The Blood of Our Heroes: Race, Memory, and Iconography in Cuba, 1902-1962
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The Blood of Our Heroes: Race, Memory, and Iconography in Cuba, 1902-1962 Robert C. Nathan A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Louis A. Pérez, Jr. John Chasteen Laurent Dubois W. Fitzhugh Brundage Cynthia Radding © 2012 Robert C. Nathan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT ROBERT C. NATHAN: The Blood of Our Heroes: Race, Memory, and Iconography in Cuba, 1902-1962 (Under the direction of Louis A. Pérez, Jr.) This dissertation examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. “The Blood of Our Heroes” argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality. Because of the authority Cubans assigned to these narratives and symbols, however, memory became a decisive weapon for oppositional movements. Throughout the republic, Cubans reframed the independence wars to undercut the legitimacy of republican governments and assert a claim to power, a process of historical revision that reached its apogee in the successful revolutionary movement of the late 1950s. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Introduction: Ends to Beginnings ........................................................................................ 1 I. Myths, Monuments, and Meanings: Cuban Civil Religion in the Early Republic .............................................................................................. 23 II. Black and Bronze: Memory, Race, and the Antonio Maceo Monument ............ 68 III. “Yes, We Make Patriots”: Schools and the Socialization of National Narratives ............................................................................................... 122 IV. A People That Has Never Been Free: The New Politics of the Past ................... 163 V. The Heroic Race: Blackness in the New Cuban Past .......................................... 191 VI. Epilogue: Making History in the Cuban Revolution ........................................... 229 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 267 iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: "The Cossacks in the Field." ...................................................................... 53 Figure 2: Céspedes and Martí to Estrada Palma: "What have you done with the Republic?" .................................................................................................. 55 Figure 3: Céspedes freeing his slave, La Discusión, 1908 ......................................... 61 Figure 4: The PIC as cannibals, 9 June 1912 .............................................................. 91 Figure 5: “The colored race: Cuban before black,” 10 June 1912 ............................. 92 Figure 6: Landing of Antonio Maceo at Duaba ..................................................... 136 Figure 7: Castro backed by Maceo, Martí, and Mella .............................................. 254 Figure 8: Mella: 90 Years of Struggle ..................................................................... 255 Figure 9: October 10 1868-1959 ............................................................................... 256 Figure 10: Maceo carried in the Granma .................................................................. 262 iv Introduction: Ends to Beginnings On the first of January, 1959, Fidel Castro and his surging army massed on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba. The rebels had learned that the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista had fled the island, and sensed that, after nearly seven years of dictatorship and three years of armed insurrection, victory would soon be at hand. As a rapidly assembled military government in Havana pressed for negotiations to end the ongoing rebellion, Castro took to the airwaves of his movement’s radio station to address the people of Santiago de Cuba. The military rulers, he declared, “want to prohibit the entrance into Santiago to those who have liberated the patria.” As his 26 of July Movement assembled around the historic city, Castro issued a profound and powerful rejoinder to his opponents. “The history of 1895 will not be repeated!” he proclaimed. “This time, the mambises will enter Santiago de Cuba!”1 Castro entered Santiago, and his forces quickly converged on Havana. The revolution, it seemed, was triumphant. Castro’s words announcing the revolution’s triumph, however, spoke to a sense of a deeper victory that stretched back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, as the army of the 26 of July Movement spread across the island to seize the reins of government, Fidel Castro looked back more than six decades to invoke the Cuban mambíses, the army that fought Cuba’s thirty year struggle for independence from Spain. Why, in this moment of profound 1 “Fragmentos de la alocución a Santiago de Cuba, leída por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro,” in Ricardo Martínez Victores, ed., 7RR: la historia de Radio Rebelde (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978), 477. importance for the future of Cuban nationhood, did Castro look to the past as a rallying cry for victory? This dissertation examines the ways that Cubans used the memory of their independence struggle as the foundation of their new nationhood and their national self- image. The wars for independence became a common narrative that established a shared Cuban identity during the unsteady transition from colony to republic, and from republic to revolution. Instead of only tracing the consolidation of stories and symbols in the service of national unity, this dissertation will reveal how the authority of historical memory in Cuba served to sustain dramatic challenges to the status quo and unsettle the political and social structures of the Cuban republic. “The Blood of Our Heroes” argues that the memory of the nineteenth century independence struggle emerged as the lingua franca of political debate during the Cuban republic (1902-1959), and served as the ideological foundation of the revolutionary movement that seized power in 1959. While Castro’s claim to embodying the mambí army of the anti-colonial effort is striking, his mobilization of that memory was the product of a long process of contestation and controversy over the meanings and purposes of the Cuban past. Immediately following the withdrawal of Spanish colonial authority on the island, Cubans set about affirming the victory of their long independence movement and elevating its heroes and stories into the iconography and narratives that would support a stable nationhood and enforce social cohesion. From the onset of national independence, the ability to define and lay claim to the legacy of the independence movement served as indispensable source of legitimacy for Cuban governments and leaders, providing a crucial connection to a shared and glorious past. 2 However, as Castro’s invocation of the mambises at Santiago suggests, the memory of that glorious past was more complex and fraught than official commemorations would suggest. As quickly as some Cubans celebrated the heroic victories of Cuban insurgents as evidence of national fitness and unity, others challenged the claim that the ideals that motivated the Liberation Army had been achieved in the new republic. As narratives and icons could be deployed as symbols of the nationalist movement’s victory, so too might they be reconfigured to undercut those claims and promote alternate visions of the nation. As its title indicates, “The Blood of Our Heroes” speaks to the power of shared glory and sacrifice in the Cuban imagination, as well as to the symbolic functions of race within those narratives. Cubans hoping to affirm national unity routinely recalled the blood spilled in the service of independence, while celebrating the mixture of the blood of black and white soldiers on the nation’s battlefields. I argue that race and memory were deeply entangled in Cuban life. My analysis centers on three questions: How did Cubans use narratives of the independence wars to create and sustain national unity and social cohesion? How did the memory of the alliance of black and white soldiers in those wars contribute to norms of inclusion and political participation for Cubans of color? And finally, how did critics of the republican conditions create alternative narratives of the nation’s history to challenge the dominant nationalist framework and assert claims to power? When Castro announced that his forces would not be kept from entering Santiago, just over sixty years had passed since the last time a Cuban insurgent army had descended upon that city in the summer of 1898. Then as well, the rebels sensed the approach of victory, the culmination of a thirty year struggle for national independence that began when a white slaveholder named Carlos Manuel de Céspedes inaugurated