Ever Faithful

Ever Faithful Ever Faithful Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba David Sartorius Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Tyeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Sartorius, David A. Ever faithful : race, loyalty, and the ends of empire in Spanish Cuba / David Sartorius. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8223- 5579- 3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 8223- 5593- 9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Blacks— Race identity— Cuba—History—19th century. 2. Cuba— Race relations— History—19th century. 3. Spain— Colonies—America— Administration—History—19th century. I. Title. F1789.N3S27 2013 305.80097291—dc23 2013025534 contents Preface • vii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s • xv Introduction A Faithful Account of Colonial Racial Politics • 1 one Belonging to an Empire • 21 Race and Rights two Suspicious Affi nities • 52 Loyal Subjectivity and the Paternalist Public three Th e Will to Freedom • 94 Spanish Allegiances in the Ten Years’ War four Publicizing Loyalty • 128 Race and the Post- Zanjón Public Sphere five “Long Live Spain! Death to Autonomy!” • 158 Liberalism and Slave Emancipation six Th e Price of Integrity • 187 Limited Loyalties in Revolution Conclusion Subject Citizens and the Tragedy of Loyalty • 217 Notes • 227 Bibliography • 271 Index • 305 preface To visit the Palace of the Captain General on Havana’s Plaza de Armas today is to witness the most prominent stone- and mortar monument to the endur- ing history of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. Built in the eighteenth century, the palace has served many purposes: as the home of the captain general, the highest- ranking Spanish offi cial on the island; with Cuban inde pen dence, the home of the U.S. military governor aft er 1899; the home of the Cuban president until 1920; as the city hall, municipal archive, and fi nally a museum.1 Long since national in de pen dence in 1898, Cubans have resisted the infl uence of foreign powers, but the empire that built the palace as its nerve center has be- come, with each successive transition, a less commanding symbol of imperial domination. Cubans have confronted problems that had their origins in slavery— economic de pen den cy and racial inequalities among them. Th e palace itself, though, is now associated with the trea sures of a bygone era. Walking through the palace today, it’s easy to underestimate the heft of an empire that for almost four centuries variously inspired fear, resentment, and aff ection from its subjects.2 Fernando Ortiz, the foremost scholar of Cuba’s African dimension, knew this palace well. It was here that the lawyer and anthropologist learned lasting lessons about the meaning of colonial rule to Cuba’s multiracial population. Ortiz spent his formative years in the Canary Islands before returning to Cuba when he was fourteen, just months before the fi nal war for in de pen dence erupted in February 1895. Within days of his arrival in Havana, his grandfather took him to the palace to catch a glimpse of Arsenio Martínez Campos, the once and future reform- minded captain general known for negotiating with rebels over the course of a three- decade insurgency. Such conciliation pro- voked nothing but contempt in the grandfather, a staunchly conservative sup- porter of Spain. When Martínez Campos entered the room, the grandfather whispered into young Fernando’s ear, “Look well at his face; he is a mulatto from Guanabacoa” (see fi gure P.1).3 Figure P.1 • Arsenio Martínez Campos, ca. 1870. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Never say never, but it would be surprising if Martínez Campos— who was born in Segovia, Spain, and whose well- documented rise through the ranks of a mostly segregated military led him to high offi ce— was either of African descent or from a marginal Havana suburb.4 But this was how the elder Ortiz made sense of the openness toward those who fought for national in de pen- dence, all of whom he assumed to be black or mulatto—“as if being a rebel was proof that one was colored,” his grandson later noted. Th is episode also illustrates the central topic of this book: the relationships imagined between po liti cal allegiance and racial identity. Fernando Ortiz would eventually dismiss the far- fetched theory as an old man’s prejudices, although he still observed that the captain general “looked and he seemed to me somewhat like a light- skinned mulatto.” In the same chamber aft er Cuban in de pen dence, Ortiz recounted this anecdote to Tomás Estrada Palma, the fi rst president of the Cuban Republic (see fi gure P.2). Es- trada Palma dismissed with “unforgettable amiability” the story about his colonial pre de ces sor: “Now all that has fi nished; in Free Cuba we are now all of the same color.”5 And this was the idea that Ortiz reiterated in a speech deliv- ered in that very same space (in what was now the Municipal Palace) in 1943. Figure P.2 • Palace of the Captain General, Havana, ca. 1895. Courtesy of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries. Preface • ix He located the writings of in de pen dence leader José Martí at the heart of a vision of the Cuban nation that transcended the racial divisions created un- der colonial rule. He also acknowledged that many Cubans of color in the nineteenth century found it logical to support a national project that placed being Cuban above blackness or whiteness. Th is was an idea developed in writing by Martí and others and in practice within a diverse liberation army, and it is a national racial ideology that still today stands as one of the most remarked- upon features of the island— one with analogs in many other areas of Latin America. Although this book began as a social history of those ideas, early discoveries in Cuban archives shift ed attention to another intriguing intersection of race and politics: how ordinary Cubans expressed support not for national in de- pen dence but for the Spanish colonial government, how that government un- evenly cultivated and reciprocated that support, and how African- descended Cubans fi gured prominently among its adherents. Here was a story of po liti- cal allegiance running parallel to the narrative of raceless nationalism cham- pioned by Martí, Ortiz, and many other people who wove it into the fabric of Cuban history. Once I started to tug at the thread of argument about pro- colonial loyalty, that fabric began to unravel. Basic understandings about the nature of Spanish imperialism, African slavery, colonial racial hierarchies, liberalism, and national citizenship all begged for revision. How, then, are we to reconcile such divergent forms of po liti cal allegiance, or to account for a phenomenon that confounds the anti- imperialist orienta- tions of so many struggles against racial in e qual ity? Scholars have acknowledged that the Spanish government had cultivated that support and extended limited rights and privileges, but they have generally understood it either as exclusive to Cubans of full Spanish ancestry or as false consciousness: a “ divide and rule” policy, as Ortiz called it, an “im mense social lottery” designed to keep most Cubans of color “distracted and diverted from fundamental grievances.” Ortiz did not dwell on the question of why Cubans of color might have affi rmed colonial rule. In his speech of 1943, he briefl y explained it as an elite aff air. “Doubtless there existed in Cuba that select group of colored people whose personal interests were selfi shly interlocked in the high wheels of the colonial government,” he argued, insisting that most of those individuals “were mulattoes with hidden or unconcealed family connections, favored by privileges; mulattoes of blood tinged with blue by amorous relations that placed ebony patches on the noble Castilian heraldry; and mulattoes of blood turned yellow by the embrace of the dark- colored girl with the man who was the color of his gold coins.”6 Like his grandfather, Ortiz associ- x • Preface ated po liti cal allegiance to one cause or another as being linked to blood, ancestry, and color: the key concepts that gave meaning to the idea of race in Cuba. Certainly, Ortiz was on to something when he linked mixed ancestry to the consolidation of empire. Since the earliest years of the Spanish presence in the Americas, strategic marriages to native elites and the Hispanization of mixed peoples helped make Spanish legal and social norms hegemonic.7 Yet it is no more persuasive to assume that support for Spanish rule was limited to Spanish ancestry than to assume that Arsenio Martínez Campos’s conces- sions to rebels meant that he was a mulatto passing for white. Nor was loyalty to Spain limited to those who derived economic privileges from colonial rule. Indeed, many wealthy Cubans preferred the stability of Spanish rule to the uncertainties of in de pen dence, but so did many other Cubans, and for a wide variety of reasons. Neither economic opportunity nor Spanish descent fully explains pop u lar support for a colonial government that survived mainland Spanish American in de pen dence by many de cades. Th is book argues that alongside per sis tent associations of pro- colonial sen- timent with Cuba’s white population lay a conception of race and loyalty that allowed Cubans of African descent— slave and free— to be included in colonial politics as faithful, if unequal, subjects.

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