Downloaded from the Humanities Digital Library http://www.humanities-digital-library.org Open Access books made available by the School of Advanced Study, University of London ***** Publication details: Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba: essays in memory of Alistair Hennessy Edited by Antoni Kapcia https://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/ rethinking-past-present-cuba DOI: 10.14296/2105.9781908857996 ***** This edition published in 2021 by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-908857-99-6 (PDF edition) This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba Essays in memory of Alistair Hennessy edited by Antoni Kapcia University of London Press Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2021 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/. This book is also available online at http://humanities-digital-library.org. 978-1-908857-99-6 (PDF) 978-1-908857-41-5 (paperback) 978-1-908857-42-2 (e-pub) 978-1-908857-43-9 (Kindle) Institute of Latin American Studies School of Advanced Study University of London Senate House London WC1E 7HU Telephone: 020 7862 8844 Email: [email protected] Web: http://ilas.sas.ac.uk Contents Abbreviations v Notes on contributors vii Preface. In memory of Alistair Hennessy xiii Antoni Kapcia 1. Spanish republicanism and the colonial empire: Alistair Hennessey and Spain’s democratic revolution 1 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara 2. Rethinking pathways to the Cuban past 15 Louis A. Pérez, Jr. 3. The origins of Cuban socialism 29 Fernando Martínez Heredia 4. Persuading parliament: Rafael María de Labra, Spanish colonial policy and the abolitionist debate (July 1871) 45 Catherine Davies 5. Ethnic whitening processes and the politics of race, labour and national identity in colonial Cuba: a case study of Irish immigrants, 1818–45 63 Margaret Brehony 6. From Hispanic essays to modern reporting: the evolution of Cuban journalism seen through the figure of Justo de Lara 87 Jordi Garrell 7. The changing shape of Cuban cinema: a report and a reflection 107 Michael Chanan 8. A mixed economy of labour in a changing Cuba 123 Steve Ludlam 9. What’s in a name? Emigrant Cubans since 1959 and the curious evolution of discourse 149 Antoni Kapcia viii RETHINKING PAST AND PRESENT IN CUBA 10. Decentering cubanidad. Commodification, cosmopolitanism and diasporic engagement shaping the Cuban migration to post-1989 Western Europe 167 Catherine Krull and Jean Stubbs Abbreviations AHPC Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cienfuegos ANC GSC Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Gobierno Superior Civil ANC ML Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Misceláneos de Libros ANC RCJF Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Real Consulado y Junta de Fomento ANC ROC Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Real Ordenes y Cédulas CANF Cuban American National Foundation CEAP Centro de Estudios de Alternativas Políticas CEDEM Centro de Estudios Demográficos CEMI Centro de Estudios de Migraciones Internacional CNOC Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba COMECON Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (led by the Soviet Union) CPB Comisión de Población Blanca CRF Cuba Research Forum CTC Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (Central Union of Cuban Workers) CTC-R Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba Revolucionaria FEU Federación Estudiantil Universitaria FON Frente Obrero Nacional (National Workers’ Front) FONU Frente Obrero Nacional Unido FRG Federal Republic of Germany GDP gross domestic product GDR German Democratic Republic ICAIC Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos IOM International Organization for Migration LAC Latin America and the Caribbean MINREX Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba (Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs) MTSS Ministerio del Trabajo y Seguridad Social (Ministry of Labour and Social Security) NA RO National Archives, Foreign Office PC (up to 1944) Partido Comunista de Cuba PCC (from 1965) Partido Comunista de Cuba x RETHINKING PAST AND PRESENT IN CUBA PSP Popular Socialist Party UNEAC Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba UNJC Unión Nacional de Juristas de Cuba (National Lawyers Union of Cuba) UR Unión Revolucionaria Notes on contributors Editor Antoni Kapcia is professor of Latin American history and director of the Centre for Research on Cuba/Cuba Research Forum at the University of Nottingham. After gaining his BA and PhD at University College London, he taught and researched at Wolverhampton (Polytechnic, and then University) until 2003, when he took up his post at Nottingham. At this time he also served a period as president of the Society for Latin American Studies and was a visiting professor at Havana University. He has researched widely on modern and contemporary Cuban cultural, intellectual and political history, his publications including Cuba: Island of Dreams (2003); Havana: a Cultural History (2008); Cuba in Revolution: a History Since the Fifties (2008); Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building and the Book (2012, in collaboration with Par Kumaraswami) and Leadership in the Cuban Revolution: the Unseen Story (2014). He is currently completing a collaborative project on the role of local history in Granma province, Cuba, and writing a history of Cuba since 1959 alongside a historical dictionary of Cuba. Contributors Margaret Brehony is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Geography, National University of Ireland, Galway, where she has taught courses in Latin American and Irish studies. She is co-editor of Irish Migration Studies in Latin America. Her research interests in the field include European migration to Cuba, gender and race, comparative colonialisms and digital humanities, and she has published on Irish migration to Cuba in the 19th century. Margaret is the curator of an exhibition ‘The Irish in Latin America’, commissioned in 2016 by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which is currently touring in Latin America and Ireland. She has been liaison officer with the Irish Refugee Council on advocacy and active citizenship training with refugee- led organisations, and on research and policy development. Margaret is also a member of the Gort Justice for Undocumented campaign. xii RETHINKING PAST AND PRESENT IN CUBA Michael Chanan, whose involvement with Latin American cinema dates from the 1970s, is a seasoned documentarist, writer and professor of film and video at the University of Roehampton, London. Author of a history of Cuban cinema (second edition, 2004) and numerous articles on different aspects of Latin American film and video, he has filmed in most of the continent’s countries since the early 1980s. Michael has also written about early cinema, the history of recording, the social history of music and the politics of documentary, while most of his films since the turn of the millennium have either been academically funded, or else no-budget videos for the web and educational use. These include documentaries about Detroit, the electrification of the Soviet Union, political memory in Argentina and Chile, the City of London as the Vatican of financial capitalism and, most recently, money and debt. See mchanan.com and his blog, putneydebater.com. Catherine Davies is professor of Hispanic and Latin American studies at the University of Nottingham, and director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study (University of London), specialising in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish and Spanish American literature and cultural history. Her research includes studies of the literary and cultural production of Spanish, Cuban and Spanish American women authors, as well as editions of literary texts. She has also published on abolitionism in Cuba and Spain, with recent research focusing on gender studies in the context of the independence wars in 19th-century Spanish America. Catherine’s publications include A Place in the Sun? Women’s Writing in Twentieth-century Cuba (1997); an edition of the Cuban feminist-abolitionist novel Sab [1841] by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (2001); ‘Gender studies’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (ed. Efraín Kristal, 2005); South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (with Claire Brewster and Hilary Owen, 2006). She was principal investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council research projects ‘Gendering Latin American Independence: 1790−1830’ (2001−6) and ‘Women and Independence in Latin America: A New Multimedia Community-Contributed and Community-Driven Online Resource’ (2012). See www.genderlatam.org.uk. Jordi Garrell teaches and researches in the University of Nottingham and other institutions. After graduating in sociology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2000, he launched and edited his own magazine for five years, during which time he developed skills in all aspects of publishing, from copywriting to management, but also developed a passion for creative writing, such that he completed a three-year course in the discipline at the Ateneu