble men like us who liberated Cuba and today have nothing to eat. In my own land . . . I find myself without protection or assistance.”26 These were the circumstances in which General Alejandro Rodríguez found himself at war’s end. “You know,” he confided to a friend in 1899, “that abandoning my interests and family, I was among the first to reach for arms and support the revolution.” He added: “I who have served my country, for which I have sacrificed everything, cannot even have my family at my side for a lack of means to support it. I cannot embark on any business or reconstruct my farm due to a lack of funds. I see myself perhaps forced to emigrate in search of bread in a strange land.”27
The war had shattered the world as known by most Cubans. Many returned to peace in worse condition than when they began the war. Ramón Roa “had struggled and suffered without ever allowing my spirit to falter,” he reminisced years later, to return home to Sagua la Grande “only to understand that I had gone to war to lose everything.”28 The fortunate few returned to doing what they were doing before the war, grateful to be doing something but more than slightly bewildered by how little seemed to have changed. Esteban Montejo returned to Cruces after the war “without a penny in my pocket,” he recalled years later, and “began to work in the San Agustín Maguaraya sugar mill. To work at the same old job. Everything seemed like I was back in the past all over again.”29 Mambises in vast numbers fell upon hard times, cast aside in the republic they had sacrificed to create. “With painful frequency,” lamented Santiago Rey in 1931, “on the public paseos and the principal streets, one is aware of the painful presence of a founder of the nation [fundador de la patria].” He added: “An old invalid black man, with medals of the war for independence pinned to his chest, peddling lottery tickets or selling boxes of matches, an indirect means to defend his dignity, and imploring generosity from those he liberated. Blacks and whites, old men, filled with memories and pain, thus negotiate daily their very subsistence.”30 Years later, mambí Feliciano González would look back on the republic and lament: “I did not ever think that things would be so bad. I had figured the republic would be a great thing for us. But it turned out differently.”31
Cubans of African descent had welcomed the end of Spanish rule with high expectations. Martín Morúa Delgado celebrated the Cuban purpose as a triumph for all Cubans, black and white, for “the democratic spirit that had reigned in the insurgent camps has taken hold, and nothing and no one will be capable of reversing that spirit of equality and justice that informed the program of Montecristi and which was ratified in the fundamental objective of the Revolution.”32 The participation of Cubans of color had been decisive to the success of the liberation project. They had emerged from the war with standing and status, many with military rank and political position, with authority and prestige acquired by way of heroic comportment during decades of armed conflict, all of which seemed to suggest a favorable future indeed for the much-promised raceless nation. Historian Alejandro de la Fuente was entirely correct to note that “Afro-Cubans had emerged from the war with a public presence and prestige they did not enjoy before the struggle began.”33 For the vast numbers of men and women of color who had enrolled in the independentista ranks, sovereign nationhood held the promise of dignity and respect, racial equality and political participation. Cubans of African descent had suffered and sacrificed on behalf of independence in the belief of the promise of the sovereign nation.
In fact, the end of Spanish colonial rule brought little relief to the condition of vast numbers of Cubans of color. During the years of the U.S. military occupation and into the early republic, Cubans of color, including many of the most prominent leaders of liberation, were cast aside and passed over. Mambí Ricardo Batrell Oviedo returned to Matanzas and bore witness to the systematic discrimination against blacks: “The war ended, and the Spanish dominion over Cuba came to an end. It was with sadness that I saw the rise of the practice of intrigue and injustice in the province of Matanzas, where the war against Spain was sustained by men of color. No sooner than the armistice was proclaimed that the few white officers who passed the war without fighting began to emerge from their hiding places. Positions that properly corresponded to us, those of us who had fought without respite during the war, were distributed to those cowards [majases] who avoided engaging the enemy in the field of battle.”34
Cubans of color realized early on that something had gone terribly wrong. “Unfortunate indeed would be the fate of black Cubans,” protested essayist Rafael Serra as early as 1901, “if the only thing to which they are allowed to aspire to as just remuneration for their sacrifices for the independence and liberty of Cuba is hearing the National Anthem and receiving the false adoration dedicated to our illustrious martyrs.” Serra continued:
Blacks were told to suffer a little more, for discord among Cubans would imperil the success of the redemptive [liberation] project from which we all would benefit equally. The black Cuban agreed. The war began. Blacks had to endure injustice in the émigré communities abroad and on the fields of combat in Cuba. . . . The war ended. Spaniards and Cubans embraced. The people of Montoro [that is, the Autonomists] kissed and made up with the people of Martí [that is, the independentistas], and blacks remained in virtually the same condition as they were under Spain. But still they were told: suffer a little more for now, because what is presently happening is the fault of the Yankees, and any conflict among Cubans would imperil the redemptive project from which we all would benefit equally. We should all join together as one people so that these Yankee lynchers depart and leave us alone. But tomorrow the interveners will leave, and we know the lesson: the tyranny will continue. Suffer a little more for now because whatever conflict among Cubans could imperil the redemptive project from which with the passage of time. . . we will all benefit equally. If we are not united, the Yankee lynchers will return to this land to intervene in our affairs, where there is some tyranny, but—we are all Cubans.35
The meager distribution of public positions and political appointments among Cubans of color early on bode ill. In 1902, a committee headed by General Generoso Campos Marquetti and representing Veteranos y Sociedades de la Raza de Color met with newly inaugurated president Tomás Estrada Palma to protest the shabby treatment of blacks in the new administration. The small number of blacks and mulattos in the Rural Guard and police, Campos Marquetti insisted, as well as the systematic discrimination against Cubans of color in the civil departments of the government, was an affront “toward a race that had valiantly spilled its blood in defense of the Cuban cause.” Campos Marquetti concluded: “The truth is, Mr. President, this is not what we expected from the Revolution, and things cannot continue like this.”36
Little changed in the years that followed. “The revolution for independence brought to Cuba a civilization that made us a better people,” mambí colonel Miguel Balanzó wrote on the eve of the rebellion organized by the Partido Independiente de Color in 1912:
But I doubt that all Cubans would consider themselves happy. I hear all around me voices that speak of the humiliations experienced among those who are descendants of those unhappy blacks who were driven by the whip of white men. . . . Have we forgotten that all were redeemed by the tears of Cuban women and the blood of the martyrs and heroes of our wars for independence? All of these poor souls are the sons of the same patria. . . . They too deserve the right to receive the best collective treatment and enjoy the felicity that the clarion announced to the civilized world on May 20, 1902, with the establishment in Cuba of an independent Republic.37
The promise of nation had implied a change of relationships, among Cubans themselves, of course, but especially between Cubans and their government, with the presumption of the prerogative of Cuban as a condition of sovereign nationhood. “Why so much struggle?” Fernando Ortiz asked rhetorically. “Why so much blood spilled?” He continued: “Was it only for a coat of arms and a flag? No. Our bloody national effort was not a mere desire for independence, only to continue, in our own country and without foreign control, the same values of daily life that had been imposed upon us by oppressive norms. Our war was for independence, but it was also in its essence a separatist project. A war of separation from the past, separation from the colony, separation from despotism.”38
The proposition of sovereign nationhood had seized hold of the Cuban imagination as a way to a better future, not as an abstract idea but as a means to actualize the promise of “with all, and for the good of all.” It was about an egalitarian purpose that evoked expectations of common good, social justice, and collective well-being, conditions the republic was charged to bring into being. “The revolution [for independence],” José González Lanuza explained to Governor General John Brooke in 1899, “fought Spain in order to overthrow the entire past; its men went to war in order not merely to secure a flag for our soil, but to see that they became masters of their own land.”39
The promise of nation had summoned Cubans to dramatic action with the expectation of dramatic change. They had imagined a sovereign nation dedicated to the betterment of life for all Cubans, to the defense of Cuban interests, as the principal purpose for its existence. National sovereignty implied self-determination—the capacity for agency—consecrated in the ideal of nation as a source of security, certainly from external adversary but also from internal adversity. Three generations of Cubans had dedicated themselves to the project of liberation, affirmed Ramón Alfonso, “not merely to change flags but to create a more perfect society on the remains of the defunct colony.”40 Cubans had entered into a covenant, as they had understood the terms of their commitment, a moral contract in which they had devoted themselves to bringing into being a republic dedicated to the defense of their interests. “The Republic,” observes the narrator in Arturo Montori’s autobiographical novel El tormento de vivir (1923), “affectionate and paternal, was obliged to care for its children, the Cubans, who had suffered so much to create it.” And more:
Especially the poor, the émigré workers who took bread from the mouths of their loved ones to raise money for the Revolution, the peasants who abandoned their families to all sorts of horrors and misery to join the insurgent ranks, and all . . . who endured humiliation and were prepared to take whatever risk was required for the cause of liberty. They would now be, surely, the pampered children, the favored ones of the new situation, in which their needs would be met with affectionate solicitude, against the abuses of the strong, merchants, bourgeois, planters, owners of enterprises, all the new owners of the wealth, mostly foreigners.41
Norms of nationality had developed within the lived experience of national formation under specific historical circumstances, a process very much inscribed in the promise of nation as a means of individual well-being and a way to collective advancement, around which all were expected to subordinate coexisting—and competing—identities to the all-encompassing paradigm of Cuban. It is from the distance of more than 150 years that the influence of the nineteenth-century process of liberation reveals its impact on national sensibilities. The experience reached deeply into the moral order from which Cubans came to a recognition of themselves as a single people, of what they could reasonably expect of each other by virtue of being Cuban.
The nineteenth-century process of liberation had acted decisively to shape the moral framework of nationality, as an experience and as an expectation: as an experience, it provided Cubans with celebratory narratives of heroes and heroic deeds, a testimonial of a people joined together for noble purpose; as an expectation, it fixed the promise of national sovereignty as means of shared fulfillment. The project of nation forged the values around which the attributes of nationality were assembled, as ideals, to be sure, but as ideals so central to the terms of self-representation as to make them the standard by which the character of Cuban would thereafter be measured. The expectation endured as a purpose to pursue—that is, a promise to fulfill, and this too developed into a facet of the character of Cuban. The “heroic gesture” of independence, historian Antonio Iraizoz wrote in 1939, was expected to produce “a change in mentality, in disposition, in spirit: in short, to fulfill the desires and legitimate hopes of those rebels and dreamers [rebeldes y soñadores] who sacrificed themselves for the good of Cuba. . . . It was to produce new conditions and new commitments to which the Republic would be dedicated.”42
All of which served to set the shortcomings of the republic in stark relief. Simply put, the purpose for which the republic was organized was incompatible with the ideals by which nationality had been shaped. The normative determinants of Cuban had formed around the proposition of nation as a means to mediate inequity and ameliorate injustice, to remedy the sources of Cuban discontent and redress Cuban grievances. “No one can think,” wrote newspaper publisher Carlos de Velasco in 1924, “that the men and women who initiated the Cuban Revolution believed that achieving political separation from Spain would signal the fulfillment of the independentista ideal. No. They possessed a higher concept of their purpose and their people; they wished to transform the country in every way: in the political, the moral, and the social. . . . The revolutionary ideal has not been realized.”43 The commitment to sovereign nationhood developed as a devotion to faith, a belief in the promise of nation as the source of the common good. Historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez understood the promise of patria as the basis of a “moral community,” dedicated—he wrote in 1921—to the creation of “the essential conditions for collective well-being,” obliged to “create the quality of life for national well-being,” including “health care, without which life is toil and torment; security for life, property, and honor; public recreational facilities; education; public transportation; charitable organizations to aid and protect children, the elderly, the ill, and the needy.”44
The idea of nation had been imagined as something to believe in, to belong to Cubans, to do the things Cubans believed needed to be done: the nation as something to revere as an act of faith. Cubans had long ascribed sacral properties to the ideal of nation: indeed, a purpose of redemption as means of deliverance. Patria was rendered variously as altar, as hallowed ground—“the patria is sacred,” proclaimed Martí.45 It was site of worship and source of grace, at once transformative and transcendent. “Everything should be sacrificed at the altar of the patria,” enjoined novelist Anselmo Suárez y Romero.46 Carlos Manuel de Céspedes alluded to “the holy war of our independence” (la santa guerra de nuestra independencia).47 Emilia Casanova de Villaverde paid homage to Cubans who were “disposed to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the patria.”48 Salvador Cisneros Betancourt enjoined all Cubans “to join us and sing together with us the hymn of redemption that we raise in fervent veneration at the sacrosanct altar of the Patria.”49 And Antonio Maceo celebrated “our national sovereignty” as the “holy ideal of the independence of Cuba” (el ideal santo de la independencia de Cuba).50
Nationality implied integration into community on the basis of well-being and security, as source of status and dignity, to draw Cubans together into shared normative systems, an ethic from which shared moral purpose was derived. In a society where status was often the prerogative of property, nationality offered the possibility of self-respect and pride, available to all, openly and equally. These were the terms by which national identity assumed form, as ideals, to be sure, but as ideals so central to the terms of self-representation as to make them the standard by which the character of Cuban was enacted.
History had not turned out the way it was supposed to. Achievements fell short of aspirations. The expectations that had sustained Cuban hopes yielded to disappointment and disillusionment, then to demoralization and eventually cynicism. The promise of nation persisted as a hope unrealized, for the historic sources of Cuban discontent continued unremedied. Years later, a disheartened Manuel Piedra reflected on the outcome of Cuban efforts and could only wonder what might have been if Cubans had obtained independence “without a foreign intervention, and been spared four years of a foreign military occupation and many years of national subordination, which resulted in deforming the natural process of the Revolution and the deflecting of the course of aspirations to which we committed ourselves to the battlefield.”51 The protagonist protests in Antonio Penichet’s novel ¡Alma rebelde! (1921): “This is what the republic was for? This is why so many innocent people perished?”52 Julio Antonio Mella was severe in his judgment: “The Revolution for Independence has been a farce.”53 Loló de la Torriente lived through the years of the early republic and recalled vividly the disillusionment that had seized hold of the popular mood. “Everyday discontent increased . . . in the face of the thwarting of the ideals of Martí,” she remembered. “There was no doubt among the Cuban insurrectos that ‘something’ remained unattained.”54
The realization that “something” had remained unaccomplished did not reveal itself in a single dramatic moment, but slowly, over time and in turns, each new revelation adding to the frustration attending the unrealized sovereign nation. Cubans seemed to have been overtaken by forces they could neither control nor comprehend, unable even to render the sequence of events into coherent narrative order. Many did not know what had happened, or how it had happened, or why.
The passage of time served to reveal how little influence Cubans exerted over the government constituted in their name. The end of the U.S. military occupation in May 1902 was followed by more U.S. armed interventions, in 1906 and 1917, to end Cuban protests of electoral fraud, and in 1912, to aid in the suppression of the uprising organized by the Partido Independiente de Color to protest the persistence of racial injustice. The Americans intervened continually in the conduct of Cuban internal affairs. It seemed to have no end; it was a self-perpetuating process. More intervention required more intervention. Anything that seemed to impinge on American interests—which soon came to include almost everything—was the object of U.S. concern—and was acted upon. “And then there were the Americans,” as novelist José Soler Puig speaks through his protagonist in Bertillón 160 (1960). “It was impossible to sustain a good government in Cuba. Good government meant one that would address the eternal problems of Cuba: unemployment, peasants without land, public service monopolies, monoculture, the sugar mills.”55
Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, a succession of American diplomats arrived in Havana to exercise breathtaking authority over the management of the internal affairs of the republic, including Frank Steinhart, William E. Gonzales, Boas Long, Enoch Crowder, Harry Guggenheim, Sumner Welles, Jefferson Caffery, Arthur Gardner, and Earl E. T. Smith, among others. The Cuban government, observed the British minister in Havana in 1910, “though nominally independent, is so fully aware of its subordination to the will of the United States that it never ventures to take any step of importance which might displease Washington, and in most cases consults and acts upon the advice it receives from the United States.”56 It was left to former president Gerardo Machado to offer insight into the workings of North American hegemony. “The specter of intervention was of such potency,” Machado observed, “that no one ever dared to oppose it. It was believed . . . that the act of rejecting an unjustifiable [U.S.] supervision could bring to Havana harbor warships and marines from the United States.”57 Former U.S. ambassador Earl E. T. Smith acknowledged as much in 1960, if in slightly different terms: “The United States, until the advent of Castro, was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that . . . the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”58
Cuban political leaders and officeholders brought further discredit to the republic. That political office lacked substantive public purpose fixed the function of politics principally as a medium of exchange among power contenders, a source of sinecures and a system of spoils, a means of personal aggrandizement and individual enrichment. “Here politics means personal gain,” planter Manuel Rionda observed tersely in 1909.59
All through the first half of the twentieth century, a succession of presidential administrations, with hordes of hangers-on in tow, proceeded to lay siege to the public treasury and lay waste to public trust. A total of twenty different parties competed for political office in the republic, and, with few exceptions, nothing distinguished one from the other except personalities. “In Cuba,” attorney José Antonio González Lanuza pronounced wryly, “nothing more closely resembles a liberal than a conservative, and vice versa.”60
Corruption seemed to have no limits, and political malfeasance appeared to have no end—all through the administrations of Tomás Estrada Palma (1902–6), José Miguel Gómez (1909–12), Mario Menocal (1912–20), and Alfredo Zayas (1920–24), the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–33), the extralegal military rule under Fulgencio Batista (1934–40), the sordid years of Auténtico administrations (1945–52), and dictatorship under Batista (1952–58). Corruption acquired structural form, as far reaching as it was widely practiced; bribery, graft, and embezzlement developed into the principal means by which to conduct the affairs of state: “Politics as an endless filth [un asco perpetuo],” poet Agustín Acosta remarked in 1924.61
A yawning moral void settled over the civic realms of the republic. A reading of the national press during the 1920s provides a dismal view of the state of the republic. Smuggling was rampant in the customhouses and among port police officials. Allegations of graft in the post office had become commonplace. The Department of Treasury was rocked by recurring scandals, including the disappearance of retirement pensions, misappropriation of tax revenues, and padded payrolls. Graft and corruption were especially rampant in the Department of Public Works, where kickbacks and rake-offs were the normal methods of doing business. So were bidding irregularities, misappropriation of funds, and cost overruns. Vast expanses of state-own land passed illegally from the public patrimony to private possession.
These were years of political malfeasance transacted in full public view with utter impunity—and immunity: ballot stuffing, vote rigging, and electoral violence, endlessly, it seemed. Scandal after scandal and no readily available remedy, what Francisco José Moreno remembered as “the barracks-rabble, old cronies, and reprobate politicians [who] grabbed public offices and sinecures with equal contempt for both form and substances of public decorum.”62 With few notable exceptions, Cuban political leaders were successful at little more than self-aggrandizement. Politics in the republic was sordid stuff, corrupt and corrupting: all in all, a pervasive condition of moral squalor. Cynicism developed into the currency of conventional wisdom and took hold as received knowledge, with politics commonly reviled and widely vilified. U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden was aghast at “the widespread and shameless corruption existing in all walks of life, but permeating the Government from top to bottom.” Warned Braden in 1945: “The persistence and further growth of the unbelievable corruption is sapping the moral and physical strength of the nation and [there will] eventually be an explosion by the Cuban people into revolution and possible chaos. This development would necessarily create disagreeable and difficult consequences for us.”63
This is not to argue, of course, that had the United States not denied the republic the capacity to exercise national sovereignty Cubans would have discharged the functions of public office with moral probity and ethical virtue. These are obviously matters of unknown outcomes. It is to suggest, however, that without the capacity for national sovereignty, Cubans lacked the means of self-determination, and without the capacity to exercise collective agency, whether as a matter of persuasion or a circumstance of power, Cubans lacked the means to hold public officials to the task of advancing national well-being as the principal function of political power. Which was the point: in fact, the republic was structured principally to meet American interests, not Cuban ones. On those occasions in which Cubans bestirred themselves to protest political fraud and electoral violence—as in 1906 and 1917, for example—the United States intervened in support of the status quo. Fernando Ortiz understood the forces at work in the early republic and commented in 1932:
We Cubans are aware of our own serious responsibilities resulting from the acts of successive corrupt governments, but there is one great extenuating fact, namely, that every time the people of Cuba . . . have attempted to eradicate the abuses of a despotic government by resorting to the only available means, the efforts to restore justice and freedom have been frustrated by the diplomatic policy in Washington. . . . American diplomacy has supported the culpable government and has prevented the Cubans from restoring a government in accordance with their laws and civilization.64
For Cubans to overturn the norm of malfeasance that had seized hold of the public life of the republic and, further, to force local power holders to defend Cuban interests as the principal function of government would have inevitably challenged the primacy of North American interests, that is, the purpose for which the Americans had designed the republic in the first place. Cubans had very limited means with which to seek remedy of the sources of their discontent, for, most assuredly, to challenge the regimen of the republic as a means to advance nation also implied a challenge to a political system in which the primacy of foreign interests had been institutionalized.
The republic could neither serve Cuban needs nor represent Cuban interests. It was overtaken by an utterly circular logic: without power to govern on behalf of national interests, government lacked the capacity to advance the well-being of the people in whose name it was presumed to have been constituted, and inevitably to forfeit the credibility necessary to maintain the legitimacy of government. “Cubans have always been in fact a people debarred from self-determination,” literary critic Jorge Mañach wrote in 1933. “The Cubans have not been able to shape their destiny according to their own will, because that will has been lain in semi-subjection.” The Platt Amendment had “resulted in crushing the Cuban sentiment of self-determination, when it imposed expressed limits on the exercise of collective will”65—what historian Luis Aguilar would call this a “deep wound” (herida Honda).66
The republic developed into a source of embarrassment, in disrepute and out of favor, incapable of inspiring popular confidence, unable to command political credibility. Cubans lost control of the means with which to define themselves, on their own terms, in their own forms, and were still unable to affect the forces that governed their lives. Disappointment begot disillusionment. “We are not independent,” despaired poet José Manuel Poveda. “We are nothing more than a colonial factory, obliged to work, and offer its harvest and crop, forced by the whip. We are disorganized and debased, like a bad entourage: we cannot defend ourselves. A gust of dispersion [un soplo de dispersión] has swept away conscience, and [with it] everything that there was of dignity, purity, and valor. . . . We are a shadow of a people, the dream of a democracy, the longing for liberty. We do not exist.”67 The aging mambí general Carlos García Velez was despondent. “I will die with the regret of not having done more for the future of our children, left defenseless in an immoral and mercenary society,” he wrote in his journal on April 19, 1951. And four months later: “The social cancer has developed such profound roots that any effort to extirpate the disease will necessarily place the life of the republic in danger.” In a published interview three years later, García Velez was no less candid—and no less despondent over the state of affairs: “There is no Republic. There is nothing. I do not believe in anything.”68
Thoughtful observers could not conceal their disquiet over the Cuban condition. “In truth,” essayist Manuel Bisbé brooded, “we have not discharged our debt. . . . The men to whom fell the task to realize in the Republic the unrealized program of 1895 were not all far-sighted, responsible, and honest as the circumstances required.” He concluded: “We have failed to become masters of our destiny.”69 Years later, poet Heberto Padilla looked back on these years with a deep sense of anguish: “Cuba was a country for sale, a parody of a country.”70 This was precisely the same imagery used by the 26 July Movement in its “Program-Manifesto” of 1956: “The Republic is a sorrowful caricature, through the fault of Cubans.”71 In Dreaming in Cuban (1992), novelist Cristina García has her protagonist given to plaintive musings: “Cuba has become the joke of the Caribbean, a place where everything and everyone is for sale. How did we allow this to happen?”72
The demoralization was palpable. Through much of the first half of the twentieth century, vast numbers of men and women had come to question the value of being Cuban, frustrated by the inability to achieve the nation upon which the fulfillment of nationality was contingent. The national memory had internalized disparate facets of the past, difficult to reconcile and especially difficult to accommodate within the discursive realms of nation as imagined at the time of its formulation. Self-interrogation produced self-reproach and inevitably a loss of self-esteem. “What is our nationality?” novelist José Antonio Ramos asked in despair as he brooded over the corruption of public life in the 1910s. “I feel a terrible shame at being Cuban.”73 Jorge Mañach frequently alluded to a national condition of “inferiority complex” and “pessimism,” and essayist Juan Marinello identified a debilitating “disquiet” that had produced among Cubans a persisting “inferiority complex.”74 Twenty years later, physician Gustavo Pittaluga arrived at a similar conclusion: “Our country has long suffered—from the times of its very founding—from an ‘inferiority complex.’”75 It perhaps could not have been otherwise. “The colonial structure survived under the factitious symbols of the national anthem, the coat of arms, and the flag,” Raúl Roa reflected years later. “Out of that frustration developed the inferiority complex that characterized our republican life.”76 U.S. State Department officials often characterized Cubans as “sometimes influenced by a sense of inferiority, which promotes exaggerated nationalism.”77 Novelist René Vázquez Díaz’s narrator in La isla del Cundeamor (1995) described Cubans as a people “driven by that nationalism that lies latent in the subconscious of every Cuban and makes them prone to the strangest excesses.”78 Psychiatrist José Angel Bustamante identified “the Platt Amendment and the constant fear of intervention by a foreign country, as well as the resulting disquiet attending the frustration created by the governments of the Republic” as salient factors in “the structure of the basic Cuban personality,” expressed principally as “insecurity and the feeling of inferiority.”79 The Tenth National Congress of History concluded its 1952 proceedings with a “Declaration of Principles,” approved as the Final Act, affirming that “the imposition of the Platt Amendment upon the new Republic created among our people a terrible inferiority complex, of skepticism and lack of confidence in their own destiny, and lack of faith in the Republic.”80
Men and women of goodwill could only look about with numb incredulity, to bear witness to recurring spectacles of scandal, each more spectacular than the one before, alienated from a succession of governments unresponsive to Cuban needs. “There is not a single Cuban who is not disillusioned by the farce that is today the republic,” broods the protagonist in José Antonio Ramos’s novel, Las impurezas de la realidad (1929).81 So many had given so much. The republic seemed unworthy of the sacrifices made on its behalf. For the vast numbers of men and women for whom independence had been about sovereign nationhood, about the fulfillment of collective well-being contingent on the realization of Cuba for Cubans, the republic stood as a mockery of the very ideals that had informed the meaning of nation. Demoralization developed into one of the salient characteristics of civic culture in the republic. “Our nation is passing through a horrendous crisis,” brooded Raimundo Cabrera in 1923. “It is not crisis of a government, it is not a crisis of a party, it is not crisis of a class. It is a crisis of an entire people.”82
Without the capacity to exercise national sovereignty, without the means to fulfill the purpose for which the idea of nation was conceived and which had given the proposition of nation the power of its promise in the first place, the republic lacked the means to advance the primacy of Cuban interests. Historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez bore witness to his own times: “The disillusionment is great, the sorrow of the great mass of the Cuban people is sincere, while a wave of cynicism subdues and almost extinguishes the enthusiasm of the early days. But the Nation does not lose faith in the patriotic ideals.”83 Fernando Ortiz could hardly contain his despair. “After that noble national project on behalf of the liberation ideal [la idealidad mambisa],” Ortiz wrote in 1912, “into which we poured our last drops of blood, . . . we have descended shamefully into the muck of immorality, of ignorance, of passions, and most of all of indifference, of the most horrible national apathy.” And he continued: “Our descent has been so rapid, our political failure so frightful, that the Cuban people are on the verge of losing—if they had not already done so—what was their most precious achievement, the only thing that encouraged their personality and gave them stamina and life: faith. Poor us. . . . What is completely incontrovertible . . . is the absolute discredit into which political activity has fallen, considered among us today totally as ineffective, futile, and what is more pernicious.”84
Essayist Waldo Medina attributed the sources of the Cuban angst to the dashed hopes of liberation. “Everything has been a failure, frustration, a loss of confidence in the national destiny, an erosion of the sentiment of nation and nationality,” a dispirited Medina wrote. “The redemptive revolutions of 1868 and 1895 were subverted, the genuine ideals of the old liberators were betrayed. The last war organized by Martí was won, but for others, not for Cubans, who continued to live without land, without bread, without peace. Bread and peace that signified justice and democracy.” Medina described the fate of the mambises, who endured “the mediated peace of the first foreign intervention—a national humiliation . . . and [source of] the great Cuban frustration.” The “valiant defenders of the . . . patria meditated in silence with the shame of knowing that they were vanquished even though they were the victors: without land and without resources. . . . Poverty was transformed into the sole virtue of many of the men of the war.”85 Lamented José Enrique Varona in 1917: “The generations of Cubans who preceded us and who gave so magnanimously at the hour of sacrifice would look at us with astonishment and pity, and ask themselves incredulously if this is the result of their efforts, of the cause into which they put their hearts and lives. . . . Cuba of the republic is the twin sister of Cuba the colony.”86 The differences between generations were also on the mind of the protagonist, mambí colonel Damaso del Prado, in Luis Rodríguez Embil’s short story “La impurezas de la realidad: Carta respuesta” (1932). “We made the Republic,” Colonel del Prado writes to his son. He continues:
At the time no one thought about identifying the meaning of action because the action was the meaning. At the time one simply acted, because one had to act. . . . Everything at the time was very clear and simple in our eyes. . . . My generation did something, because it believed in an ideal—the ideal of absolute independence—and its fulfillment. The generation that immediately followed mine, more intelligent and less instinctive and intuitive, in comparison, achieved nothing, for seeing the ideal of the previous generation totally mutilated upon its realization lost the faith that had characterized my generation. . . . The difference between one generation and another is to have faith—or not—in an ideal.87
Cubans lived with the presence of their past as part of daily life, packed with purpose, a history that had a reason for being: sometimes as a moral lesson, at other times in the form of prescriptive purport, and always as a point of view and perspective. The past insinuated itself into the popular imagination in the form of an unfinished history, the past as a calling, a summons to Cubans susceptible to the promise of nation. The past was where the virtues around which the attributes of nationality had formed, as ideals, to be sure, but as ideals so central to terms of self-representation as to make them the standard by which the character of Cuban was measured. Cubans were obliged to remember, insisted Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez in 1923, “the great deeds realized by our fathers in defense of our homes, our liberty, and our rights.” He added: “The Cuban who comes to know the history of our past will feel heir to a rich patrimony and will discover in that very legacy the means to make it greater.” Guerra was succinct: “Our history is the only thing that we possess that is genuinely ours.”88
The past was preserved as a monument to commemorate a heroic deed—a statue to honor a patriot, a plaque to mark a place of historical significance, a tomb of a martyr, a birthplace, or the site of conspiracy. The anniversary of a patriot’s birth date elicited testimonials; the commemoration of a death date evoked tributes. The past was memorialized in stamps, coins, and currency, in the construction of statues and sculptures as “public works of historical utility,” wrote historian Miguel Varona Guerrero, “in remembrance and honor of our heroes and martyrs of freedom and independence.”89 Monuments, markers, and mausoleums in honor of the martyrs expanded across the island—what one Cuban commentator characterized as “the representation of our nationality in marble and stone.”90 That monuments were not designed specifically with political intent does not reduce their political impact, for they developed into one more form by which historical knowledge entered domains of popular awareness. They occupied public space and presumed to provide a specific interpretation of a decisive aspect in the Cuban past. “Since the war ended,” observed Frederick Ober during his travels across the island in 1904, “the Cubans have nearly impoverished themselves erecting marble memorials and monuments of other sorts, to their brothers slain by Spaniards.”91 Visiting Havana almost twenty years later, Joseph Hergesheimer characterized Cubans as “morbidly sensitive about their land, their monuments and martyrs.”92
The mambí memory passed into memoirs, some as chronicles of campaigns, others as diaries, and almost all in the form of first-person testimonials. Between the 1900s and 1950s, the publication of first-person accounts of the nineteenth-century wars of liberation, including the diaries, campaign journals, reminiscences, and autobiographies of the veterans of the wars of independence, developed fully into a genre of Cuban historical writing.93 This was history as word of mouth and memory, recounted, repeated, and recorded, inherently subjective, to be sure, but itself the source from which an understanding of the past acted to shape the terms of Cuban. The literature of memory, observed historian Diana Iznaga, was characterized “by its function in the service of a cause which, in the final analysis, was the cause of the Cuban people: the struggle for the right of national independence and rescue from oblivion their heroic tradition of combat and victories. . . . It was valuable because by virtue of reading the memoirs we see develop before our very eyes the emergence of a people.”94
Mambises also turned historians, to bear witness and chronicle the history that they themselves had contributed to producing. Officers of the Liberation Army published historical studies of the war for independence, including Colonel Matías Duque, Nuestra patria (Lectura para niños) (1925); Captain Aníbal Escalante Beatón, Calixto García: Su campaña en el 95 (1946); Colonel Manuel Piedra Martel, Campañas de Maceo en la última Guerra de Independencia (1946); Major Miguel Varona Guerrero, La Guerra de Independencia de Cuba, 1895–1898 (1946); Colonel Cosme de la Torriente, Calixto García cooperó con las fuerzas armadas de los EE. UU. en 1898 (1952); and General Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, La Constituyente de Jimaguayú (1952) and Maceo, héroe y carácter (1952). Captain Joaquín Llaverías inaugurated the publication of the Boletín del Archivo Nacional in 1902 and served as the director of the Cuban National Archives between 1913 until his death in 1956.95 The founding of the Asociación Pro Enseñanza de Hechos Históricos in 1939, under the direction of Captain Luis Rodolfo Miranda, was dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge of the nineteenth-century wars for independence. “It is our desire,” explained Miranda, “to make known the achievements of the men who, with a smile on their face, were happy to die for Cuba Libre. We wish our youth of today to learn of the sacrifices and glory of the past, knowledge that serves as a source of pride to our people so that they will continue to struggle to complete the noble work begun by those men.”96
Legacy was honored in national acts of remembrance. A presidential decree in 1903, subsequently ratified in the Constitution of 1940, established October 10 (Grito de Yara), February 24 (Grito de Baire), and May 20 (independence day) as national holidays. Towns and cities across the island observed annual dates of local historical significance: January 12 for the burning of Bayamo; January 22 in Mantua for the completion of the 1896 invasion; April 14 for the commemoration in Guáimaro of the Constitution of 1869. The value of patriotic holidays, exhorted one primary school manual, lay in their “profoundly educational” function: “They serve to contribute to ideas of social solidarity and foster and strengthen a national spirit. . . . Through these observances children learn that patriotism does not consist only of shouting vivas to the patria on a given date, in May or October, but also in learning to fulfill their duty . . . [and] that the best way to demonstrate love for the patria is to meet our obligations.”97 Years later, General Harry Villegas Tamayo vividly remembered his adolescence: “[Patriotic commemorations] created a patriotic sentiment among the youth. The celebration of October 10 represented something very important. For me it was decisive in the later development of my life.”98
History hovering: Depicting the looming presence of the próceres standing in judgment of the conduct of public affairs of the republic. Left: José Martí and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes condemning President Tomás Estrada Palma for having invited U.S. intervention in 1906. From La Lucha, October 10, 1906. Right: Caricature by Conrado Massaguer depicting Máximo Gómez and José Martí condemning the corruption of President Alfredo Zayas. From Carteles 8 (April 19, 1925).
The national calendar filled with dates to commemorate the death of próceres—the mambises and martyrs of the nineteenth century—always an occasion to remind the living of the debt owed to the dead: February 27 for the death of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes; May 11 for Ignacio Agramonte; May 19 for José Martí; December 6 for Antonio Maceo. Provincial towns and cities across the island honored the martyred hijos predilectos—local favorite sons and daughters—and thereby established a civic claim to participation in the cause of national liberation: Calixto García in Holguín, Magdalena Peñarredonda in Artemisa, Serafín Sánchez in Sancti-Spíritus, Pedro Díaz in Yaguajay, Isabel Rubio in Guane, Francisco Carrillo in Remedios, Eusebio Hernández in Colón, Juan Delgado González in Bejucal, Rita Suárez del Villar in Cienfuegos, Francisco Leyte Vidal in Mayarí, Adela Azcuy in Viñales, and Emilio Núñez in Sagua la Grande, among hundreds of others.
The presence of the deceased próceres hovered symbolically over the conduct of civic affairs in the republic, something of a specter understood to stand in judgment of political comportment. The living were in continual dialogue with the dead, the dead residing in the present in the form of moral authority, to be addressed and asked—rhetorically, of course—to render judgment on some aspect of public life. It was from among the dead, and specifically those who had perished in pursuit of patria, that the living were enjoined to seek inspiration and a standard of conduct. “The voice of the martyrs—those who sacrificed to create the patria—must be heard,” exhorted elementary schoolteacher Francisco Rodríguez in 1910. “The martyrs will live on in the legend of their virtuous actions and their example will inspire us to imitate them.”99 The example of the dead imposed on the living the obligation of duty to the patria. “The dead will save Cuba . . . against the thieves who corrupt and violate Cuba,” journalist Eduardo Abril Amores insisted in 1922. “The bones of our heroes will come out of their tombs to attack the wretched. . . . Those who died for the liberty of Cuba will have to continue to defend the patria; like El Cid, they must continue to win battles from the glorious tombs. . . . They created the patria with their lives and from death they preserve it.”100
The celebration of the past drew Cubans into direct and indeed often personal engagement with their history. It was both programmatic and performative. Historical knowledge was diffused by way of commemorative participation as a collective experience in a national context. “The patriotic holidays were celebrated with fervor,” José Juan Arrom recalled of his childhood in Mayarí. “I remember the program of one February 24 celebrating the beginning of the war for independence. [The event] began early in the morning with a reveille played by the municipal band, marching along Leyte Vidal Street. All the children awoke with enthusiasm to see the parade. We later had breakfast and dressed in our finest clothing, some even wearing new shoes for the occasion. We gathered at the school from where we departed with our teachers in a children’s parade until reaching the Veterans’ Center.”101
Children in primary schools participated in weekly patriotic commemorations. Every Friday, teachers and students participated in “civic acts,” explicitly as a means to foster affinity with the patria. In 1910, the administration of President José Miguel Gómez introduced a “patriotic act” known as the “Allegiance to the Flag” (Jura de la Bandera) for all public elementary schools, whereby children pledged loyalty to the flag.102 A large Cuban flag and the national coats of arms were placed on display, attended to by a student honor guard selected for good grades and exemplary conduct. The assembled students would salute the flag and sing the national anthem. Speeches would be given, variously discussing love of nation, the poetry and political thought of José Martí, and the deeds of Antonio Maceo, Calixto García, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, among others. For the commemoration of February 24, children previously selected as the civic act guards were honored to receive the “Kiss of the Patria” (Beso de la Patria), whereby the cheek of each child was brushed with the Cuban flag. Recalled Tania Quintero: “Every week one of us would assist in the preparation for the Acto Cívico on Fridays: to set up the stage and raise the flag, to be a presenter to read compositions and poetry. The high point was the award of the certificates to the winners of the Beso de la Patria, which I received in the fifth grade.”103
Teachers organized field trips to historic sites and monuments, to museums and commemorative events. Affirmed the manual La enseñanza de la historia de Cuba (1951): “In this way, the civic consciousness of Cuban children will be strengthened, from the earliest grades through the completion of primary education, by way of an appreciation of patriotic values and knowledge of their duties as children of a nation whose liberty was the result of the sacrifice of its most eminent men, to render homage to these men and the symbols of the Patria.”104 Years later, the father of Camilo Cienfuegos reminisced how much the young Camilo liked Cuban history: “It was his favorite subject. He always showed great interest—I would say passion—to learn about the lives of our patriots, and especially about the lives of Martí, Maceo, Máximo Gómez and others.” The future comandante of the Rebel Army, recalled his father, learned that “the Cuba in which we live was not the one that Martí dreamed about and for which so many mambises had sacrificed their lives.”105 Cienfuegos received on several occasions the Beso de la Patria award.106 Huber Matos similarly recalled his childhood: Every Friday, the end of the week was celebrated “with a ceremony called la Jura de la Bandera, where we had to take flowers and scatter them about the Cuban flag. We recited patriotic poetry. All very magisterial, by which the people were convinced of the need to make the effort to make our republic a reality.”107 Carlos Franqui later recalled the origins of his affection for the Cuban past: “In La Duda public school I met an exceptional teacher . . . who explained the history of Cuba to me; she introduced me to its martyrs, its poets, its struggles.”108 The education system of the early republic, literary critic Luisa Campuzano insisted, played a decisive role in the development of a sense of nation among the members of the next generation. “The school,” Campuzano observed, “formed Cubans within knowledge and love of their country, of its customs and its culture.”109
Memory assumed multiple forms, thereupon transmitted from one person to another, from one generation to the next, the way that legacy often passes into legend and takes hold as a matter of received wisdom. Across the island, all through the years of the early republic, the names of towns, schools, parks, and streets were changed to honor the deeds and dead of the wars for independence. Among the towns to change their names were Recreo (Máximo Gómez), Hato Nuevo (José Martí), Corral Falso (Pedro Betancourt), Lagunillas (Domingo Méndez Capote), Paso Real (Isabel Rubio), Cuevitas (Ignacio Agramonte), and Cimarrones (Carlos Rojas). In Havana, the streets Tacón, Concha, and Cánovas were changed to Martí, Maceo, and Gómez, respectively; Dolores was renamed Jesús Rabí, and Maloja was changed to Francisco Vicente Aguilera. In Sagua, Tacón was renamed Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. In Alquízar, the names changed from Calle Real to Antonio Maceo; from Calle de la Iglesia to Pedro Díaz; from Paseo Juana to Paseo Rius Rivera; from Barrio de Chafarinas to Barrios de los Mártires. Few indeed were the number of towns larger than 10,000 residents that did not have streets named after José Martí, Antonio Maceo, Máximo Gómez, Ignacio Agramonte, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. In 1922, the Cuban Congress decreed January 28—the birth date of José Martí—a national holiday. A bust of Martí was placed in every public school in the republic. Each municipality of the republic was required to designate “one of its principal streets with the name ‘José Martí’”; every municipality was required to dedicate “to the memory of the Apostle a statue, a bust, an obelisk, a commemorative column, a bronze plaque or marble plaque memorial in the most prominent public place.”110
Historical knowledge assumed multiple forms, rendered as legend and lore, preserved in popular memory as purpose, received as heritage, and passed on as legacy to live up to and make good upon. The past persisted as a presence, observed and celebrated, in the form of fact and fiction: in the classroom and on the pages of daily newspapers and weekly magazines, in popular décimas and political discourse. Historical themes developed into a staple of film, produced on stage, sung in song, and recited in poetry.
The ideal of sovereign nationhood insinuated itself deeply into the aesthetic sensibilities of the first generation of the republic as Cubans sought new ways to articulate aspirations of national sovereignty. “Culture in the republic,” José Antonio Portuondo observed, “developed under the specter of our political frustration.”111 The novels of Carlos Loveira, José Antonio Ramos, Miguel de Carrión, Graziela Garbalosa, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Ofelia Rodríguez-Acosta, and Jesús Castellanos, among others, and the poetry of Regino Boti, Agustín Acosta, José Manuel Poveda, Mariano Brull, Regino Pedroso, and Nicolás Guillén, among others, mounted a withering assault on the character of public and private life in the republic.112 “It is important to emphasize,” writer José Antonio Grillo Longoria wrote in regard to the conventions of Cuban fiction in the republic, “that writers and artists have an important role in the task of rescuing the past, to awaken interest in the history of their country, and to preserve for eternity and with gratitude the memory of the martyrs and heroes of the past.”113
Conrado Massaguer, “Martyrs of the patria.” A veteran of the war for independence (mambí) paying homage to the grave of deceased veterans, commenting: “So many dead so that so many can live in debauchery.” From Carteles 7 (December 7, 1924).
The principal periodical literature of the early years of the republic, most famously Cuba Contemporanea, as well as the weekly magazines Bohemia, Carteles, Gráfico, and Social, were relentless in their criticism of the political culture of the republic, denouncing the corruption, malfeasance, and graft that had undermined public confidence in government. Caricaturist Conrado Massaguer, a member of the Grupo Minorista and founder/co-founder of the magazines Gráfico, Carteles, and Social, provided graphic indictment of the malaise of the republic, to what he later described as his “disillusionment with [the politics] of early republican years.”114
Conrado Massaguer, “My God! The Dead always end up so all alone!” Depicting the “death” of cubanismo, patriotism, nationalism, altruism, civic pride, heroism, idealism, abnegation, and sacrifice. From Social 8 (November 1923).
The world of the plastic arts conveyed the angst of frustrated nationality in memorable artistic achievements. The vanguard painters of the 1920s and 1930s immersed themselves in the representation of the nation, very much about the politics of patria, a people very much immersed in the history in their own time. The landscapes of Domingo Ravenet, Lorenzo Romero Arciaga, Arístides Fernández, Amelia Peláez, Antonio Gattorno, and Víctor Manuel celebrated scenes of rural communities, the fauna and flora of the countryside, and the idealization of the guajiro, evoked as highly sentimental renderings of the meaning of Cuban. Themes of the liberation of the nation informed the art of Carlos Enríquez and Jorge Arche. Graciella Pogolotti maintained that the works of Víctor Manuel, Amelia Peláez, and Carlos Enríquez, among others, “were divested of their decorative function and dedicated to constructing the image of an incipient nation.”115 Artists contributed powerfully to consciousness of Cuban by way of “their symbolization of national identity,” suggested art historian Juan Martínez: “Emphasis on national independence, rejection of old colonial practices, affirmation of new and modern ways, and attention to neglected sectors of Cuban society such as the peasant and the Afrocuban were expressed in various ways in the art of the vanguardia painters. . . . These painters’ consistent interest in expressing the national ethos and their choices of land, creole tradition, and the common people as symbols of cubanidad. . . and the acclamation of the patria was given symbolic form in [their] art.”116
Cubans acquired much historical knowledge as a matter of inherited wisdom, knowledge so fully assimilated in the collective being of a people as to assume fully the form of intuition as a matter of feeling and sentiment. Knowledge of the past developed principally as narratives possessed of didactic function and instrumental purpose, presumptively actionable and loaded with political purport: an agenda, in short, to make good on legitimate aspirations thwarted, which meant too that vast numbers of Cubans carried within them a readiness to remedy.
The meaning of the past gained popular currency principally as a morality tale, learned at home and taught at school, given sensory embodiment in aesthetic forms and assigned political meaning as a discourse of dissent. A brooding sense of something gone wrong insinuated itself into the character of republican politics. The nineteenth-century project of nation developed early on into a usable politics, a framework in which to articulate opposition, as a set of ideals immediately recognizable and inherently revolutionary: more than simply challenging political power, the project of nation challenged the premise of the republic. To be a revolutionary as an agent of history was an honorable calling, a purpose amply validated as a matter of a past pending, an ever-present and long-standing summons to complete a history begun in the nineteenth century. “Everyone wanted to confer on himself the title of revolutionary,” affirms the narrator in Enrique Serpa’s novel La trampa (1956).117 In those interior places where deeper truths dwelled, Cubans in the early republic understood the presumptive condition of independence as fiction and the claim to national sovereignty as false. The past pointed the way forward. It was necessary for Cubans to reclaim “the sense of our history” (el sentido de nuestra historia), historian Enrique Gay-Calbó insisted in 1934, and thereupon “resume our march toward the future.”118
The power of the past to serve as a source of inspiration and means of fulfillment increased in direct proportion to the disillusionment with the republic, for contained in the promise of its moral lay the presumption of redemption. A heroic past consecrated as a matter of an unfinished history could not but implicate Cubans in the premise of their history as a purpose to pursue. The past developed into a guarded site, a sanctuary of sorts, where the values that had conferred meaning on Cuban could be protected and preserved—in reserve—as a fount for future generations to draw upon as a matter of perspective and purpose. The salvation of the nation depended on the defense of the past, Cubans sensed—that is, the past as a circumstance about which Cubans could still do something. The history—in its diverse forms and its multiple functions—was what remained of the people that Cubans had wished to become, with the conviction that fulfillment of the ideal of nationality could be realized only by the enactment of the past, that is, a commitment to the purpose that had informed the meaning of nationality. “We cast a retrospective glance to those bright days of our past,” essayist Pedro Sotolongo wrote in 1911, “not solely to pause to contemplate the heroic achievements, but also to seek to understand the disinterested motives that motivated those generous hearts and the purpose that impelled them with such fervor to prolonged war in pursuit of a plausible ideal. . . . We are obliged to study our history conscientiously to demonstrate who we once were, to prove our capacity for the heroic [and] good faith, jealous of our own self-worth and worthy of our times and deserving of the respect of the world at large.”119
Cubans dwelled in the past as a place of moral clarity, a past structured as a point of departure from which aspirations of national fulfillment necessarily obtained orientation. They were deeply sentimental about their past, and because sentimentality implied feelings and emotions, the past was something about which Cubans were passionate. Therein lay the source of the Cuban angst: living with a wrong that needed to be righted, as both a state of mind and a condition of the heart: the prospects for the future well-being of the nation depended upon the fulfillment of the past. Historian Roberto Pérez de Acevedo insisted that the study of the past engaged Cubans in an endeavor of consequence, for “it was by way of history that a nation is prepared for the future.”120 Much of the theater of playwright José Antonio Ramos was informed by a deepening awareness of the past as means of national redemption. “The historian today has resting upon his shoulders perhaps the most important and most decisive mission in the task of consolidation and contributing to a definitive national coherence,” Ramos insisted in 1917. “Of primary necessity, as the first step, must be a History of Cuba, a history . . . that is emotional, suggestive, and philosophical, that is something more than a recounting of deeds, to serve the new generations, today disoriented and without the slightest idea of the road traveled [el camino recorrido].” Concluded Ramos: “Our History is beautiful, a powerful greatness upon which rests all our rights to liberty.”121 Thirty years later, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring summoned the historian to national service. “We know that all people need to understand their true history,” Roig insisted, “for within that truth exists the reason of their existence and the rich source of future rectification and orientation.” Cuban historians were morally obligated to apply “the lessons and orientations applicable to our patria to correct past errors, find new avenues of inquiry, and apply better political and administrative methods in the search for the consolidation and ennoblement of the Republic,” and, further, “to prevent the use of concepts and forms that act to demoralize [Cuban] nationality.” History was obliged to serve as the means to develop “respect of Cuban sovereignty, among its citizens and as well foreigners and their governments.”122
The Cuban historian was charged with the role of conscience, not simply with chronicling the past, insisted Roig de Leuchsenring, “but with the duty vital to the Cuban people: to expunge the sense of inferiority from which the Cuban people suffer, a cancer that has plunged them into a condition of a devastating defeatism,” and, further, “to prevail over defeatism, to destroy the inferiority complex that our people suffer, and to revive and instill in our people faith and confidence in their own abilities, those virtues possessed by the four great leaders of our war of liberation of 1895: Martí, Maceo, Gómez, and García. This patriotic task is incumbent upon us in a special way, precisely in our capacity as historians, because in the distortions of the true history of our last war of liberation are to be found the sources of our republican defeatism.”123
Historians had a special responsibility to foster civic pride and patriotic virtue, Roig de Leuchsenring affirmed in 1956. “The first thing that all children should know,” he insisted, “is the history of their country, in all grades. . . . All teachers of the History of Cuba and all authors of history texts used in the classroom should be Cuban by birth [as a way to combat] the inferiority complex from which so many Cubans presently suffer.”124
Historians of the republic studied the past with a purpose, an endeavor that was itself a project to preserve and pass on the ideals that had served to substantiate the Cuban claim to sovereign nationhood, something akin to a commitment to remembrance as an act of resistance. This was historical knowledge as it always had been: informed with instrumental purport and possessed of political utility. Historians dedicated themselves to the idea of the past as a purpose to pursue, task to complete, and hopes to realize. “Few countries can wear the crown of thorns of martyrdom in defense of exalted and pure ideals of liberty and independence like Cuba,” insisted historian Elio Leiva in 1953. “Among us, in effect, the idea of the patria emerged upon unspeakable pain, upon enormous sacrifice of life and treasure, upon extraordinary heroism, upon a sadness of such profound dimensions that it is impossible to conceive that it can be contained within the human spirit without shattering the oppressed souls in small pieces. The act of recounting this history would tire even the most intrepid historian.”125 Historian Juan Leiseca explained the purpose of his textbook, Historia de Cuba (1925): “I wrote it inspired with the sole purpose of offering Cuban children one more means by which to enrich their minds and spirit. . . . I wish to put in [their] hands a weapon for struggle [un arma para la lucha], but not a weapon only to advance historical awareness, but one that, reaching deeply into the hearts of the children, invigorates their capacity to admire the greatness of the patria and arouses in them the desire toward emulation and the awareness of the purest nationalism.” Leiseca appealed directly to the classroom teacher to insist that “we can have a strong and free patria only when Martí is considered as Apostle and redeemer in every corner of the nation,” adding: “The teacher should be above everything else a patriot who ardently loves his country; who sees in his students the citizens of tomorrow engaged in the national life; and who especially believes that when he teaches history, he engages in an eminently nationalist task.”126 Elio Leiva and Edilberto Marbán dedicated their co-authored Historia de Cuba (1944) to the dissemination of knowledge of “a long, tenacious, and painful struggle courageously mounted by men and women endowed with an elevated concept of patriotic duty that their times imposed upon them and knew how to bequeath to us lessons that should serve always as the norms of our civic duty. To remember the virtues of that generation who sacrificed itself to offer to us the legacy of a better nation is the task given to the Historia de Cuba.”127 Historian Fernando Portuondo del Prado expressed the hope that his Historia de Cuba (1953) “would contribute to the development among young Cubans today of an understanding of the deeds of previous generations of Cubans and to the feeling of solidarity with a common past.”128 Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez was categorical:
We must teach our children to admire everything that is worthy of admiration in our history: the indomitable valor displayed during our epic struggles for independence; the perseverance of sacrifice in pursuit of liberty that engaged us during the second half of the nineteenth century; the heroism of our wars; of the greatest of the soul that revealed the beauty of women who served as an inexhaustible source of tenderness and love of Cuban mothers, always disposed to the sacrifice by husbands and sons for the patria. We must make our students understand the rich patrimony to which they are heir, and by way of love of the past they will also love the present and the future.129
It was necessary to celebrate the Grito de Yara (1868) and the Grito de Baire (1895). The future well-being of Cuba, historian Herminio Portell Vilá insisted, depended on collective faith in the promise of the past. “The first duty of every Cuban who truly wishes to rescue Cuba from the ills of today,” he wrote in 1949, “is to believe in the epic history of Cuba and in the heroes, martyrs, and patriots who created Cuba.”130
The proposition of duty to sacrifice as attribute of Cuban had established itself as a historical truth. The generation of liberation, insisted mambí colonel Matías Duque in his text Nuestra patria (Lectura para niños) (1925), was obligated to teach children “the way of duty, the path of sacrifice,” adding: “The children of today, taught by us as examples, will love Cuba the way the mambises loved Cuba, and if necessary they too will defend it the way of the soldiers of Céspedes, Agramonte, Máximo Gómez, Maceo, Martí, and so many others who offered to the Patria the sacrifice of their treasure and lives in order to realize the ideal of liberty, decorum, and honor.”131 Sociologist Ciro Espinos assigned particular importance to the ideal of sacrifice in the formation of personality among adolescents:
The integral ideal of cubanía—central to the formative period of adolescence—originates from the patriotic past. Because many Cubans heroically sacrificed their lives to obtain liberty for their contemporaries and for later generations; because the greatest Cubans of the past, the most intelligent, the bravest, Cubans of wealth and social standing, immolated themselves as martyrs in the redemption of the enslaved patria; because many Cubans of modest backgrounds, workers, peasants, artisans, young and old, all of the most humble social origins, also immolated themselves anonymously with unparalleled heroism on the altar of redemptive ideals of the patria,. . . later generations [now] possess and enjoy a free patria.132
This was the past conceived as legacy bequeathed to children in the form of collective trust. Children were conducted into domains of nationality, implicated in those dispositions around which self-awareness as Cuban was fashioned. “Look at sea breeze as it gently caresses the star of my flag, your flag, our flag,” exults the narrative voice in Luis Ricardo Alonso’s novel El palacio y la furia (1976). “The blue and white, the triangle of red blood, the ideal and the reality. What made us cry as schoolchildren when we listened to the national anthem: ‘To die for the patria is to live.’”133
In classrooms across the island, from primary school through university, historical knowledge was intended to forge consciousness of Cuban. In Enseñanza de la historia (1940), pedagogue Pedro García Valdés emphasized the importance of history “to the formation of national consciousness and national character.” To be Cuban implied a disposition to discharge duty derived from a historically determined value system. “The failure to prepare our youth to commit to the fulfillment of the national past,” García Valdés warned, “is to leave our grandchildren without patria and leave our children without love. It is to extinguish the patriotic flame.” And to the point: “It is necessary to nationalize our youth [by way of the sacred legacy of the past], for a people who lack national ideals and aspire only to base materialism are a people who proceed to lose the liberties that others have obtained for them.” Historical education was designed to develop a sense of shared memory, to develop within children the desire “to feel, think, and love in Cuban [sentir, pensar y querer en cubano].”134 Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez was lucid in the purpose he assigned to historical knowledge: “The history that forms and perfects the love of patria. . . is not only political history that deals with heroes, wars, and revolutions . . . but a far more profound and comprehensive history of who we are and how we have become who we are.”135
Emphasis was placed on the celebration of the life of José Martí as the exemplary Cuban, with attention given to the lives and deeds of the mambises as models of behavior, including, and especially to deduce duty to sacrifice for the patria as the ethic of nationality and obligation that corresponded to Cubans by virtue of being Cuban: a people “over whom,” observed María del Carmen Boza, “the image of Martí hung as a burden of example.”136 The teaching of history encouraged “appreciation of the sacrifices of the founders of the nation to secure liberty and progress”; to “promote knowledge of the personality of José Martí, exemplary patriot that all Cubans should imitate for his sublime virtues”; to “develop patriotism and sense of duty”; to “learn proper Cuban conduct according to the principles of Martí [principios martianos]”; and to “identify the attributes the child should have in order to follow the example of the Apostle [Martí].”137
The teaching of history in the primary grades, the manual La enseñanza de la historia de Cuba (1951) stipulated, was to emphasize “love of the Patria, its national symbols, the national holidays, and the achievements of notable Cubans.” The 1930 manual for primary-school teachers of history—La enseñanza de la historia en la escuela primaria—emphasized the need “to develop interest and affection for history, to facilitate its study, and to strengthen the sentiment of nationality [fortalecer el sentimiento de la nacionalidad].” Particular attention was given to teaching history through the biographies of the “great men of the nation, for by this method the student will be formed in behalf of national solidarity in support of noble and valuable ideals”138—what history teacher Carlos Valdés Codina insisted in 1905 was the need “to provide children with the models of those great men who made the patria.”139
Biography served as model tales for Cubans, who were exhorted to live their lives in discharge of the obligations of nationality. “The historic figures who bequeathed to us this beloved patria,” columnist Isabel Carrasco wrote in 1925, “emerge from the pages of History immortalized by the affection of all Cubans, and should serve to stimulate and inspire by their example, uniting everyone under the beneficent shadow of the flag of beautiful colors, sustained by one ideal and one purpose: to see the patria great, beautiful, and always free.”140 The virtue of Cuban was discerned in the lives—and deaths—of mambises: celebration of heroic individuals who embodied devotion to the nation and the ideal of nationality. Mambises endured as examples through which to make history anew. “We must continually remember the lives of our dead,” enjoined historian Néstor Carbonell y Rivero, “to make altars of their tombs [as] spiritual bridges between today and yesterday. . . . We must always remember our heroes and our martyrs. They constitute the life of the nation in what represents the most pure and the most noble. They are, in sum, the glory of who we were, the truth of who we are, and the faith of what we can become. . . . There is still much history to make in our nation: we must bring together in a continuum those who died for the nation with those who live for it.”141
Biography assumed the form explicitly of a genre of didactic purpose. At least as important, biography evoked a history told as a narrative of human agents, shaping the course of events and pointing the way for others to follow. “The life of Antonio Maceo,” insisted biographer Luis Rolando Cabrera, “is a lesson, an example which should be studied by all Cubans as source of exemplary inspiration through which to fulfill our civic duty. . . . Maceo was the sum of all virtues, a worthy example of valor and integrity.”142 The life and death of Guillermo Moncada, pronounced biographer José Mesa Vidal, was an example “to glorify for all eternity the need to sacrifice for the greater glory of the patria.”143 In his prologue to the 1928 biography of Ignacio Agramonte, Francisco de Arredondo summoned “good Cubans” (los buenos cubanos) to “follow the glorious examples set in 1868,” adding: “Today, as we seek to purify the Government and Cuban Society, as we seek to escape definitively from the social and political corruption to which the colonial system accustomed us, there is no better example for Cuban youth than the life of Ignacio Agramonte.”144 Matías Duque completed a biography of his mambí brother Antonio, he wrote, because it was “necessary for youth to appreciate those magnificent examples of virtue so that they be imitated and to understand that there is nothing greater in life than service in behalf of these earthly virtues.”145 “The central idea that has inspired the writing of this book,” explained Benigno Vázquez Rodríguez in his preface to Precursores y fundadores (1958), “was to offer to the generations of Cuban youth of the present and the future the beautiful example to be derived from these lives.”146
The study of the past assumed multiple institutional forms. The Academia de la Historia, founded in 1910, served as the principal center of historical scholarship and included Fernando Ortiz, Enrique José Varona, Emeterio Santovenia, and Enrique Collazo, among others. The founding of the Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Históricos e Internacionales in 1940 provided the forum in which the principal historiographical developments were registered. In collaboration with the Office of the City Historian of Havana, the Sociedad Cubana organized annual National Historical Congresses. In 1945, at the urging of the Second National Congress of History, the Cuban Congress enacted legislation decreeing the official name of the 1895–98 conflict to be “Spanish-Cuban-American War.” The scholarship of a cohort of historians, most born within several years of each other, shaped the dominant thematic and interpretative perspectives of the historiography in the early republic and contributed decisively to the collective self-understanding of the nation: Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez (1880–1970), Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (1889–1964), Emeterio Santovenia (1889–1968), Enrique Gay-Calbó (1889–1977), Jose Luciano Franco (1891–1989), Leopoldo Horrego Estuch (1892–1989), Herminio Portell Vila (1901–92), Elías Entralgo (1903–66), Fernando Portuondo del Prado (1903–75), Hortensia Pichardo (1904–2001), and Julio LeRiverend (1912–98).
Cuban efforts in the nineteenth century failed to produce national sovereignty, but they did result in a rich twentieth-century historical literature, and it was in response to the former that the latter developed. This was a scholarship that served to bear witness to the national angst, historians bearing grievances and seeking redress. Most of all, this was a scholarship filled with a sense of thresholds not crossed. The publication of hundreds of titles of books and articles between the 1920s and the 1950s fixed the dominant purpose of Cuban historiography: to advance Cuban claims to national sovereignty and self-determination. That Cubans addressed the past largely within the conventions of historical scholarship should not obscure the inherent political purport that informed much of the twentieth-century historical literature. There was a purpose in the point of view to which Cuban historiography was dedicated, a literature that strove relentlessly to enter its times. It was the place to work through the grievances of the past, and inevitably grievances developed into a way to remember the past. To engage history offered the possibility of enabling agency: to preserve and perpetuate memory as usable historical knowledge. This was the past as a point of orientation, what the narrator in Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta’s novel En la noche del mundo (1940) contemplates as a means of “proper direction by way of History.”147 Historical knowledge was very much structured around the norms of nationality, by way of assumptions of a destiny due to Cubans by virtue of their past. Purpose was self-evident: to call attention to an unfinished national project and to propound the propriety of the Cuban claim to sovereign nationhood.
But it is also true that this was a history that existed simultaneously outside the canons and conventions of the formal historiography of the republic: principally as historical knowledge that dwelled in realms of the public domain. Its meanings developed analogously to the ways that popular memory remembered the past. A sense of wrong was inscribed into the premise of historical knowledge, always with intimations of frustration from which to draw the inference of a past still pending.
Memory of what was widely understood as an injustice had become intrinsic to the founding narratives of the republic. An unfinished history implied an incomplete nation, a people forged into a community without the means to actualize the purpose that had provided the rationale to nationality. Pretension to agency in the form of sovereign nationhood persisted as an ideal around which to organize—and precisely because it embodied the value system from which nationality had developed, it informed a politics that could not be readily repudiated. This too was the legacy of liberation, passed on as an unrealized ideal to which subsequent generations were obliged to respond as duty of Cuban. “It can be said,” poet Cintio Vitier commented in 1957, “that for us frustration has been transformed into something of a dark duty. He who is not frustrated . . . is a traitor who deserves to be stoned.”148 Poet José Manuel Poveda was moved to brooding introspection during a 1918 visit to the ruins of the sugar mill La Demajagua, the site at which Cubans inaugurated the Ten Years War in 1868. “There may have been differences among them,” Poveda reflected, “but all wanted the same thing, and to obtain it, they sacrificed life and home. They wanted the same thing, and that was their greatness. . . . They dreamed the same dream of heroic liberation and patriotic abnegation.” He concluded: “The national conscience turns in onto itself, and understands that its present is not different from its past, and that today it is obligated to heroism in defense of liberty owing to the heroism of the founders of [Cuban] nationality, and that our responsibility is no less than theirs.”149
Cuban historical narratives acquired discernible structure around the proposition of an interrupted history, mostly as an unrealized purpose from which—indeed, as a result of which—the dashed hopes of a people originated. Cubans entered the twentieth century with a sense of an unfinished history, of a purpose unachieved and a nation unrealized, and most of all with the historic sources of their discontent unremedied. An unfinished past seemed to imply history in progress, awaiting completion, a process to join up with and take part in. To contemplate the past was to confront an unsettled history, to ponder where things went astray, and how, and why, and always to brood about so much sacrifice offered for so little gain. Historical knowledge entered into the mainstream of public life, a living history, present and relevant at every turn. This was a history that could be acted upon, from which to derive a politics and deduce a purpose as a duty to fulfill. It is indeed entirely arguable that the turn-of-the-century generation of historians more than adequately contributed to the intellectual environment with which the Cuban revolution in 1959 was received. “I believe that there was a decisive moment for all of my generation: the triumph of the Revolution in 1959,” reflected historian Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, and he continued:
Its significance was contained in the fact that this event was understood by way of our national history. It is not that the Revolution developed a new interpretation of history, but rather we assimilated the revolutionary processes as a consequence of the historical education we had received by way of the works of Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Fernando Portuondo, Ramiro Guerra, Leopoldo Horrego. . . . That is to say, this was a disposition derived from a culture of history that was at once an incentive and an element basic to the formation of Cuban revolutionaries in the 1950s and 1960s.150
The men and women who enrolled in the ranks of armed resistance during the 1950s were formed principally during the 1930s and 1940s, representatives of the second generation of the republic, coming of age during the ascendancy of a critical national historiography. Nicolás Rodríguez Astiazaraín, a member of the Civic Resistance during the 1950s, later reflected on his own intellectual formation. “We read everything,” he recalled, “although we had a particular interest in the first-person accounts of our history. . . . We were assiduous readers of the serious books like those of Hortensia Pichardo, Fernando Portuondo, Emilio Roig [de Leuchsenring], among others.” He added: “Although patriotic sentiment is not forged solely by way of study, it certainly helped in the development of political ideas and assisted in understanding the continuity of the revolutionary processes that our ancestors inaugurated. At that moment, we understood that the Republic, born in 1902, had nothing to do with the Republic that Martí and other founders [forjadores] of our independence had envisioned.”151
The idea of an interrupted history insinuated itself deeply into national sensibilities and could not but invite the inference of a legacy as a matter of redemptive purpose which all verdaderos cubanos were obliged to fulfill. This was history in the form of burden as inheritance. “He recalled the sad history that he had studied in high school,” the narrator describes Sebastián in Edmundo Desnoes’s novel No hay problema (1961). “History had weighed Cuba down. . . . Cubans could laugh and dance the conga and rumba while a powerful sentiment of frustration simmered below the surface, the frustration of a country without a future.”152
The proposition of thwarted nationhood acted decisively on the political culture of the republic, which meant too that the discourse of political opposition derived purpose as a politics of continuity in pursuit of the nineteenth-century ideal of nation. The past flourished in the political imagination of the early republic: the ideal of the sovereign nation as a highly charged sentiment, at once a frame of reference and a point of view to which Cubans were highly susceptible. Cubans bore the “weight” of the knowledge of a nation unfinished, of a republic compromised at its inception and impaired in its function: a past denied the denouement to which three generations of men and women had dedicated their lives. The ideals that had informed the normative content of nationality assumed the form of legacy to live up to and passed into the dominant political discourses of the republic as purpose to pursue and ideals to realize. The cause of Cuba was deeply embedded in the memory of the ideal to which vast numbers of men and women in the nineteenth century had dedicated their lives—without the desired outcome: memory as a factor of the Cuban condition, observed Cintio Vitier, as “a longing for a familiar heroic yesterday.”153 The future to which they had dedicated their efforts had eluded them, and what remained was the past to contemplate, always as a point from which to begin anew and reclaim their bearings. “It is necessary to learn to appreciate historic deeds,” wrote Julio Antonio Mella in 1926, “not with the fetishism associated with the fatuous worship of the past but for their importance to the future, that is: for today.”154
Cubans lived with a brooding sense of history having gone awry, given very much to pondering the course not taken and the cause not achieved, of what might have been if the ideal of sovereign nation had been realized. The practice of the counterfactual—of what might have been if—developed fully into a mode of historical writing and a moral of political discourse in the early republic. The ideal was the enemy of the real and in no small measure contributed to the political environment in which the republic was divested of moral authority. Past and present remained locked in a relentless dialectical relationship. The nineteenth-century ideal of nation served as the standard with which to take measure of the twentieth-century republic and could not but invite invidious comparison, continually—and of course the republic fared poorly every time. The very act of comparison contained within the purport of its premise the moral basis with which to challenge the existing order of things, and most assuredly with the result—if not the intent—of discrediting the republic.
Memory mattered, and the Cuban preoccupation with history suggested a people clinging to the past as a means of collective continuity. History was something to hold on to, or perhaps more accurately, something that could not be let go of, for this was a past as repository of the value system that had given meaning to Cuban: the way a people sense that they had lost their way and gone astray, that they had not fulfilled the task for which they had come together as a single people, and that it was necessary to attend to their past as if it were still in front of them. Simply put: to persevere with their past. There was purpose to the past, a purpose that shaped the function to which historical narratives were put, something akin to the past as a calling. “The frustration of the central objectives of the war of 1895 as a result of the North American intervention,” Cintio Vitier suggested, “made the generation [of the republic] think that the only way to start up Cuban history again [echar a andar de nuevo la historia cubana]. . . was to reclaim the legacy of Martí.”155
Remembrance of the past acted to structure historical knowledge as a moral narrative around which a politics formed and a purpose developed. The idea of a Cuba irredenta insinuated itself deeply into Cuban political culture: to revive and redeem the promise of sovereign nationhood and thereby fulfill the ideals around which nationality had formed. “The Cubans of the republic,” essayist Julio César Gandarilla wrote in 1913, “the Cubans of honor, have the right to struggle for the sovereignty of Cuba, the way the martyrs of 1868 and 1895 struggled,” adding, “The vow of ‘independence or death’ remains to be fulfilled by all Cubans.” Gandarilla distinguished between “the bad Cubans” (los malos cubanos), whom he characterized as enemies of Cuba, and “the good Cubans” (los buenos cubanos), who were committed to the redemption of the ideal of nation.156 The United States was “a usurper of a victory that was ours,” insisted playwright Pedro José Cohucelo in 1925, “first through the military intervention of the Island and then through the odious Platt Amendment, [and] proclaimed that it was not Cuba which, through the efforts of its sons and blood spilled by its martyrs and heroes, had obtained the independence and sovereignty sought for half a century.” The duty of all Cubans, Cohucelo insisted, was to end “the ‘appendix’ [the Platt Amendment] that demeans our very conscience and humiliates us in the eyes of foreigners who commonly look upon us as slaves in a North American colony that is called Cuba. . . . The Platt Amendment is an affront to Cubans, and we cannot call ourselves free and independent as long as this appendix serves to embarrass and shame us.”157
All through the first half of the twentieth century, political contenders of almost all ideological persuasions defended—some more, some less—the ideal of the sovereign nation, something of an article of faith to which almost all aspirants to power professed devotion and thereupon proselytized as a politics. There was no higher source of moral validation to political purpose in the early republic than the claim of discharge of duty imposed by history: fulfillment of nation transmitted as legacy and received as duty of Cuban (el deber del cubano).
The past formed and informed the purpose with which virtually all political contenders in the early republic aspired to power, thereby rendering history as the basis of a politics of national fulfillment. The cause of unfinished purpose developed as the principal discursive mode of political opposition in the early republic, especially noteworthy for its claim to continuity with the nineteenth-century independentista project. History offered a readily accessible political purpose, widely shared and commonly held reference points with which to summon indignation with the prevailing order of things. Historical narratives as political discourse served to establish the moral framework for oppositional politics of the republic: fulfillment of the independentista project as the alternative to the status quo. The possibility that the past was prophetic must be considered central to the logic with which it held Cubans in its thrall.
That Cubans were deeply invested in the anticipation of their past as a condition of nationality also meant that they were especially susceptible to the moral of its meaning. A politics claiming a mandate from the past, in the name of the unfulfilled nation, developed into a powerful challenge to the legitimacy of the republic. The past entered the realm of politics because politics seemed to offer the only way to redeem the past: Cubans increasingly turned to history to give purpose to their politics. The way to summon Cubans to make history was through history; the way to realize the expectations of a better future was to fulfill the aspirations of the past.
Domains of selfhood and nationhood closed in upon one another, acting upon each other—that is, nation as an ideal to surrender to as frame of reference and source of self-esteem, always as something to live up to and do right by. This was the transcendental nation to which all Cubans were joined as the basis to the claim to being a single people. “The Patria is to be loved above everything else,” exhorted Matías Duque in his 1925 history text for children, Nuestra patria (Lectura para niños):
It guarantees our life and our dignity. It allows us to live respected by foreigners; it confers splendor on the home and in the family; it cares for us and is with us as we move about the world. . . . For a man to be respected by other men he must love the Patria and be disposed always to make sacrifices, whatever sacrifices may be required. . . . Without Patria there is no honor, there is no family, there is no happiness. The Patria is everything and everything should be for the Patria. Nothing can be withheld from the Patria. One has to be generous and noble with it; nothing can be denied to the Patria at any time: not life, not family, not wealth. Everything is from the Patria and everything should be for the Patria. When the Patria asks valor of its sons and daughters, it should be given unconditionally, even if it is necessary to die. When the Patria asks for the destruction of the home, it should be destroyed. When the Patria asks for one’s property, money, and well-being, that too should be given.158
The first republican-born generation came of age during the 1920s, formed within the contradictions of the ideal of the nation and the reality of the republic—a generation that Luis Araquistain characterized as having been “born and nurtured with a new social spirit and a new historical consciousness, restless with a sense of duty and responsibilities toward a nation in danger.”159 The young men and women of the early republic bore witness to an endless spectacle of malfeasance and misgovernment. There seemed to be no limit to the practice of political abuse, no end to revelations of graft, no constraints on the reach of North American power. They mobilized for change, to protest political abuse and denounce graft and corruption. Continual popular disaffection with conditions in the republic was expressed with the organization of the Partido Independiente de Color (1907), the Federación Nacional de Asociaciones Femeninas (1921), the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (1922), the Asociación de Buen Gobierno (1923), the Falange de Acción Cubana (1923), the Protesta de los Trece (1923), the Grupo Minorista (1923), the Movimiento de Veteranos y Patriotas (1923–24), the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (1925), the Partido Comunista de Cuba (1925), the Liga Anti-Imperialista (1925), the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario (1927), and the Liga contra la Enmienda Platt (1928).
A new generation of Cubans discerned a politics in the past, all very much as a matter of principles and program contained within a larger paradigm of continuity with the nineteenth-century independentista project. To remedy the republic implied the need to reclaim the historical project for which Cubans had first organized as a united people in behalf of sovereign nationhood. Raúl Roa reflected on his coming of age during the 1920s and 1930s: “New generations, historically driven to complete the unfulfilled feat of 1895, introduced a new spirit and new expectations into the Cuban people. José Martí was reclaimed for living and for struggle.”160
The generation of the republic revived aspirations of the nineteenth-century liberation process and committed itself to the promise of the past in the form of a leap into the embrace of faith in its history. Cubans looked inward and backward to make themselves in their own image. The model of exemplary conduct was contained in the lives of the mambises of the nineteenth century. “I would like to see the noble youth of today,” Enrique José Varona urged in 1930, “of civic culture, prepared, and committed, confront the problems of today and meet the issues of tomorrow with the same noble heroism with which the glorious youth of 1868 and 1895 met the challenges of their time.”161
Cubans disaffected with the prevailing order of things inserted themselves consciously into the continuity of their history. They found in the past a purpose to fulfill and a program to propound, but most of all a legacy to fulfill. “A noble people with knowledge of their history know how to honor their past,” affirmed Rubén Martínez Villena in the “Exposition” of the Falange de Acción Cubana en 1923.162 He contemplated the commemoration of February 24—the beginning of the 1895 war for independence—with a sense of purpose of a task unfinished. “It is time to have a real patria,” he reflected, “with a firm foundation, strong and coherent. . . . It is time to have a true nation [tener Patria de verdad]. . . . Patria is political independence and an orderly functioning of the State; honorable household and virtuous government; the national treasury filled and a clean civic conscience.”163
The organization of the Junta Cubana de Renovación Nacional in 1923 included many of the most prominent representatives of the public life of the republic, including anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and historians Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, and Fernando Figueredo y Socarrás. The 1923 Manifesto of the Junta Cubana de Renovación Nacional proclaimed its purpose: “To consolidate the Republic and complete the task begun by the revolution of liberation.” In a wide-ranging denunciation of the conditions in the republic, the Junta warned that “the nation is plunging headlong into disaster” and insisted that “the people demand the public life of the republic be worthy of the dignity and honor of the Cubans who made its existence possible.”164
Abuses in the republic often recalled abuses in the colony. The 1925 National Assembly of the Movimiento de Veteranos y Patriotas denounced the Liberal, Conservative, and Popular parties’ support of Gerardo Machado, insisting that Cuba in 1925 was “in the same situation as the year 1895, when three political parties then—the Constitutional Union, the Reformist, and the Autonomist—acted contrary to the interests of Cuban people who in 1895 understood the necessity to do away with the three existing parties in order to have their legitimate interests respected.”165
Political opposition to the government of Gerardo Machado during the late 1920s and early 1930s was increasingly articulated within a paradigm of continuity with the nineteenth-century liberation project. Indeed, almost all opposition groups dedicated themselves to the fulfillment of the larger historical project of nation. The Directorio Estudiantil Universitario demanded “the complete independence of the Cuban people”: “That members of the Constituent Assembly in 1901 preferred a mortgaged republic to no republic at all does not prevent us from rebelling against the denial of our sovereignty and against every act upon which that denial is based.”166 The young men and women of the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario proclaimed themselves to be “the worthy sons and daughters of that handful of heroes, that small group of titans, who scaled the summit of immortality and glory in the legendary [battles of] Peralejo, Las Guásimas, [and] Mal Tiempo.” The Directorio affirmed its commitment to the “consolidation of our institutions, bequeathed as legacy of those who committed themselves to the struggle in pursuit of an ideal and a free nation [una patria libre],” and vowed: “This revolution is more formidable than those of 1868 and 1895.” Alluding to the need to redeem “la Patria irredenta,” the Directorio invoked “the glorious pages of Cuban history and the sublime examples of abnegation, sacrifice, patriotism, and virtue of that history, from which emerges the sentiment of nationality, which is the supreme synthesis of all the elements that influenced the formation of the nation.” It was now the turn of a new generation to join “the struggle for an ideal and for a patria libre.”167 The Directorio, Justo Carrillo recorded in his memoirs, propounded far-reaching objectives, “aspiring to the discharge of a historic role through and for the strengthening of consciousness of nationality in order to achieve economic and political independence.”168
Cubans of almost all political persuasions drew a common moral from the past. “The cry of six generations of Cubans,” exhorted Julio Antonio Mella—a founder of the Cuban Communist Party—in 1928, “from the time of [Joaquín] Agüero through our times, has been ‘Cuba Libre.’ What does it mean? A great desire to secure liberty: yesterday from the Spanish regime; today from machadista despotism and American imperialism.” It was necessary for Cubans to renew their commitment to the nineteenth-century ideals of egalitarian politics, social justice, and political democracy, Mella insisted, to act together to honor “the symbols of Yara [1868], Baraguá [1878] and Baire [1895],” and he declared that “all of Cuba is today a Baire.”169
The organization of the ABC Revolutionary Society in 1931 developed as a cellular resistance group to undertake armed struggle, including sabotage, bombings, and assassination, as methods of a larger campaign against the government of Gerardo Machado. Its corporatist structure notwithstanding, the ABC, like the opposition of the left, consciously acted as a historical actor in pursuit of national fulfillment. The ABC Manifesto-Program of 1932 demanded economic reform as an outgrowth of “the liberation struggles that had a principal economic objective: to achieve political independence as a means to pursue the material development of the nation. This was the purpose for which the [1868] war against the Metropolis was launched.” The ABC celebrated “the generation of 95,” which “through its liberation efforts had fulfilled its glorious historical mission.” The task of liberation had passed to a new generation. “Martí had predicted that after independence,” the ABC affirmed, “it would become necessary to wage a new war for liberty. This is that new war!”170 Historian Francisco Ichaso, a founding member of the ABC and author of the ABC Manifesto-Program, reflected on the revolutionary struggles of the early 1930s and denounced the progovernment Liberal and Conservative parties as having “deserted history,” adding that it was “precisely in that painful moment when the two political parties deserted history that the ABC was founded.” He continued:
As our Manifesto-Program of 1932 affirmed: we came to continue and complete the work of the liberators. Cuba obtained its independence at a cost of extraordinary and cruel human and economic sacrifice. The independentistaenterprise had a defining Numantian characteristic [un marcado sello numantino]: Cubans did not hesitate to endure all manner of material sacrifice, determined to free themselves from a metropolis that could not fulfill the desire for liberty, democracy, and progress that was bestirring the island.
The founding of the ABC responded to the logic of legacy, Ichaso insisted, to uphold the ideals that had summoned Cubans to dramatic action in the nineteenth century. “At the time we confronted mentalities similar to [the sentiments in 1878] of the Autonomists,” Ichaso recounted, “the [defeatist] people who assumed that ‘all was lost,’ that ‘nothing could be done to overthrow tyranny,’ and that there was no other remedy than to compromise and sign a new [Pact of] Zanjón [that is, to surrender]. [They charged] that we revolutionaries were idealists and dreamers if not crude troublemakers that no one should take seriously.” Continued Ichaso: “The ABC was the Protest of Baraguá of the new Cuban revolution . . . and it proceeded to situate itself on the straight line of history. For the historic deed consisted in not entering into shady negotiations with the despot, but to remove him and to structure a more just future atop the ruins of the repressive apparatus.”171
The reform movement of the 1920s and early 1930s culminated in 1933 with the overthrow of Gerardo Machado and the subsequent short-lived government of Ramón Grau San Martín. For one hundred days, between September 1933 and January 1934, the Grau government devoted itself to the task of transforming Cuba with exalted purposefulness, a combination of improvised populism and systematic reform. The overthrow of Machado represented an act of agency, popular indignation channeled into a deed of popular will. Certainly, this was how the fall of Machado in August 1933 was celebrated: a repressive government unable to meet the needs of the Cuban people removed in response to popular revulsion. “For the first time since the war of independence,” exulted Jorge Mañach, himself a founding member of the ABC, “the people of Cuba experienced during those August days the emotion of control, the feeling that they were the masters of their own destiny.”172
Under the injunction of “Cuba for Cuba,” the Grau government proclaimed its commitment to the ideal of nation based on the “lines of modern democracy [and] upon the pure principle of national sovereignty” and abrogated—if only symbolically—the Platt Amendment as an act of national sovereignty and self-determination.173 Cuban aspirations for sovereign nation had been realized, proclaimed the new government: “Sixty-five years after the separatist revolution of 1868, the first fundamental declaration of the Provisional Government . . . [is] to proclaim and sustain above all other interests and ideas the absolute and immaculate Independence of the Patria, the preservation of which all Cubans today, like Cubans of the past, are disposed to sacrifice their lives and treasure, which mean nothing when such glorious ideals are at stake.” The new Provisional Government affirmed its commitment to “absolute independence and national sovereignty and the defense of the principle of self-determination in the resolution of its internal conflicts.”174 The Cuban people, proclaimed the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario, “aspire to obtain our political independence, the task that the mambises of 1895 left uncompleted.” The Directorio affirmed its “complete satisfaction with the achievements of the present historical moment . . . presiding over an independent and sovereign Republic, without ignominious international tutelage, and presiding over the development of the moral forces found in the soul of our nationality.”175
Cuban aspirations to national sovereignty were no more acceptable to the United States in 1933 than they had been in 1898. Washington was implacable in its opposition to Grau. That this was eminently a reformist government—rather than a revolutionary one—mattered less than that it had committed itself to the defense of Cuban interests as the principal purpose of the public policy. The reforms of the Grau government had indeed challenged the premise of the primacy of North American interests in Cuba. “Respect for us is diminishing,” Ambassador Sumner Welles warned on September 25, “and the belief is rising, sedulously fostered by the radicals, that the United States can be flouted with complete impunity.” Three weeks later, an alarmed Welles warned again that the new government was engaged in a “deliberate effort . . . to show its intention of minimizing any form of American influence in Cuba.”176 In the months that followed, the U.S. government withheld diplomatic recognition and coordinated plans of internal subversion in collaboration with local opposition groups and the army under the command of Colonel Fulgencio Batista.
The Grau government appealed for hemispheric support. In December 1933, it presented its case directly to the Seventh International Conference of American States held in Montevideo, convened—as events would have it—to ratify a proposed convention on the “duties and rights of states,” central to which was the proposition that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.” Cuban demands for national sovereignty were presented in the form of a historical narrative by historian Herminio Portell Vilá, a member of the Cuban delegation. Cuba “wishes to be free, independent, and sovereign,” the Cuban delegation pronounced, “and aspires and insists upon the exercise of self-determination.”177 “You know how the Platt Amendment was incorporated into the Constitution of Cuba,” Portell Vilá recounted. “My country had just emerged from a bloody war in which it had expended all its energies and laid waste to all the resources of the nation.” The Platt Amendment, Portell Vilá insisted, was designed as a “substitute for the annexation of Cuba to the United States.” Cubans were warned in 1901 “that the Platt Amendment was a legislative ultimatum: either the Platt Amendment was accepted or Cuba would not be independent.” He concluded: “The Platt Amendment and the Permanent Treaty are iniquities of coercion, for the Cuban people never freely accepted either the Platt Amendment or the Permanent Treaty, for my country was occupied by North American bayonets.”178
Even as the Cuban delegation made the case for the principle of nonintervention in Montevideo, the United States had completed preparations to remove Grau from power. In January 1934, acting with the support of and in behalf of the United States, Colonel Fulgencio Batista ousted Grau from power and thereupon emerged as the new power broker of the republic.
The reformist coalition of 1933 subsequently divided into two principal tendencies. One month after his removal from power, Grau organized a new political party: the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, named after the party of José Martí, committed to the realization of the “authentic” goals of Martí. One year later, Antonio Guiteras, previously the secretary of the interior in the Grau government, organized Joven Cuba. A revolutionary organization, Joven Cuba vowed to realize the promise of nation. “Cuba possesses all the indispensable elements to constitute itself as a nation, but it is still not a Nation,” the program charter of Joven Cuba affirmed, adding: “Cuba remains in a colonial state.”179
Efforts at national sovereignty and self-determination had failed again. Some things did change, to be sure. The Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, although the United States kept control of Cuban territory on which it had established the Guantánamo naval base. The subsequent promulgation of the 1940 constitution was received with enthusiasm and expectation that perhaps the new constitutional order would provide a way to fulfill Cuban aspirations. The election of Ramón Grau San Martín as president in 1944 raised hopes of better things to come. These hopes did not last long.
The events of the 1930s passed into the collective memory as la revolución frustrada. The men and women of the 1920s and 1930s had committed themselves to the fulfillment of the nineteenth-century ideal of nation. The past had informed the purpose to which their politics was put and shaped the program to which their efforts were directed, but to no avail. The mobilizations of the 1920s and early 1930s ended in frustration, and another generation was thwarted. “I confronted the tyranny in my nation in 1933,” reflects Ricardo in the José Antonio Ramos play FU-3001 (1944). “And from the failure of the revolution to this very day, I have lived without a sense of purpose.”180
The reform project of the 1930s had failed, but the purpose of the past persisted: a people awaiting fulfillment. “It is worth remembering,” Pablo de la Torriente wrote from New York in 1936, “now more than ever, that the revolution for which we struggle is exactly the one that fell mortally wounded with the fatal bullet of Dos Ríos” (that is, the death of José Martí).181 The struggle of the 1930s—“to be who we wish to be”—Raúl Roa reflected years later, “had its roots in the process of the previous century.” Roa added: “Our perspective and our attitude were sustained . . . in the enduring example and the unfulfilled ideal of 1868 and 1895, that continues to act as the driving force in shaping our destiny. Each generation has its proper task. The task of our generation was—and continues to be—to transform into a historical reality the revolutionary principles that the generations heir to the liberation legacy [el legado mambí] repudiated and trampled upon.” Cubans were obligated, Roa insisted, to pursue the nineteenth-century project of nation as a matter of “historic duty,” and “the fate of that revolution [of independence] is our fate,” bearing as much relevance to Cubans in the 1930s as it had to Cubans in the 1890s. “It is in being a revolution of this type,” Roa insisted, “that it derives its nationalist tenor and anti-imperialist character. . . . From this condition, to revive the pursuit of the thwarted objectives of the revolution of 1895 and [from which] it obtains its battle cry: ‘Cuba for Cubans’ . . . it seeks respect for our sovereignty and the independent development of Cuban life.”182
