Caring for Children

Mambí Totems and Reconcentrado Taboos: Violence and the Unjust Dead in Cuban Literary and Visual Cultures By Eric Morales-Franceschini A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Judith Butler, Co-Chair Professor Trinh Minh-ha, Co-Chair Professor Samera Esmeir Professor Wendy Brown Fall 2015 Mambí Totems and Reconcentrado Taboos: Violence and the Unjust Dead in Cuban Literary and Visual Cultures © 2015 by Eric Morales-Franceschini ABSTRACT Mambí Totems and Reconcentrado Taboos: Violence and the Specter of the Unjust Dead in Cuban Literary and Visual Cultures by Eric Morales-Franceschini Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, Co-Chair Professor Trinh Minh-ha, Co-Chair This study examines the representational strategies that Cubans have employed in order to come to terms with violence in their revolutionary history and the extent to which such strategies have worked in the service of alibi as opposed to critique. Accordingly, the study looks most closely at the discursive and visual portrayals of the mambí, guerrilla soldiers of Cuba’s wars for independence (1868-98) and, not incidentally, icons of Cuban identity and revolutionary ethos. Within or relative to these very portrayals and the same wartime history, however, stands the specter of the reconcentrado, victims to Spain’s “camps of reconcentration” and by far the largest and most tragic casualties of the wars. Drawing on rhetorical and contrapuntal reads of war literature and historiography, political cartoons, monuments, and revolutionary era cinema, I tease out the myths and iconography by which the mambí has come to bespeak racial fraternity, virility, cunning, martyrdom and liberation, whereas, by stark contrast, the reconcentrado bespeaks vulnerability, imperialism, anonymity and atrocity. In this respect, four representational strategies stand out: the reconcentrado as (i) a campesina or señorita damsel in distress under the threat of rape by Spaniards and in need of a machete-endowed savoir; (ii) an emaciated, sickly mass of anonymous children with vacant gazes and no voice, carnal evidence of an atrocity that, presumably, speaks for itself yet clearly cites Holocaust iconography; (iii) interned mambisa or patriot who stoically bears her and her children’s agony; or (iv) as sheer absence, where only the mambises, their heroic machete charges, and the cry “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” are visible and audible. Whichever the case, the actual history of antagonistic and coercive acts within or by the Liberation Army and any collateral responsibility for the unjust dead are disavowed; in lieu of critique, thus, the reconcentrado is rendered an alibi for revolutionary violence, centralized power, and nationalist interpellations in which sacrifice for the Patria constitutes the “sublime.” 1 Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the reconcentrado could signify otherwise. Given her agony, the paternalism with which she was dealt, and her labors against an unjust death, deaths for which patriotic consolations ring hollow, I argue the reconcentrado, as ethical figure and as historical fact, speaks on behalf of non-violence, democratic voice, and the summons to care for life at its most precarious. Such ethical hails have proven all the timelier in a “post-socialist” Cuba where mambí mythology and revolutionary identity have had to wrestle not only with transnational finance capital and consumerist culture but also the specters of (UMAP) labor camp confinados and Special Period balseros. 2 DEDICATION To Dr. Gregory Comnes, who opened worlds to me. i TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................... 1 DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................................ i GRATITUDES ............................................................................................................................................. iii CHAPTER 1. CUBAN COUNTERPOINTS: DON MAMBÍ AND DOÑA RECONCENTRADA .................. 1 1.1. Contrapunteos cubanos—Cuban counterpoints .............................................................................. 1 1.2. Dulce et decoro est—Dying to Live ......................................................................................................... 3 1.3. The Unsacrificeable—A Living Death .................................................................................................... 8 1.4. Contrapuntear ............................................................................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER 2. ¡AL MACHETE!, OR THE MAMBÍ SUBLIME ................................................................... 19 2.1. Mambí: A Genealogy ................................................................................................................................ 19 2.2. ¡Al Machete!—Icon and Fetish .............................................................................................................. 25 2.3. ¡Bendita sea la tea! .................................................................................................................................... 31 2.4. Mambiserías—Citation and Consummation ...................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER 3. MUDOS TESTIGOS: CAN THE RECONCENTRADO SPEAK? .......................................... 43 3.1. Martí-dom—Death and the Sublime .................................................................................................... 43 3.2. “The Butcher”–Tropes & Iconography ............................................................................................... 47 3.3. Bandos—Decrees & Disavowals ........................................................................................................... 52 3.4. Mudos testigos—Mute Witnesses ......................................................................................................... 56 CHAPTER 4. BEARDED CRYPTS: MAMBÍ TOTEMS AND RECONCENTRADO TABOOS .................. 61 4.1. Crisis & Embitterment ............................................................................................................................. 61 4.2. Mambí Totems .......................................................................................................................................... 65 4.3. Specters of the Camp ............................................................................................................................... 72 CHAPTER 5. HISTORY OF AN ALIBI ....................................................................................................... 80 5.1. Death & Disavowal ................................................................................................................................... 80 5.2. Ethicality, Cuban-style ............................................................................................................................ 84 5.3. Contrapuntal Horizons ............................................................................................................................ 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................ 91 ii GRATITUDES I would like to thank the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and Professor Judith Butler for research grants that made possible fieldwork in Havana, Cuba for the summer of 2010. This project could simply not have been written otherwise. Thanks to the Ford Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship (2013-2014) I had sufficient time to reconceptualize my theses and write chapters 1-3. The project is all the more cogent for it. To each of my committee members I owe debts I cannot repay: to Judith Butler, for her generosity and her attention to the finest of argumentative details; Trinh Minh-ha, for her inspirations in visual analysis and storytelling; Wendy Brown, for all that she has taught me about feminist and political critique; and to Samera Esmeir, for her candid ways and her insights as a historian. May I, too, one day be as useful and inspiring to others as you have been to me. And a special thanks to my beloved, Rebecca Ann Matthew, for only you know how unlikely this document (and all that it represents) is. iii CHAPTER 1. CUBAN COUNTERPOINTS: DON MAMBÍ AND DOÑA RECONCENTRADA He who knows how to die always prevails. –José María de Heredia, “Himno del desterrado” (1825) 1.1. Contrapunteos cubanos—Cuban counterpoints Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano (1940) recounts the history of Cuba as a “controversy” between its “two most important personages,” namely Don Tobacco and Doña Sugar. As Ortiz dramatized it, the two are sheer contrast: The one is white, the other dark. Sugar is sweet and odorless; tobacco bitter and aromatic. Always in contrast! Food and poison, waking and drowsing, energy and dream, delight of the flesh and delight of the spirit, sensuality and thought, the satisfaction of an appetite and the contemplation of a moment’s illusion, calories of nourishment and puffs of

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