Mapping Colonial Havana: La Condesa De Merlin's Voyage of Return

Mendez Rodenas A 2021 Mapping Colonial Havana: La Condesa de Merlin’s Voyage of Return. Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 6(1): 10, 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/karib.73 RESEARCH ARTICLE Mapping Colonial Havana: La Condesa de Merlin’s Voyage of Return Adriana Mendez Rodenas School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Missouri, US [email protected] In this essay, I return to the Spanish edition of Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (1844), reading it with fresh eyes not only as a poetic homage to the city of Havana, but also as a foundational work in the Cuban literary tradition. Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana is emblematic of nineteenth-century literary and visual cartographies that mapped colonial Havana in a romantic mode. During her two-month stay (June–July, 1840), Merlin’s sentimental return to her native city is tinged with remembrance and renewal of lost family ties. While an accent on affect and the poetry of place haunts every episode in the travelogue, the text unfolds as a literary map of nineteenth-century Havana that sheds light on an early, formative stage in the formation of Cuban national identity. I examine Merlin’s literary mapping of colonial Havana through various spatial tropes: sublime tropics (the topography of the port), the contrast between public and private spaces, and the effect of surveillance in the city. Lastly, I look at how Merlin’s travelogue constructs a social history of colonial Havana at a threshold moment not only in her life story—the eve of her final farewell—but also of the nation. Keywords: Condesa de Merlin; national identity; colonial Havana; Romanticism; travel writing Para Raquel, quien nos acompañó al Château de Dissay “The city of dreams has turned into the city of oblivion. Havana has not evolved: it has merely crumbled.” Pablo Medina, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1996) Introduction The appearance of Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo’s Viaje a la Habana (1844) was greeted in the Havana press of the period as an editorial sensation. Two brief notes in the Faro Industrial de La Habana give notice of the new book and of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s brief biographical sketch.1 Relating the author’s return to her native city after thirty- six years of residence in Paris, Viaje a la Habana (1844), published in Madrid the same year as La Havane, the three- volume French original, created a stir amidst Havana’s intellectual circles. Félix Tanco, one of the most ardent members of Domingo del Monte’s tertulia, lambasted Merlin for writing an imaginative geography of the city, accusing the author of providing a distorted view of colonial Havana, based on, but not limited to, toponymical and other factual errors (Tanco, 4–5, 11). In the charged prose of Refutacion a un folleto intitulado Viage a la Habana, the Matanzas writer struck Merlin down with an epithet that has been applied to her works ever since: the glib accusation that Merlin merely saw Havana “with Parisian eyes.”2 1 [Anonymous], “Viage a la Habana por la Sra. Condesa de Merlin,” Faro Industrial de la Habana, April 10, 12, and 14, 1844. Along with the announcement of its publication and favorable reception in Europe, the anonymous source takes a laissez-faire approach as to its contents: “Tal como la obra es la ofrecemos al público, dejando á cada lector se forme el juicio que le plazca” [We offer the work just as it is, letting each reader form his own judgement]. (April, 10, 1844, Faro Industrial). Although side-stepping the book’s importance, the author goes on to note that it merited a special price: “tres pesetas sencillas; es decir, el precio que la obra tiene de costo en la Peninsula” [three simple pesetas; that is, the same price as sold in Spain]. Original spelling and punctuation. 2 “’La Sra. de Merlin … ha visto á la isla de Cuba con ojos parisienses, y no ha querido comprender que la Habana no es Paris.’” [Madame Merlin has seen the island of Cuba with Parisian eyes, and has not quite understood that Havana is not Paris]. Tanco, Refutación, 55. Veráfilo’s pamphlet appeared in thirteen subsequent installments in the Diario de La Habana (April 22–May 4, 1844). For further discussion, see Méndez Rodenas, Gender and Nationalism, 94–96, 295–296. Art. 10, page 2 of 13 Mendez Rodenas: Mapping Colonial Havana In this essay, I return to Merlin’s travelogue, reading it with fresh eyes not only as a poetic homage to the city of Havana, but also as a foundational work in the Cuban literary tradition. Extracted from the longer French original, the abridged Spanish edition was not only familiar to her criollo peers on the island, but it also recorded the voyage of ini- tiation of a traveler who sought to re-discover the sights and sounds of a city left behind in early adolescence. Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana is emblematic of nineteenth-century literary and visual cartographies that mapped colonial Havana in a romantic mode. During her two-month stay (June–July, 1840), Merlin’s sentimental return to her native city is tinged with remembrance and renewal of lost family ties. While an accent on affect and the poetry of place haunts every episode in the travelogue, the text unfolds as a literary map of nineteenth-century Havana that sheds light on an early, formative stage in the formation of Cuban national identity. In what follows, I examine Merlin’s literary mapping of colonial Havana through various spatial tropes: sublime tropics (the topography of the port), the contrast between public and private spaces, the gendered city, and movement and transit through alamedas and open cityscapes. These various spatial practices culminate in the paseo en quitrín, a typically habanero spatial practice that gives a glimpse of the social history of colonial Havana.3 This last, pivotal scene, in turn, coincides with a threshold moment not only in Merlin’s life story—the eve of her final farewell—but also signals the construction of a discourse on Cubanhood that counterpoints home and departure, belonging (pertenencia) and exile, a discourse that was to find its echo in many pages of contemporary Cuban literature. Madame Merlin’s “lost steps” set the tone for her voyage of return in 1840. The eldest daughter of Joaquín Santa Cruz and Teresa Montalvo, members of the sugar plantocracy, her parents left her behind in Havana to attend pressing criollo interests in Madrid. As third Count of Jaruco, Santa Cruz was aligned with Francisco Arango y Parreño and other members of the creole Enlightenment who negotiated trade concessions with the Spanish Court. Growing up under the tender but overly solicitous care of her maternal great-grandmother, Luisa Herrera y Chacón, reverentially addressed as “Mamita” in her early memoirs, Mercedes grew into a precocious yet sheltered child. In 1797, Joaquín Santa Cruz returned to Cuba as leader of a scientific commission to explore the area around Guantánamo for various moderniz- ing projects, including building a canal and improving roads (Levi Marrero 255). Upon his return to Havana, the stern Count cloistered Mercedes inside the Convent of Santa Clara, but she managed to escape despite the vigilant eyes of the abbess, her paternal great-aunt. In April 1802, when she was twelve years old, she accompanied her father back to Spain, what prompted a childhood memoir, Mes douze premières années [Mis doce primeros años] (1831). In Madrid, Mercedes reunited with her mother and her two siblings. During Joseph Bonaparte’s occupation, in October 1809, she married Antoine Christophe Merlin, a French count serving under Napoleon. Upon the defeat of the French, her flight over the Pyrenees to Paris is narrated in Souvenirs et Mémoires (1836). In Paris, she was the center of a lively salon which gathered leading artistic and literary personalities. After the death of her husband, in 1839, Mercedes returned to Cuba to settle accounts with her brother, Francisco Javier, who had inherited the family fortune as well as the title of Count of Jaruco. After a two-month stay in Cuba, Merlin returned to France and remained at her daughter’s residence, the Château de Dissay, until her death in March, 1852. Merlin’s family romance has broader implications for Cuban literature and culture. Her return journey prefigures the many secular pilgrimages undertaken by Cuban émigrés and exiles, at various historical junctures, and particularly after 1959. Cuban critics of all persuasions have dubbed her “a Havana writer of French expression” due to her impassioned defense of her adopted motherland and its language.4 But she belongs squarely within a long-standing tradition of transnational Cuban literature, a constant from the nineteenth century to our own day. Havana at mid-nineteenth century When she stepped off the boat aptly named the Christophe Colomb, the city that greeted Madame la Comtesse Merlin in June, 1840 was different than the one she had left behind nearly forty years ago. Havana during the 1840s showed traces of the old colonial city, divided by murallas or ramparts into two parts. The colonial core, or intramuros, dotted by convents, churches, and located near the commercial activity of the port, was also the seat of the Spanish Cap- tain Generalcy, the symbolic and spatial heart of the colony. The creole aristocracy, as well as Spanish merchants, the military, and other elites, remained safely ensconced within the city walls. The Alameda de Paula, depicted in Frédéric Mialhe’s Isla de Cuba Pintoresca, pulsated with a vibrant street life near the port (fig.

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