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116 Alexander Von Humboldt the Most Important Feature of This Publication for an English-Language Reader 116 book reviews Alexander von Humboldt Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition, introduced by Vera Kutzinski & Ottmar Ette. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. xxvi + 519 pp. (Cloth US$65.00) The most important feature of this publication for an English-language reader- ship is its completeness. (French, Spanish, or German readers have had it better since the nineteenth century.) The editors and their staffs have restored Hum- boldt’s text in the “exact order of the French original” of 1826. Their aim was to provide the first unabridged edition of the two-volume French original in a readable English version, sticking very close to that original. By including the section against slavery, they have set a standard for the twenty-first century. Humboldt didn’t have “Imperial Eyes.” Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, Anglophone readers had to content themselves with the “falsified” version of John S. Thrasher (2001). Using the second Spanish translation (Bustamante 1829), he erased the section against slavery, though the Markus Wiener/Ian Randle edition of 2001 restores it from the German text (see my 2004 review, NWIG 78:131–134). The “new English Humboldt” begins with an excellent introduction by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette entitled “Inventories and Inventions: Alexander von Humboldt’s Cuban Landscapes,” a “Note on the Text,” and Humboldt’s “Reasoned Analysis of the Map of the Island of Cuba” accompanied by his first (1820) map of the island of Cuba. (Compare the figure and position of the Bay of Pigs [Ensenada de Cochinos] and the port of Cienfuegos with his 1826 map [pp. 198–199].) Following the main text, a nearly 100-page section entitled “Annotations” constitutes an outstanding analysis. This section is intended to give readers “a sense of the extensive global network that Humboldt created and carefully nurtured during his lifetime … by emphasizing relevant connections between the historical personalities that populated his essay’s pages” (p. 471). Next come a very interesting essay entitled “Alexander von Humboldt’s Library,” a useful list of Humboldt’s maps, a short (arguably too short) “Chronology,” an “Editorial Note” (which discusses the French edition, translations, and the present edition), a subject index, and finally a “toponym index.” I would sug- gest that readers begin with the “Editorial Note,” where the editors rightly comment: “From today’s perspective, it is astonishing that an early nineteenth- century text, to which scholars in the Spanish-, French- and German-speaking parts of the world have long attributed great significance and influence, has not been available in a complete and reliable English translation until now” (p. 465). © michael zeuske, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-08801022 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:21:47PM via free access book reviews 117 Some critical observations may be useful. First, the introduction includes some perspectives about the island that do not reflect the full importance of Cuba (for history, for the American space, and for Humboldt). And the annota- tions contain errors about Francisco de Arango’s position, about slavery, slave trade, and slaves, about persons concerned with these issues such as Nicolás Calvo (who died on December 15 or 16, 1800, and could therefore not have accompanied Humboldt during his first stay in Cuba, which began on Decem- ber 19) and Esteban Montejo (see Zeuske 1999), and about the 1810–30 wars of independence in the Spanish continental colonies (especially in Venezuela [1811–21]) and the role of Simón Bolívar (see Zeuske 2012). Humboldt myths are persistent and strong. And the perspectives about Humboldt are often misled by a supposition that his political behavior was “democratic”—see the mention of his “unshakable democratic convictions” (p. vii), or the jump from 1790 (the aristocratic and constitutional phase of French Revolution, when France was still a monarchy) to Humboldt’s positive behavior in the revolution in March 1848 (when he honored the dead of the uprising). We do not really know much about Humboldt’s political positions; my understanding is that he was first of all a revolutionary of writing, scientific research, and culture, and a liberal in all the positive connotations of this concept at the end of the eighteenth century and with all the problems of liberalism in the nineteenth century. And yes, Humboldt was an enemy of slavery (and the slave trade) as well as of colonialism. This is true. But there is a “postcolonial problem”—the agency of the enslaved. In relation to Cuba this means taking into account the slaves and their voices, and the ways the slave trade and slavery should be abolished and the slaves emancipated (through themselves, through the state, or through owners). None of the historical and philosophical European writers of the nineteenth century placed the island in as much of a central position of their work as Humboldt. I think we owe this to Cuba’s central position in what now is called “Second Slavery” (Tomich 1988). During his travels in the American continents Humboldt was interested in the island of Cuba as an Atlantic/Caribbean inter- section of the Americas—that means Havana as an imperial port. And—as the enormous material about maps and measurements in this publication shows—as a relatively small and feasible example for the new technologies of geographic position measurements and the use of the results for the produc- tion of a new map, made by Humboldt (the map of Cuba of 1826). Humboldt remained in Cuba only a little over eighty days during his first visit (Decem- ber 19, 1800-March 15, 1801) and some forty days during the second (March 19- April 29, 1804)—a total of four months. The island itself was not a “global island” for him, but Havana was a global intersection port with an interesting social life New West Indian Guide 88 (2014) 85–229 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:21:47PM via free access 118 book reviews (after the solitude of his studies of tropicalité in the marginal regions of today’s Venezuela—the main content of his three-volume Relation historique [Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales du Noveau Continent … 1814–1831]). Most of the per- sons he contacted in Havana, with whom he lived and became friends, were big slaveholders and even merchant bankers and slave traders. (During his first stay he was a guest of the de la Cuesta family, by this time the most important negreros in Cuba.) Humboldt saw el interior (Cuba outside of Havana) only for a few days, the longest stay being some ten days of winter vacations in the most modern ingenio (sugarmill) of Río Blanco (February 1801, southeast of Havana, near Güines), owned by Joaquín [Beltrán] de Santa Cruz y Cárdenas, Count of Mompox [Mopox] and Jaruco. Humboldt did not write a travelogue during his stay in 1800/1801 and the travel diary he did write in 1804, “Isle de Cube, Antilles en général” (which was very important for the text that later became the Politi- cal Essay), does not play any role in today’s Humboldt research (including this edition) because it has still not been transcribed and edited. Humboldt was not very interested in slavery in Cuba in 1801, and only a little bit more in 1804. He became much more interested in a variety of specific slaving issues later on— abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Great Britain and the United States when he lived in Paris and visited London after 1808, the Congress of Vienna with its declaration against slavery after 1815, and abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico after 1820. Humboldt was aware that what really happened after 1825 (the bubble crisis of South American bonds) was that Cuba (with Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the South of the United States) was booming only because of the “Second Slavery” (a modern, industrial mass slavery in the sugar fields, cotton, and coffee plantations) and because of the trafficking of human bodies from Africa to the Americas despite all the abolitionist rhetoric and dis- courses or treaties. This was the real, historical base of Humboldt’s Cuba: the Cubagrande (a concept introduced by Heinrich Friedlaender in 1944), analyzed in the Political Essay on Cuba (which he decided to publish only in 1826), which became the well-known two-volume freestanding edition (the “French origi- nal”), based on his travel diary of 1804. Humboldt’s mention of the status of slaves in independent Colombia and, in relation to this “new” status, the praise of Bolívar deserved a note by the editors. This is quite directly Humboldt’s “postcolonial problem”: “Salutary changes in the status of slaves are imminent. According to the laws governing the newly independent states, slavery will gradually vanish; the republic of Colombia pio- neered gradual emancipation. This measure, at once prudent and humane, can be credited to the selflessness of GENERAL BOLIVAR” (pp. 319–320). This man- umission law (debated from 1819 until 1821, and then proclaimed) consisted in the freedom of the womb (children of slave women were declared “free” but New West Indian Guide 88 (2014) 85–229 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:21:47PM via free access book reviews 119 stayed with their mothers), the fixing of surviving slaves under the control of their masters and owners, the formal renaming of all slaves into manumisos (the formal and legal concept for liberated slaves), a period of apprenticeship for all manumisos (including the “free”-born children of slaves) of 18 years first (which was prolonged different times) and, after all this, a compensation to the masters for each (real) liberated slave.
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