Carmen E. Lamas
In this chapter I argue for the importance of the Latin American archive for Latina/o studies.1 I do so for two reasons. First, a concerted entry into this archive furnishes new information concerning the Latina/o experience. This is so because many Latina/os, particularly but not exclusively in the nineteenth century, lived their lives across national boundaries, not infrequently traveling from their home countries to the United States and back again. Because they often wrote in Spanish (as opposed to English), their works are published primarily, though not exclusively, in their home countries or in countries where the Spanish language is the primary linguistic medium. As such their lives, both written and lived, are to be recovered from the Latin American archive and would otherwise be unknown in the absence of this resource. Second, the types of materials we find in the nineteenth-century Latin American archive demand that we ask new questions of the Latina/o experience, and they command new answers to such questions. Specifically, to study the Latin American archive in the course of recovering Latina/o voices and lives of the nineteenth century calls one to question the very nature of Latina/o identity and what this implies, in turn, for not only Latina/o studies but American and Latin American studies as well.
This dual phenomenon—the capacity for the Latin American archive to lead to the recovery of new Latina/o voices and lives and to illustrate new dimensions of, indeed a new mode of understanding, Latina/o identity—is well illustrated in four works by the Cuban intellectual Raimundo Cabrera (1852–1923). Cabrera was prolific: He was a novelist, poet, and autobiographer; he composed zarzuelas; and he was an accomplished journalist. The works here selected, while not representative of his entire oeuvre, nevertheless serve to encapsulate his own complex relationship to the United States. I demonstrate how the Philadelphia publication and later English translation of Cabrera’s well-known work Cuba y sus jueces: rectificaciones oportunas (1887) (trans. Cuba and the Cubans, 1896) opens the historical record to two long-time U.S. residents, the brothers Pedro José and Eusebio Guiteras, whose work has to date been studied only from a Latin American perspective.2 Analyzing this text further allows for the recovery of the translator of the work, Laura Guiteras, who was previously unknown in the study of Latina/o literature and history.
Second, I examine Cabrera’s serialized fictive war memoir Episodios de la guerra. Mi vida en la manigua (1897–98), arguing that with it Cabrera, who lived less than two years in the United States, inserted himself into the longstanding Latina/o communities in New York and Florida of the late 1890s.3 In effect, Cabrera transformed himself, a short-term Cuban exile, into a prominent member of Latina/o political and cultural circles through the war memoir genre. Third and finally, I study Cabrera’s Spanish translation of Andrew Carnegie’s very popular Triumphant Democracy or Fifty Years’ March of the Republic (1886), which appeared under the title Los Estados Unidos. Reducción de la obra “Triumphant Democracy” de Mr. Andrew Carnegie; con notas, aplicaciones y comentarios in 1889, arguing that Cabrera’s rendering interpolates not only Cabrera into Carnegie’s text but also the United States into Cuba and, more important, Cuba into the United States.4
These three studies together illustrate the complex manner in which Latina/o identity was formed in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the lives of the persons examined in this chapter, most particularly Cabrera himself but also his translator, Laura Guiteras, and her two uncles, illustrate what I refer to as the Latina/o continuum. Frederick Aldama speaks of a “continuum of literary production” when he refers to how such writers as Gary Soto, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, among others, began writing in the 1960s and 1970s and continue to publish to the present day. He believes that in this extended literary production, these authors are “transgressing period[s] bound by historical dates and offering instead a continuum of Latino literary production.”5
I propose a different deployment of the term in that I speak of a Latina/o continuum that is constituted and comes about simultaneously in and beyond space and time, suggesting that figures like Cabrera represent a sort of identity that is not entirely Latin American (in this case Cuban) and not entirely U.S. American. Nor is it merely transnational, which is ultimately still tied to the geographic/spatial; rather, it is a sort of identity that simultaneously occupies multiple spatialities while inhabiting and crossing diverse temporal moments. It had, to be sure, a significant hand in shaping Latinidad in the nineteenth century and down to the present day.
When Raimundo Cabrera stepped on U.S. soil in 1896 his arrival was preceded by the publication in the United States of an extended Spanish-language edition (1891) and an English translation (1896) of his best-known book, Cuba y sus jueces. Both works were published in Philadelphia by the Levytype Company, a company referred to in the November 1898 issue of The Printer and Bookmaker as “the official organ, in Spanish, of the Cuban Junta in New York.”6 The work in question offered a historical overview and sociological analysis of Cuba and its people, customs, and history. A response to the pro-Spanish pamphlet published in Madrid, Cuba y su gente (Apuntes para la historia) (1887), by the Spaniard Francisco Moreno, Cabrera wrote the work in order to counter negative depictions of Cubans as lazy, lacking culture, and having a proclivity toward criminality.7 Cuba y sus jueces had been published first in Havana in 1887, and in that year alone appeared in four editions, along with four additional print-runs in the next decade. In what follows I will examine the two U.S. editions, illustrating the ways in which they each were modified for their U.S. audiences and how these modifications—and the identity of the translator—serve to make evident a Latina/o community in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia (and beyond) about which virtually nothing was known before engagement with these sources.8
By inquiring as to the identity of the work’s translator, Laura Guiteras, we can begin to trace the intellectual exchanges occurring between Latina/os in the United States in the mid- to late nineteenth century. While the voices and lives of individuals like Laura Guiteras have been largely lost to history, works by such individuals as Cabrera, who also published two diaries of his U.S. travels, help us to reconstruct their lives and those of their communities.
Cabrera had met the Guiteras family on his 1891 visit to Philadelphia, a meeting he documents in his published compilation of letters, which detail his travel experiences from Key West to New York and is titled Cartas a Govín. Impresiones de viaje. Primera serie (1892).9 Cabrera also published a second series of letters titled Cartas a Govín. Sobre la exposición de Chicago. Impresiones de viaje. Segunda serie (1893) detailing not only his experiences at the 1892 Chicago Exposition but also his travels through the Midwest and then in upstate New York.10 These works, a must-read for scholars of nineteenth-century Latina/o literature and history, are filled with rich geographic and cultural details, including short observations about race relations in the United States. Moreover, they allow us to reconstruct the presence of longstanding Latina/o communities he encounters not only in Philadelphia but also in Thomasville, Georgia, where he comes across 300 Cuban cigar workers.
Laura Guiteras was the daughter of Antonio Guiteras; she was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1856. Her family, pro-independence advocates, fled to the United States with the outbreak of the Ten Years War. She first resided in New York City and later married William K. Martin of Philadelphia. She dedicates her translation of Cabrera’s book to her uncle Eusebio Guiteras, and, as it turns out, Laura Guiteras was herself a member of a well-known family in Cuban literary and cultural circles, for she had two intellectually prominent uncles on her father’s side: the aforementioned Eusebio and his brother, Pedro José Guiteras. While these two Cuban intellectuals have been claimed by Cuban studies, their U.S. experiences have gone largely undocumented by Cuban studies scholars, and they have not been recovered for Latina/o studies.11
Eusebio Guiteras was an educator and the author of the very popular multi-volume Spanish-language readers Libros de lectura (1856, 1857, 1858, and 1868). Published in the United States and Cuba, they were used in schools throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century. According to Luisa Campuzano, the first volume had thirteen editions by 1898.12 These books were used not only to teach children who knew Spanish how to read but also to teach Spanish to English speakers in the United States. Eusebio first traveled to the United States in 1848, returning to Matanzas in 1853. He lived in Cuba in the 1860s but permanently returned to the United States in 1869 and lived there until his death in 1893.
Also well known to scholars of Cuba but almost entirely unknown in Latina/o and American studies was her second uncle, Pedro José Guiteras, who lived in the United States from 1853 to 1890. While residing in Rhode Island, he wrote Historia de la conquista de la Havana (1762), published in 1856, as well as the two-volume Historia de la isla de Cuba (1865–66). He revised his two-volume Historia from 1882 to 1883 while residing in Baltimore, and the second editions were finally published in Cuba in 1927 and 1928 by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.13 Pedro José Guiteras died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1890.
Pedro José’s recovered residence in the United States will lead scholars to ponder a fundamental question, one that will open a new area of scholarship: How does an author’s residence in the United States (in this instance for almost forty years) affect his or her work (in this case the writing of Cuban history in and from Rhode Island)? Pedro José lived, wrote, and published books on Cuban history from the U.S. antebellum period to the height of the Civil War and through Reconstruction while Cuba was in the midst of its own struggle for independence from Spain, a struggle that included long debates about Afro-Cuban participation in the movement. During most of his lifetime, universal freedom was not granted for Cuban slaves, but instead the Ley Moret of 1870 established a process of gradual abolition through the patronato system.14 One can only imagine the theoretical and disciplinary implications of the answer to such a question, especially in relation to Pedro José’s own experience with race and race relations in the United States. Recognizing from where texts are written, as Rodrigo Lazo has so elegantly analyzed in his work on Cirilo Villaverde, leads one to question how location and residence affect the work at hand—in this case, not the writing of fiction but that of history itself.15
Laura Guiteras’s 1896 translation of Cabrera’s book is not the first of his works to have been published in the United States. In 1891 a Spanish-language edition of Cuba y sus jueces was published in Philadelphia by the Levytype Company—the publisher that subsequently printed the English translation under the title Cuba and the Cubans. And this 1891 Spanish-language edition was edited by none other than Laura’s uncle Eusebio Guiteras.16 Differing from the multiple previous editions that were published in Havana, this edition (the seventh) contained 107 engravings (including photographs) interspersed throughout the text. It further added an appendix that recorded sometimes extensive information for each engraving. While both Pedro José and Eusebio Guiteras are briefly mentioned in earlier editions of Cuba y sus jueces, in the Philadelphia edition their photographs appear prominently, in the body of the work, and brief biographical entries appear in the appendix: Cabrera refers to Eusebio on page 88 of the Philadelphia edition, this in a list of “retóricos, profesores y gramáticos,” and he includes his picture on page 86 of the same edition, marked as illustration No. 37, noting the following in the appendix:
No. 37.—Eusebio Guiteras.—Born in Matanzas on March 5, 1823: he was educated at the school Carraguao. He collaborated until 1865 in the most notable publications of his epoch. He published a leveled Spanish grammar text whose success is demonstrated by the multiple editions published in Latin America. His travel account about his trip through Europe, Asia and Africa is interesting, as well as his book A Winter in New York. Author of texts on religion and other well-received books. He currently resides in Philadelphia.17
In this brief entry Eusebio is presented as a cosmopolitan author whose travel and texts span the globe. Meanwhile, the 1896 English translation features the intervention of Cabrera’s Latina translator, Laura Guiteras, for it is her historical interpolation that contextualizes Eusebio Guiteras’s life and works in a U.S. Latina/o context.
First, in the opening pages of Cuba and the Cubans we find the following dedication: “To / the memory of her beloved uncle / Eusebio Guiteras / this translation is dedicated / by his niece / Laura Guiteras.”18 By choosing to dedicate the translation to her uncle and by identifying herself as his niece, Laura Guiteras not only converts Eusebio into a historical marker in Cuban culture, this due to his prominence as the individual to whom the work is dedicated, but she does so for herself as well, by placing her name next to his; significantly, she does so in English.
Second, instead of offering merely the six sentences cited from the 1891 Philadelphia edition, and in place of the brief asides in that entry that refer to New York and Philadelphia, Laura includes in her 1896 translation a full biographical sketch of her beloved uncle of six-and-a-half pages in length, which appears as the description of engraving No. 37. As above, this sketch includes references to Eusebio’s travels throughout France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Jerusalem, as well as his life and literary and educational activities in Cuba; but it additionally includes a significant historical intervention for American studies because she highlights Eusebio’s intellectual exchanges with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, emphasizing that Eusebio was instrumental in the publication of William H. Hurlbert’s now much-cited article on Latin American poetry, “The Poetry of Spanish America,” which appeared in 1849 in the North American Review, edited by Longfellow.19
While Hulbert’s article was an important intervention for Latin American studies, because it presented Latin American authors to a U.S. readership, revisiting Eusebio’s friendship with Longfellow and deciphering his influence on the publication of the piece through a detailed reading of their correspondence would help us to better understand such an important figure for American studies as Longfellow from the context of his intellectual exchanges with such individuals as Eusebio Guiteras. This time, however, through a Latina/o studies perspective.20 Also of interest to American studies, and in the same vein, is the reference to Eusebio’s correspondence with William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, George Ticknor, Hubert H. Bancroft, and John Greenleaf Whittier (333).
Laura then comments on Eusebio’s popular Spanish readers, citing the financial success of the books and noting that “many editions have been issued by Appleton & Co. of New York; the largest in 1886, counting upwards of 18,000 volumes. This is an unprecedented success in the Island of Cuba” (335). She then catalogs his published and unpublished works that were written in the United States, including his novels, a retranslation of a Spanish rendering of the Bible, and a reader for the study of the English language (336–37). She closes the biographical sketch by highlighting the fact that Eusebio Guiteras was a member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and of the American Catholic Historical Society (337).
The recovery of Eusebio Guiteras for Latina/o and American studies is particularly significant not only because it is facilitated by the textual intervention of a Latina but also because it directs the historian to archival resources that have not been accessed by Latina/o studies scholars to date; after she places Eusebio and his works and life squarely in the United States, in English, we find that No. 37 contains a footnote which states that the biographical sketch was originally published in The Records of the American Catholic Society of Philadelphia in 1894 (330 n1). Here, then, we discover not only that Laura Guiteras was not merely a translator of Cabrera who married a Philadelphian and lived in that city but also that she was a member of a larger Latina/o community that existed in her day in Philadelphia, evidence of which may be found in church archives. Indeed, Laura was active in the Catholic Church in the 1870s to 1890s, and a thorough review of this archive would allow scholars to reconstruct the lives of the Latina/o communities of which Laura and her family were a part.
It is only by way of accessing the Latin American archive, where Cabrera’s Cuba y sus jueces is first published (in Spanish), and by following the literary thread to the English translation of the work, that we gain new insight into another aspect of the Latina/o experience of the nineteenth century. For, while Latin American scholars have ignored the U.S. dimensions of these figures—indeed, they have shown no interest in the English translation of Cuba y sus jueces—and while Latina/o studies scholars have not taken an interest in these individuals, who wrote in Spanish, a study of their lives at the intersection of Cuba and the United States opens new avenues of research into nineteenth-century Latinidad.
Shortly after arriving in New York, Cabrera started and edited the newspaper Cuba y América, which he launched on April 1, 1897, and which ran in the United States until September 1898, when Cabrera returned to Cuba and continued production from there. Cuba y América contained the serialized war memoir Episodios de la guerra. Mi vida en la manigua, which was subsequently published in book form in Philadelphia and in Mexico, both in 1898.21 Written by Cabrera but published under the pseudonym Ricardo Buenamar (which was an anagram of Cabrera’s first and last names), this memoir has drawn only brief commentary from contemporary scholars, who note that it must be counted among that author’s collected works.22 However, the memoir is significant. Though it has collected dust in the Latin American archive for close to 120 years, its insertion into Latina/o and American studies brings to the fore, first, the Latina/o readers he reached in that the newspaper in which it appeared documents the goings-on of the Latina/o community of his day. Second, Cabrera deploys the war memoir to inscribe himself and his work into contemporaneous Latina/o cultural productions and political debates. This last dimension of the text is particularly salient for Latina/o studies.
Episodios de la guerra. Mi vida en la manigua details the experiences of one Ricardo Buenamar, the supposed author and protagonist of the serialized war memoir who is said to be a young man recently arrived in New York after fighting in the still raging War of 1895. We are told he was born to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother, and the memoir speaks against the abuses inflicted on Cubans and Spaniards alike as they fight one another, many dying from starvation and illness.
Because Cabrera never experienced an extended war campaign and because he was a longtime Autonomist,23 he needed to legitimize his participation and role in the Cuban émigré community in which armed struggle served as a legitimizing marker; a fictive war memoir was therefore a truly strategic and effective means of influencing the formation of the Cuban republic from afar and without ever having to fight in the war itself.24 Moreover, after renouncing Autonomism, Cabrera faced a serious challenge. Because it was obvious in 1897 that Autonomism was no longer a viable option for the island, Cabrera had to reposition himself politically if he wished to occupy any significant role in the future Cuban republic.25
Viewed in this light, the publishing of Cuba y América and the war memoir in particular must be seen as something more than the production of another publicity piece that pushed for Cuban independence, especially when one takes into account the first installment of the memoir.26 While both the Philadelphia and Mexico City book versions begin the war memoir with the April 15, 1897, installment, Cuba y América has an April 1, 1897, entry, excluded from the published versions and forgotten by history, in which Ricardo Buenamar is said actually to be a longtime Cuban resident of New York who returns to the island, not a Cuban criollo fighting for independence on the battlefield.
In this “erased” version, Buenamar visits Cuba with a Mr. Parker, a tobacco magnate from Georgia, a visit that in turn leads them to meet Máximo Gómez, the general of the Cuban Army. Buenamar never reveals his ethnicity or nationality, so Gómez refers to the two visitors as “the two yankees” (13); and Cabrera establishes the existence of a wide distance between Cubans who have resided for a long time in the United States, on the one hand, and Cubans from the island, on the other, by having Gómez address his Cuban American counterpart and his companion as foreign guests: “North Americans are in all places our best friends, and Cubans long for the occasion to honor them” (12). Buenamar responds by toasting Cuban independence in his “español difícil”—a Spanish whose difficulty the reader would nevertheless question because it does not deter Buenamar from writing his memoir in Spanish. Then, Gómez gives them a writ of passage, noting that help should be offered to the two American citizens, Mr. Parker and Mr. R. Buenamar, so they can return to pending business concerns in the United States.27 Cabrera ends the episode in New York, from where Buenamar recalls that every time he thinks about meeting Gómez, his heart palpitates for the general and for the Cuban Army (14).
This lost/excluded episode is ripe with the theoretical possibilities at once present in Cabrera’s life and the life of his works and their readers, because Raimundo Cabrera/Ricardo Buenamar suddenly embodies multiple subject positions and places at different times and at once. These positions range from North American, Cuban, Americanized-Cuban, long-term exile, short-term exile, pro-independence advocate, and repented ex-Autonomist, to newly arrived immigrant.28 The list proliferates as Cabrera negotiates, through this pseudonym and this genre, the multiple linguistic, social, racial, cultural, and political spaces of the diverse Latina/o communities in the United States.
All three versions, the serialized one in Cuba y América and the books published in Philadelphia and Mexico, include another episode that speaks to such multiple juxtapositions of identity. The entry titled “El inglesito” (The little Englishman) (June 15, 1897) in diminutive form, refers to an individual who supposedly fought in both the Ten Years War and the War of 1895. During the Ten Years War he was known as Henry Reeve, born and educated in Brooklyn. A bookkeeper by trade, he is said to have joined the expedition of General Jordan, where he was given the nickname “El inglesito,” because though he spoke Spanish, he never lost his American accent. According to Cabrera/Buenamar, at one point, he is captured and pretends he is mute, because he knows his Spanish captors will kill him if they hear his accent. He later escapes and commits suicide in order to avoid imprisonment. Yet immediately after this description and in the same installment, Cabrera/Buenamar mentions that he knows an alternative version of Henry Reeve’s war experiences. In this one he is killed in battle and left for dead, but, being only injured, he escapes into the woods, survives, and continues fighting for the Cuban cause.
Then, in the same installment, a second “inglesito,” is mentioned, and he is referred to as the “segundo tomo” of Henry Reeve. This “second volume” is said to have gone by the name Julio Dodle. He is “tenido por norteamericano” (taken for a North American) (72), but Cabrera/Buenamar clarifies that Dodle was actually born in Matanzas, Cuba, of foreign parents and schooled “afuera” or outside the island. He was working in Cuba as a mechanic in a sugar refinery when the War of 1895 began. “Su acento estranjero” (foreign accent) (72) once again signals his foreignness. In this version, Henry Reeve/Julio Dodle travels back to New York in order to gather armaments for the insurrection, only then to return to Cuba to continue fighting (77). Cabrera/Buenamar concludes that he most likely remains fighting in Cuba even up to the time of his recording the latest installment of the memoir. Because that installment explains that the leaders of the revolution thought he was the same person, Henry Reeve/Julio Dodle (13), this character, embedded in the real-life events of the War of 1895 that the fictive war memoir “documents,” is meant to bridge the political, social, racial, and cultural spaces between the United States and Cuba, just as Cabrera/Buenamar is supposed to do the same.
Henry Reeve was a historical person. He was born in Brooklyn in 1850; he did go to Cuba with General Jordan in 1869; he was injured but escaped. He died on the Cuban battlefield in 1876. His life and legend continue to this day because Fidel Castro created the Henry Reeve Brigades in 2005 as a response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster: These Cuban doctors continue their service in Haiti and Pakistan. In addition, Enrique Clio wrote a 2009 novel about Reeve’s exploits on the Cuban battlefield titled The Faraway War. In this juxtaposition between history/fiction, time/space, author/pseudonym, we find best exemplified a Latina/o continuum, the different spaces, both temporal and physical, inhabited by Latina/os at the same time through travel, memory, and the literary circulation of their works that predate and postdate their time in the United States. For with the inglesito, Cabrera/Buenamar subverts fixed notions of time and space folding the past into the present and vice-versa, as well as inhabiting both Cuba and New York at the same time, and at different historical moments, all of them existing simultaneously—but to be found in the Latin American archive.
In 1889 Cabrera published a translation of Carnegie’s well-known and fantastically popular 500-plus-page book Triumphant Democracy or Fifty Years’ March of the Republic. His translation, however, was not straightforward. Instead, he rendered into Spanish only the particular selections of the work that he deemed to be important for Cuba’s economic, political, and social future. In the end, he appropriates Carnegie’s book altogether, radically transforming it into a book about Cuba. This appropriation speaks to Cabrera’s Latina/o intervention in a very specific manner, an intervention made possible only when we enter the Latin American archive.
A glimmer of Cabrera’s purpose in rewriting Carnegie’s book may be found in the preface to his translation, in which he reflects on his own interventions in Carnegie’s text.29 Omitting Carnegie’s own preface and replacing it with his own, he clarifies that the translation is a “reduction” of Carnegie’s book (xviii), emphasizing that because of the bitterness he experienced when thinking of Cuba as he read Carnegie’s text, he separated himself in great part from the author’s plan and purpose. Instead, he decides to choose from the original the most important facts and narratives, in order to compare the progress of the American people with the disgrace experienced by the society in which, Cabrera says, “he nacido, en la que vivo y para la cual escribo” (he was born, lives in and for whom he writes) (xix). He states that his purposeful rewriting of Carnegie’s book serves as work directed not at the Cuban middle or intellectual class but at the Cuban masses that do not have access to relevant texts or information (xix). He then admits to including additions to and commentaries on Carnegie’s text in order to emphasize the need for Cuban self-government via Autonomist rule (xix–xx). The manner in which Cabrera accomplishes his mission affects our reading of his work as a Latina/o text, because in the end, as in the English translation of Cuba y sus jueces and the publication of his fictive war memoir, Cabrera’s translation of Carnegie brings the United States into Cuba and Cuba into the United States.
Cabrera accomplishes this translation/transposition in a systematic and strategic fashion. First, he keeps most of Carnegie’s chapter headings, yet he ignores and does not include any of Carnegie’s closely chosen epigraphs. From Milton to Spenser to Stuart Mill to Shakespeare, entries meant to set the tone for the content of the chapters, Cabrera simply erases them for his readers. Second, while he is relatively true to the original in the first chapter of the translation, Cabrera’s intervention slowly picks up speed, until the Carnegie text eventually is rendered unrecognizable. Starting in the second chapter, Cabrera alters Carnegie’s language. For example, after quoting one of Herbert Spencer’s many Eurocentric assertions about the importance of biology for economic success, Carnegie begins “The American People” with the following two sentences: “Fortunately for the American people they are essentially British. I trust they are evermore to remain truly grateful for this crowning mercy” (23). Cabrera translates, “El pueblo de la Unión americana es esencialmente inglés” (The American Union is essentially British) (19).30
He then commences with his extensive practice of reducing paragraphs and complete pages of Carnegie’s book into one- or two-sentence summaries. In these types of erasures, Cabrera manipulates Carnegie’s message in order to create a certain vision of the United States that he wishes his Cuban readers to accept. Knowing that Carnegie’s racial and national elitism is unpalatable to the audience he is trying to reach, Cabrera’s translation of Carnegie is both ideological and political. As he notes in his preface, he wishes to use Carnegie’s message of economic and social success to educate the average Cuban reader as to the greatness of the Republican project currently taking place in the United States (xix). To do so, he has to edit accordingly.
While the first type of intervention is one of erasure—the exclusion of the epigraphs as well as the reduction of entire paragraphs and pages into mere sentences—a second type of intervention involves the addition of new passages, cut from the whole cloth, to the text. These additions are first found in the form of added footnotes that are inserted in key places, moments in which Cabrera replaces Carnegie’s comparisons between England and the United States with ones between the United States and Cuba. Cabrera’s interventions finally move from erasure and added footnotes to direct additions to the actual body of the work: He begins to speak about Cuba’s situation without signaling when he is translating Carnegie or when he, the translator, is adding text.
By Chapter 3, “Ciudades y aldeas” (“Cities and Small Towns”), it is not clear whether Carnegie is writing about Cuba’s population, history, and present state, or if it is Cabrera who does so. For example, Carnegie speaks to the magnificent increase in urban populations in metropolises such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Jersey City, and New York, but Cabrera summarizes these fifty pages in a few paragraphs and then abruptly interjects, “Estas cifras casi fabulosas nos llevan á pensar en la triste suerte de nuestro país” (43) (These almost fantastic numbers make us think of the sad fortune of our country). The reader first thinks it is Scotland and England to which Carnegie is referring, but Cabrera forecloses on such a logical interpretation when he subsequently notes, “[S]iete ciudades fundó en la Isla de Cuba el renombrado conquistador Diego Velazquez . . .” (43) (Seven cities were established in the island of Cuba by the renown[ed] conquistador Diego Velázquez . . .). With this sentence the reader is left to understand that it cannot possibly have been Carnegie who wrote the words in question; and yet the transition of authorial voice is seamless. The translator transforms himself into the author of the work and brings the reader with him, because the data that follow are not footnoted and the “nos” and “nuestro” (both meaning our) bring the Cuban reader and Cabrera together in the intervention. For in the use of our instead of my/mine the reader is invited to become a translator himself, to accept Cabrera’s interventions as true, and thereby partake of his rewriting of the text, a willful and complicit act between reader and translator.
As the conflation between translator, text, and reader continues, through the use of nos and nuestro, among other narrative strategies, Cabrera graciously invites Carnegie into his, meaning Cabrera’s, book by referring to him in the third person in his narrative. For example, when speaking about the production of tobacco in the United States, Carnegie says derisively, “Chewing is already a thing of the past, and the pipe and cigar are doomed. Before many generations the smoker will be considered as disgusting as the chewer is today” (196). Cabrera replaces Carnegie’s negative assessment with the following neutral comment: “el cultivo del tabaco (cuyo uso Mr. Carnegie cree llamado a desaparecer) produjo en la Union en 1880—17.500,000 pesos” (108) (The cultivation of tobacco (whose use Mr. Cargengie believes will disappear) produced in the Unión in 1880—17,500,000 pesos”). More and more Cabrera becomes not simply the selective interpreter but a trusted tour guide who educates his Cuban reader in a manner that attenuates any negative reading of the United States, creating a community of readers that reads Cuba through a U.S. lens and the United States through a Cuban lens, all while marginalizing Carnegie by way of assuming his authorial identity, making him and his book a prop for Cabrera’s education of the Cuban masses.
It is his contemporary, friend, and fellow Autonomist Francisco Calcagno who best captures what Cabrera does with Carnegie’s work when he admits to the challenges of Cabrera’s translation in his introduction to the 1889 second edition of Los Estados Unidos, noting, “[V]erdaderamente no es este libro ni una traduccion ni una reduccion de su original; es, pudiera decirse, una vasta leccion de alta política, escrita sobre motivos de Andrew Carnegie: la obra de ese autor le sirve de base ántes que de original” (ix) (Truly this book is neither a translation nor a reduction of the original; it could be said that it is a vast lesson on high politics, written with the same motives as Andrew Carnegie’s: The work of this author [Carnegie] serves as a base more than an original). Yet, beyond serving as the foundation or point of departure for Cabrera’s own text, I would argue that Calcagno more accurately explains Cabrera’s interventions when he writes, “el autor al presentarnos un resúmen de la obra de Carnegie, se ha esforzado en hacerla local, la ha cubanizado” (xv) (when the author presents for us a summary of Carnegie’s work, he has made the effort of making it local, he has cubanized it). Then he ends with the following: “al concluir su lectura el corazon se siente satisfecho de la obra, y agradece su esfuerzo al autor y á su intérprete” (xv) (upon finishing the reading of this text, the reader feels satisfied by the work, and appreciates the effort made by the author and his interpreter). As Calcagno’s observations and own conflation between author and translator indicate (whether accidental or purposeful), Cabrera’s narrative takeover of Carnegie’s work exemplifies how a text from the Latin American archive can bring not only the United States into Cuba but Cuba into the United States.
The Spanish publication of Cabrera’s Cuba y sus jueces coupled with the English translation of that work as Cuba and the Cubans, both published in Philadelphia, locates the presence of Latina/os living in the United States who, though forgotten by history, are recovered as readers of his work. Of particular importance is his translator, Laura Guiteras, who published a biographical sketch of her uncle in English in the 1894 edition of The Records of the American Catholic Society of Philadelphia, thereby opening a new archive for Latina/o historiography. Laura’s dedication of her translation to her uncle Eusebio Guiteras also leads us to the recovery of her two uncles, Eusebio and Pedro José Guiteras, for Latina/o history and literature, for while these individuals hold prominent places in Cuban literary and historical studies, the decades-long presence in the United States of these important figures has neither been recognized nor theorized but must be if their works are to be properly contextualized and understood. To include their U.S. experiences in the study of their works will of necessity add another dimension to the interpretation of Pedro José’s histories of Cuba and Eusebio’s prolific print career (in the United States).
Cabrera’s fictionalized war memoir, in turn, speaks to the deployment of a politically marked genre in order to “rewrite” one’s history and inscribe one’s self into a Latina/o community. In doing so, he forms—accesses—a Latina/o continuum, in which the association of identity with a single location or a rigid notion of chronological time is challenged by travel, memory, and the literary circulation of his works.31 Finally, Cabrera’s translation of Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy traces Cabrera’s interpolation of not simply the United States into Cuban history but Cuba into U.S. history.
As this chapter has suggested, works by individuals like Raimundo Cabrera have been primarily studied through a Latin American lens and housed within that archive, often as part of national historiography. When we take into account the complexity and varied nature of Cabrera’s archive, however, we find texts that speak of the multiple locations, both temporal and spatial, that these works inhabit, as well as the U.S. location and temporality of his Latina/o readership. Consequently, the historical and literary archive of such nineteenth-century writers beckons contemporary scholars not simply to recover these texts for Latina/o studies but to challenge the exclusions that continue to occur at the archival level in American and Latin American studies.32 Conceptualizing the Latin American archive within and on the Latina/o continuum, a space that Cabrera’s works so magnificently and fluidly inhabit and reveal, forecloses the effacement of these historically priceless works and invites scholars to compose a new writing of both American and Latin American history, both literary and historical, from the Latina/o continuum, one whose disciplinary and theoretical implications we are just beginning to discover.33 For, the Latin American archive—written in Spanish, published in Cuba, the United States, and elsewhere—not only furnishes the information but also supplies the perspective that allows one to see precisely the degree to which Cubans in the United States in the nineteenth century lived in and between worlds simultaneously.
1 “The Latin American archive” refers to the physical archives held in Latin American countries as well as archives in the United States housing texts that are considered Latin American because of their being in Spanish and/or their authors/publishers being from/in Latin America. It likewise includes the Latin American studies archive, meaning the study of authors and historical events from a mainly nationalist historiography. As such, I am arguing that the task at hand for scholars is to enter these archives, conducting a rereading of texts that is transnational, trans-American, and transatlantic in scope. This type of inquiry invites scholars to ask different questions about and emerging from these archives.
2 Unless otherwise noted, hereafter all translations are mine. Cabrera, Cuba y sus jueces: rectificaciones oportunas, First edition (Havana: Imp. “El Retiro,” 1887); Cabrera, Cuba and the Cubans, trans. Laura Guiteras (Philadelphia: Levytype Company, 1896).
3 While manigua in contemporary usage can refer to the countryside, in nineteenth-century Cuba it meant “to take to the hills” or to join the independence movement. An appropriate translation of this title would be War Episodes: My Life on the Battlefront. This serialized war memoir appeared in Cuba y América (New York, 1897–98), a newspaper started and edited by Cabrera.
4 Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy or Fifty Years’ March of the Republic (New York: Scribners, 1886); Cabrera, Los Estados Unidos. Reducción de la obra “Triumphant Democracy” de Mr. Andrew Carnegie; con notas, aplicaciones y comentarios (Havana: Imp. de Soler Álvarez, 1889).
5 A second reference to a continuum appears in Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s “Comment: A Response to ‘Gay Latino Cultural Citizenship,’” in The Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 198–203. In his response, Gutiérrez references the lesbian continuum coined as such by Adrienne Rich and then speaks of placing Latino male sexuality on that continuum.
6 The Printer and Bookmaker: An Illustrated Magazine Devoted to the Arts Preservative and Kindred Topics 27: 3 (1898): 136.
7 Moreno, Cuba y su gente (Apuntes para la historia) (Madrid: Tip. de Enrique Teodoro, 1887).
8 In 2010 the Latina/o newspaper Al Día published 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). However, it includes only three figures from the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth century: Francisco Miranda (Venezuela), Manuel Torres (Colombia), and Father Félix Varela (Cuba) (12–17).
9 Cabrera, Cartas a Govín. Impresiones de viaje. Primera serie (Havana: Tip. “La Moderna,” 1892).
10 Cabrera, Cartas a Govín. Sobre la exposición de Chicago Impresiones de viaje. Segunda serie (Havana: Tip. de “Los Niños Huérfanos,” 1893) (hereafter cited parenthetically).
11 My article “The Guiteras Brothers and Latina/o Historiography” (in progress) more fully explores the lives and significance of the works of these important figures for Latina/o literary studies and historiography.
12 Campuzano lists J. K. and P. J. Collins as the Philadelphia publishers of the first three Libros de lectura and Matanzas, Cuba (no publisher), for the Libro cuarto de lectura. Luisa Campuzano, “Los Guiteras, Plácido, y Matanzas.” Academia Cubana de Lenguas. September 28, 2009. Conference Presentation. Web. October 15, 2014. http://www.acul.ohc.cu/guiteras_y_placido.pdf. Guiteras and Ramón Meza y Suárez Inclán mention that Appleton & Company in New York had also published the four readers. Laura Guiteras, “Brief Sketch of the Life of Eusebio Guiteras,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 5, no. 2 (Philadelphia: American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1894), 102 (hereafter cited in the text as “Brief Sketch”); Meza y Suárez Inclán, Eusebio Guiteras. Estudio biográfico (Havana: Imp. Avisador Comercial, 1908), 23, n.1.
13 Guiteras, Historia de la conquista de la Habana (1762) (Philadelphia: Parry and MacMillan, 1856); Historia de la isla de Cuba con notas e ilustraciones, 2 vols. (New York: J. R. Lockwood, 1865–66); Historia de la isla de Cuba, Second edition, ed. Fernando Ortiz (Havana: Colección de Libros Cubanos, 1927–28).
14 For a detailed study of this time period, see Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) and Rebecca Scott’s Slave Emancipation in Cuba: Transition to Free Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
15 Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 184–85. Julio Ramos likewise interrogates the issue of location in his article “Migratories” in Re-Reading José Martí. One Hundred Years Later, 1853–1895, ed. Julio Rodríguez-Luis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 53–66.
16 Meza y Suárez Inclán, 27.
17 Cabrera, Cuba y sus jueces: rectificaciones oportunas, Seventh edition (Philadelphia: Levytype Company, 1891), 296.
18 Guiteras, “Brief Sketch” (hereafter cited parenthetically).
19 Eusebio was forced to travel to Cambridge because of his wife’s (Josefa Gener) poor health in 1848.
20 Iván Jaksić in The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) links key Latin American figures to Longfellow and references Eusebio’s visit to Longfellow in June 1849 (103). However, he does not expand on the depth or significance of their intellectual exchange apart from noting that he provided Longfellow with copies of Cuban books.
21 Episodios de la guerra. Mi vida en la manigua. (Relato del coronel Ricardo Buenamar) (Filadelfía: Compañia Levytype, 1898); Episodios de la guerra. Mi vida en la manigua (Mexico: Tip. El Continente Americano, 1898).
22 Diccionario de la literatura cubana. Instituto de Literatura y Linguística de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980), 259; Historia de la literatura cubana: Tomo I. Desde los orígines hasta 1898. Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2002), 376.
23 With the signing of the Pacto del Zanjón—the peace treaty that ended the Ten Years War in 1878 (this war was Cuba’s first of three insurrections against Spanish colonial rule)—Cabrera, along with influential friends, founded the Partido Liberal Autonomista, a party that advocated economic and political autonomy from Spain while simultaneously maintaining Cuba as a Spanish colony. For a detailed study of Autononism in Cuba, see Marta Bizcarrondo and Antonio Elorza, Cuba/España. El dilema autonomista (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001).
24 Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, in her seminal work Identidades imaginadas. Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860–1898) (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1999) speaks to the significance of the war in the context of journalistic writing in the United States and Cuba. While she does not include Cabrera’s text in her study, she highlights the importance of journalistic pieces that depict the struggle of those fighting on the Cuban war front.
25 Dolores Nieves references this phenomenon but does not elaborate on its political and historical significance when she writes: “La primera [novela] que escribe . . . es Mi vida en la manigua. Son las memorias del apócrifo coronel Ricardo Buenamar. Alguien que Raimundo Cabrera hubiera querido ser; pero que no fue” (25) (The first novel he writes . . . is Mi vida en la manigua. They are the memoirs of the apocryphal coronel Ricardo Buenamar. Someone that Raimundo Cabrera would have liked to have been; but was not). Nieves, “Prologue,” Sombras que pasan by Raimundo Cabrera (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984).
26 Stressing the significance of the war memoir genre but not referencing Cabrera’s text, Ferrer writes, “Clearly they [insurgents writing war memoirs] saw their writing as more than representation; they saw it also as weapon and war strategy, as a central part of the very process of insurgency they were seeking to describe. More than simply a set of texts, then, this prose of insurgency was itself a kind of historical event, emerging in a particular context and as part of overlapping and sometimes competing political projects” (115).
27 The issue of passing is relevant because Cabrera is passing for Ricardo Buenamar, meaning that he needs to pass as a pro-independence advocate in order to safely make his way in the Latina/o community he is negotiating in the United States.
28 An explanation of the term Americanized-criollo is found in my article “Americanized-criollos: Latina/o Figures in Late-Nineteenth-Century Cuban Literature,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008), 69–87.
29 Cabrera, Los Estados Unidos. Reducción de la obra “Triumphant Democracy” de Mr. Andrew Carnegie; con notas, aplicaciones y comentarios (Havana: Imp. de Soler Álvarez, 1889) (hereafter cited parenthetically).
30 All translations are mine.
31 I propose one more step for the full theorization of the Latina/o Continuum, one that moves beyond the archival, though emerging from it, and that is best represented by the term philosophical horology. I first coined this term at the International Latina/o Studies Conference in Chicago in 2014. While I am addressing the full exploration of the term in a separate article, the term serves as a jumping-off point for the theorization of the manifold ways (beyond the temporal and spatial) in which the Latina/o experience, as depicted by the intersection of these multiple archives, challenges and in fact subverts the concept of the Western subject as constructed to date. Carmen Lamas, “Raimundo Cabrera’s New York Rendition of the Cuban War Memoir,” Presentation at the Imagining Latina/o Studies, Past, Present and Future. Chicago, July 18, 2014.
32 For a longer list of “Latin American” writers who lived and published in the United States but whose U.S. experience has not been taken into account to date, see my entry “Nineteenth-Century Latina/o Literature” (Oxford University Press Bibliographies, forthcoming). http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/latino-studies .
33 In relation to the silencing of history based on the archive, see Michel-Rolph Truillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of John Nemec in the preparation of this chapter.