-s EVER FAITHFUL *- Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Duke University Libraries https ://arch i ve. o rg/detai Is/eve rfait hf u I race02sart Ever Faithful Ever Faithful Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba DAVID SARTORIUS Duke University Press Durham and London 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper °o Tyeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sartorius, David A. Ever faithful: race, loyalty, and the ends of empire in Spanish Cuba / David Sartorius. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5579-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5593-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Blacks—Race identity—Cuba—History—19th century. 2. Cuba—Race relations—History—19th century. 3. Spain—Colonies—America— Administration—History—19th century. I. Title. F1789.N3S27 2013 305.80097291—dc23 2013025534 CONTENTS Preface * vii Acknowledgments xv INTRODUCTION A Faithful Account of Colonial Racial Politics 1 ONE Belonging to an Empire 21 Race and Rights TWO Suspicious Affinities 52 Loyal Subjectivity and the Paternalist Public THREE The Will to Freedom 94 Spanish Allegiances in the Ten Years’ War FOUR Publicizing Loyalty 128 Race and the Post-Zanjon Public Sphere FIVE “Long Live Spain! Death to Autonomy!” 158 Liberalism and Slave Emancipation six The Price of Integrity 187 Limited Loyalties in Revolution CONCLUSION Subject Citizens and the Tragedy of Loyalty 217 Notes 227 Bibliography 271 Index 305 PREFACE To visit the Palace of the Captain General on Havana’s Plaza de Armas today is to witness the most prominent stone-and mortar monument to the endur¬ ing history of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. Built in the eighteenth century, the palace has served many purposes: as the home of the captain general, the highest-ranking Spanish official on the island; with Cuban independence, the home of the U.S. military governor after 1899; the home of the Cuban president until 1920; as the city hall, municipal archive, and finally a museum. 1 Long since national independence in 1898, Cubans have resisted the influence of foreign powers, but the empire that built the palace as its nerve center has be¬ come, with each successive transition, a less commanding symbol of imperial domination. Cubans have confronted problems that had their origins in slavery—economic dependency and racial inequalities among them. The palace itself, though, is now associated with the treasures of a bygone era. Walking through the palace today, it’s easy to underestimate the heft of an empire that for almost four centuries variously inspired fear, resentment, and affection from its subjects. 2 Fernando Ortiz, the foremost scholar of Cuba’s African dimension, knew this palace well. It was here that the lawyer and anthropologist learned lasting lessons about the meaning of colonial rule to Cuba’s multiracial population. Ortiz spent his formative years in the Canary Islands before returning to Cuba when he was fourteen, just months before the final war for independence erupted in February 1895. Within days of his arrival in Havana, his grandfather took him to the palace to catch a glimpse of Arsenio Martinez Campos, the once and future reform-minded captain general known for negotiating with rebels over the course of a three-decade insurgency. Such conciliation pro¬ voked nothing but contempt in the grandfather, a staunchly conservative sup¬ porter of Spain. When Martinez Campos entered the room, the grandfather whispered into young Fernando’s ear, “Look well at his face; he is a mulatto from Guanabacoa” (see figure P.1). 3 figure p.i Arsenio Martinez Campos, ca. 1870. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Never say never, but it would be surprising if Martinez Campos—who was born in Segovia, Spain, and whose well-documented rise through the ranks of a mostly segregated military led him to high office—was either of African descent or from a marginal Havana suburb. 4 But this was how the elder Ortiz made sense of the openness toward those who fought for national indepen¬ dence, all of whom he assumed to be black or mulatto—“as if being a rebel was proof that one was colored,” his grandson later noted. This episode also illustrates the central topic of this book: the relationships imagined between political allegiance and racial identity. Fernando Ortiz would eventually dismiss the far-fetched theory as an old man’s prejudices, although he still observed that the captain general “looked and he seemed to me somewhat like a light-skinned mulatto.” In the same chamber after Cuban independence, Ortiz recounted this anecdote to Tomas Estrada Palma, the first president of the Cuban Republic (see figure P.2). Es¬ trada Palma dismissed 'with “unforgettable amiability” the story about his co¬ lonial predecessor: “Now all that has finished; in Free Cuba we are now all of the same color.” 5 And this was the idea that Ortiz reiterated in a speech deliv¬ ered in that very same space (in what was now the Municipal Palace 1 in 1943. figure p.2 Palace of the Captain General, Havana, ca. 1895. Courtesy of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries. Preface ix He located the writings of independence leader Jose Marti at the heart of a vision of the Cuban nation that transcended the racial divisions created un¬ der colonial rule. He also acknowledged that many Cubans of color in the nineteenth century found it logical to support a national project that placed being Cuban above blackness or whiteness. This was an idea developed in writing by Marti and others and in practice within a diverse liberation army, and it is a national racial ideology that still today stands as one of the most remarked-upon features of the island—one with analogs in many other areas of Latin America. Although this book began as a social history of those ideas, early discoveries in Cuban archives shifted attention to another intriguing intersection of race and politics: how ordinary Cubans expressed support not for national inde¬ pendence but for the Spanish colonial government, how that government un¬ evenly cultivated and reciprocated that support, and how African-descended Cubans figured prominently among its adherents. Here was a story of politi¬ cal allegiance running parallel to the narrative of raceless nationalism cham¬ pioned by Marti, Ortiz, and many other people who wove it into the fabric of Cuban history. Once I started to tug at the thread of argument about pro¬ colonial loyalty, that fabric began to unravel. Basic understandings about the nature of Spanish imperialism, African slavery, colonial racial hierarchies, liberalism, and national citizenship all begged for revision. How, then, are we to reconcile such divergent forms of political allegiance, or to account for a phenomenon that confounds the anti-imperialist orienta¬ tions of so many struggles against racial inequality? Scholars have acknowl¬ edged that the Spanish government had cultivated that support and extended limited rights and privileges, but they have generally understood it either as exclusive to Cubans of full Spanish ancestry or as false consciousness: a “divide and rule” policy, as Ortiz called it, an “immense social lottery” designed to keep most Cubans of color “distracted and diverted from fundamental grievances.” Ortiz did not dwell on the question of why Cubans of color might have affirmed colonial rule. In his speech of 1943, he briefly explained it as an elite affair. “Doubtless there existed in Cuba that select group of colored people wffiose personal interests were selfishly interlocked in the high wheels of the colonial government,” he argued, insisting that most of those individuals “were mulattoes with hidden or unconcealed family connections, favored by privileges; mulattoes of blood tinged with blue by amorous rela¬ tions that placed ebony patches on the noble Castilian heraldry; and mulat¬ toes of blood turned yellow by the embrace of the dark-colored girl with the man who was the color of his gold coins.” 6 Like his grandfather, Ortiz associ- x Preface ated political allegiance to one cause or another as being linked to blood, ancestry, and color: the key concepts that gave meaning to the idea of race in Cuba. Certainly, Ortiz was on to something when he linked mix ed ancestry to the consolidation of empire. Since the earliest years of the Spanish presence in the Americas, strategic marriages to native elites and the Hispanization of mixed peoples helped make Spanish legal and social norms hegemonic. Yet it is no more persuasive to assume that support for Spanish rule was limited to Spanish ancestry than to assume that Arsenio Martinez Campos's conces¬ sions to rebels meant that he was a mulatto passing for white. Nor was loyalty to Spain limited to those who derived economic privileges from colonial rule. Indeed, many wealthy Cubans preferred the stability of Spanish rule to the uncertainties of independence, but so did many other Cubans, and for a vide variety of reasons. Neither economic opportunity nor Spanish descent fully explains popular support for a colonial government that summed mainland Spanish American independence by many decades. This book argues that alongside persistent associations of pro-colonial sen¬ timent with Cuba’s white population lay a conception of race and loyalty that allowed Cubans of African descent—slave and free—to be included in colonial politics as faithful, if unequal, subjects. Reconstructing this history requires looking beyond the dramas that unfolded in the captain general's palace and the imposing mansions of Cubans whose wealth derived from the island's sugar economy, which was built on slave labor. The historv of race and loyalty is also to be found in bustling meeting halls and public squares across the island, on plantations transformed into battlefields, and in the barracks of mi¬ litia soldiers and wartime recruits. These spaces became the staging grounds for mutual and reciprocal interests articulated by the Spanish government and its subjects. Although the focus of the book is primarily on people of African descent, it is more than a social historv of those black and mulatto Cubans who explicitly supported the continuation of Spanish rule; it asks broader questions about the centrality of race to the maintenance of the Spanish emnire in its final decades in the Americas. In doing so, it questions the neat divide com¬ monly drawn between colonial and national racial ideologies in Cuba and. by extension, political strategies of African-descended Cubans based on identifications as subiects of an empire or as citizens of a liberal nation-state. Chronicling individuals caught between competing racial identities, colonial identity as subiects of the Spanish empire, and race-transcendent national identity, this book explains how Cubans of many different backgrounds shaped the politics of Spain’s “ever-faithful isle." Preface xi I follow the history of race and loyalty along two principal axes. Military service represented one of the most conspicuous opportunities to demonstrate loyalty in colonial Cuba. Free men of African descent had served the Spanish empire in militias since the sixteenth century, and membership conferred so¬ cial status and legal privileges recognized by colonials of all backgrounds. Yet militias encountered patchy support by Spanish officials and free people of color alike in the early nineteenth century. After the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and independence wars in mainland Latin America, for example, colonial officials doubted more than ever the wisdom of arming potentially rebellious groups. It was not until the outbreak of the first major anticolonial insurrection, the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), that military service regained its earlier importance to defining loyalty, and some free men mobilized to defend Spain against the rebels. The Spanish government also offered slaves an incen¬ tive to support the empire as it initiated the gradual process of slave emancipa¬ tion: those who fought for the Spanish in the insurrection could receive their freedom. Field interrogations of slave-soldiers juxtaposed popular and official understandings of loyalty that determined whether or not a slave would be freed, uncovering, in the process, assumptions about the will and ability of slaves to be loyal subjects. As a result of the political reforms that followed the Ten Years’ War, many more African-descended Cubans asserted their allegiance to Spanish rule, in part because they encountered new opportunities for doing so. The second axis on which I plot race and loyalty tracks the spaces of their public articula¬ tion, which expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. The Span¬ ish state sanctioned the formation of political parties, and it loosened restrictions on press and association. Cubans of color quickly asserted their presence in this burgeoning public sphere by invoking their loyalty to the government that made it possible. Since 1812, when a constitution drafted by the besieged Spanish government radically expanded the citizenship rights of select Spanish American men, colonial and metropolitan liberals had struggled to contain the demands of African-descended and indigenous people within the Spanish system—notably through censorship and control of public spaces. Reforms after the Ten Years’ War represented a turning point. Thus, the book moves from the hot, crowded theaters in small towns that hosted political party meetings to the ceremonious patriotic clubs in Havana where Cubans of color delivered florid speeches, attended by colonial offi¬ cials, that called for slave emancipation and clearer voting rights. In the late 1880s, the slow steps toward an integrated postemancipation society pro¬ voked frustration among many African-descended Cubans who had deferred xii Preface protest in good faith. Spanish political concessions buckled under social pres¬ sure for wider inclusion, and by the War of Independence between 1895 and 1898, the separatist movement’s explicit commitment to antiracism had done much to displace popular loyalty to Spain, particularly among Cubans of color. This is a book about the ideological foundations of empire, about reexam¬ ining the central themes of Cuban history, and about a prominent but under¬ explored phenomenon in the political history of the African diaspora. At the heart of the history of race and imperial loyalty is the interplay between an early iteration of Spanish national citizenship and an older form of subjectiv¬ ity as a loyal vassal of the monarch. This is a story of their conflict, but also of their interdependence. Preface ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Conducting research and writing a book can be isolating endeavors. But what immediately comes to mind when I think about the process are the good con¬ versations, good ideas, and good laughs shared with friends and colleagues. Thanking all of them as I wrap up this project has an unfortunate air of final¬ ity about it, so I acknowledge their support with the proviso that they aren’t ofF the hook just yet. Dedicated and inspiring teachers guided me on the journey that led to this book. It emerged from my doctoral dissertation, so first and foremost I heartily thank my advisor, Louis A. Perez, Jr., for his encouragement, advice, and above all for his patience. Perhaps as no one else can, he taught me a great deal about Cuba and, just as important, he taught me about the act of writing and about the ethical responsibilities of belonging to an intellectual community that spans the U.S.-Cuba divide. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee—Kathryn Burns, John French, John Chasteen, and Jerma Jackson— whose gifts as writers, teachers, and people continue to serve as examples. Leon Fink and Judith Bennett also provided wisdom and perspective along the way. I became hooked on Latin American history during my first semester in college, and I am grateful to Franklin Knight, Alida Metcalf, Linda Salvucci, Richard Salvucci, and Aline Helg for sparking my curiosity and monitoring my wobbly first steps as a historian. Over many years, the Instituto de Historia de Cuba in Havana has supported my research in countless ways. Along with the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (uneac), it has sponsored research visas, facilitated access to archives and libraries, and included me in its conferences and seminars. I thank Belkis Que- sada y Guerra and Amparo Hernandez for their strenuous efforts to make all of this happen. I also thank the instituto for the opportunities to become ac¬ quainted with Cuban scholars who have made room for me next to them in the archives; fielded my oddball questions; and shared thoughts, writing, and suggestions. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Carmen Almodovar, Manuel Barcia Paz, Barbara Danzie Leon, Yolanda Diaz Martinez, Mitzi Espinosa Luis, Leida Fernandez Prieto, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Gloria Garcia Rodriguez, Julio Cesar Gonzalez Pages, Silvia Gutierrez, Oilda Hevia Lanier, Fe Iglesias Garcia, Patricia Cok, Jorge Made Cruz, Maria de los Angeles Merino Fuentes, Blancamar Leon Rosabal, Adrian Lopez Denis, Fernando Martinez Heredia, Aisnara Perera Diaz, Carlos Venegas Fornias, and Oscar Zanetti Lecuona. A few colleagues deserve special mention for years of ongoing exchanges and warm friendship: Marial Iglesias Utset, Tomas Fernandez Robaina, the late Francisco Perez Guzman, Abel Sierra Madero, and Orlando Garcia Martinez, the open-hearted and open-minded former director of the provincial archive in Cienfuegos and president of the uneac branch there. I learned some life lessons in Cuba from Marel Suzarte, Gladys Marel Garcia, Berta Linares, Oscar Montoto, Cecilio, Loly, and some guy named Carlos. .Archivists and librarians at the research institutions I visited went out of their way to help me navigate their collections. I want to thank the staffs of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, the Biblioteca Nacional Jose Marti, and the library of the Instituto de Literatura y Lingiiistica in Havana; the Archivo Historico Provincial de Cienfuegos and Biblioteca Provincial de Cienfuegos; and the Archivo Historico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba. In Spain, I am grateful to specialists at the Biblioteca Nacional, Archivo Historico Nacional, Servicio Historico Militar, and Real Academia de Historia in Madrid; and at the Ar¬ chivo General de Indias in Seville. In the United States, I benefited from help at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the U.S. National Archives, the Huntington Library, and the Latin .American Collection of the University of Florida's Smathers Library, particularly from its director, Richard Phillips, and Margarita Yargas-Betancourt. Most of all, I thank the good people at the His¬ panic Division of the Library of Congress, who for years have provided a calm place to write and more books than I could ever read. A special bond develops among historians who visit Cuba and overlap in the course of research and conference going. These colleagues have graciously shared leads, advice, and a sense of collective endeavor, I thank Sandra Bronf¬ man. Matt Childs, Camillia Cowling, .Alejandro de la Fuente, Ada Ferrer, Jorge Giovannetti, Lillian Guerra, Frank Guridv, Jane Landers, Kathy Lopez, Gillian McGillivrav, Jill Lane, Melina Pappademos, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Reinaldo Roman, and Michael Zeuske. Early discussions with Rebecca J. Scott helped me formulate some of the central questions guiding this project. Marikav McCabe and I spent a lot of time together in nineteenth-century Cuba; I thank her for making the voyages with me. Her friendship is inseparable from this project but I am grateful that it extends so far beyond it. xvi Acknowledgments At the University of North Carolina and Duke University, colleagues and friends provided critical engagement and distraction. It was a privilege to learn alongside my Latin Americanist companeros Adriana Brodsky, Vince Brown, Mariola Espinosa, Amy Ferlazzo, Mark Healey, Jan Hoffman French, Lupe Garcia, Jane Mangan, Josh Nadel, Rachel O’Toole, Jody Pavilack, Tom Rogers, Devyn Spence Benson, Ivonne Wallace-Fuentes, and Bill Van Norman. Many other fellow graduate students were there for first response and last call: Anastasia Crosswhite, Will Jones, Michael Kramer, Ethan Kytle, Susan Pearson, Erik Riker-Coleman, Blain Roberts, Michele Strong, and Adam Tuchinsky all deserve a nod. Three individuals in particular have helped hold every¬ thing together: Sarah Thuesen, my intrepid writing partner; Bianca Premo, whose ideas may have shaped this project more than my own (although any errors are mine alone); and Jolie Olcott, whose support and friendship, and intellectual and political commitments, humble and inspire me. This book feels like the product of many-year-long conversations with these friends, which makes it all the more meaningful. Through a Latin American history reading group in Los Angeles I became close colleagues and even better friends with Robin Derby, Maria Elena Martinez, and Micol Seigel. As this project became a book, their humor, en¬ couragement, and whip-smart insights have been invaluable. Other generous colleagues—M. Jacqui Alexander, Andy Apter, Ben Cowan, Lessie Jo Frazier, Jim Green, Ramon Gutierrez, Pete Sigal, John Tutino, and Ben Vinson—have sharpened my thinking and made enjoyable the hard work that goes into our professional labors. For their comments on parts or all of the manuscript I thank Herman Bennett, Kathryn Burns, Ada Ferrer, John French, Clare Lyons, Jolie Olcott, Bianca Premo, Karin Rosemblatt, Leslie Rowland, Rebecca Scott, and especially Sarah Chambers. Thanks to kind invitations to share my work, my ideas benefited from perceptive audiences at Brown University, the Latin American Labor History Conference at Duke University, Georgetown Uni¬ versity, Indiana University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Tulane Univer¬ sity, the University of Chicago, the University of Redlands, the University of Southern California, and the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro in Nova Iguaqu, Brazil. I want to make special mention of the Tepoztlan In¬ stitute for the Transnational History of the Americas, founded by Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young. I have never found a more encouraging and exhila¬ rating forum for experimenting with ideas as this annual gathering. I thank its many participants over the years and in particular the other members of the organizing collective. I met my good friends David Kazanjian and Josie Acknowledgments xvii Saldana in Tepoz. 1 am buoyed by their support and collaboration and as¬ tounded by their generosity. I thank the staff and faculty of the University of Maryland Department of History for their collective energies on behalf of this book. Mil gracias e muito obrigado to my Latin Americanist colleagues—Mary Kay Vaughan, Alejandro Caneque, Karin Rosemblatt, Barbara Weinstein (ever so briefly), and Daryle Williams—and to a great group of graduate students, for keeping the day-to-day and the big picture in proper perspective. Elsa Barkley Brown, Ira Berlin, Jim Gilbert, Julie Greene, Hilary Jones, Clare Lyons, Mike Ross, and Leslie Rowland have aided this project in ways large and small. Both in¬ tellectually and personally, Christina Hanhardt, Jerry Passannante, and San- geeta Ray helped me keep the world beyond my work in view. The financial support of many institutions facilitated the research and writing of this book. I carried out most of my research in Cuba and Spain through the generosity of the Conference on Latin American History’s Lydia Cabrera Award, The Johns Hopkins University’s Cuba Exchange Program, and the Department of History, the Institute of Latin American Studies (now the Institute for the Study of the Americas), and the Graduate School at Uni¬ versity of North Carolina. A fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Soci¬ ety and a Library Travel Research Grant from the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies helped identify crucial sources in the United States. Faculty research grants from Whittier College and the University of Maryland provided additional travel opportunities. The Paul Hardin Fellowship of the Royster Society of Fellows at the University of North Carolina allowed me to complete the dissertation, and I am especially grateful to the University of Maryland’s Latin American Studies Center for a postdoctoral fellowship that gave me the time and space to widen the frame of this project. This book simply would not exist without Valerie Millholland. I can never repay her efforts on my behalf. With superhuman patience, she and Gisela Fosado have gone above and beyond the call of any editor’s duty. Compassion is not a job requirement for editors, but they have extended theirs to me, and to the pages that follow, in countless ways. I thank them and the whole pro¬ duction team at Duke University Press, as well as the extremely thoughtful and helpful anonymous readers who improved this project greatly. Some of those people mentioned in this exhausting, and certainly not exhaustive, list are like family—one of the great results of undertaking this project. There are many families that have supported me over the years, and two in particular learned more about Cuba than they had ever planned to and have taught me more about loyalty than the research and writing of this xviii Acknowledgments book. Long ago my brother and I decided to take a class together on Caribbean history, and one of us received the higher grade; my late father, a teacher, and my mother, whose passion for learning continues to lead her in new directions, have always given me the space to follow my curiosity. So, too, has a group of childhood friends (and their hangers-on) who still know me best and tolerate me anyway. I thank all of them, in order of having met them beginning at age six: Sarah, Marla, Andy, Phuc, Chris, Kim, Courtney, Brandon, Dan, and Ken. I dedicate this book to all of these loved ones as meager compensation for everything they have dedicated to me. Acknowledgments xix INTRODUCTION A Faithful Account of Colonial Racial Politics At the top of most pieces of official correspondence in nineteenth-century Cuba, from statistics on sugar harvests to investigations of slave unrest, was a seal or letterhead hailing “La siempre fiel isla,” the ever-faithful isle. Cuba’s loyalty to the Spanish empire became one of its defining attributes during the Age of Revolutions. Travel accounts repeated and reproduced the “ever faith¬ ful” motto, as did leading writers throughout the century. By the time that Fernando VII of Spain formally bestowed Cuba with the siempre fiel title in 1824, people had described the island with the phrase for decades. Perhaps the title protested too much. In the wake of successful indepen¬ dence movements in mainland Spanish America from Mexico to Argentina, Cuba, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, stood as the remnants of what at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been second only to Rus¬ sia as the world’s largest empire. As Cuban sugar production grew to global dominance during that century—enabled by the vast expansion of African slavery—Spain was as eager for the island to remain in its imperial orbit as Cubans themselves were sharply divided about their political future. Anxiety about maintaining the colonial relationship explained, in part, the spread of the “ever-faithful” motto, adapted to designate cities that were fideUsimas (super¬ faithful) and printed atop the lottery tickets that optimistic Cubans tucked away in their pockets. Its ubiquity guaranteed nothing in terms of people’s po¬ litical allegiance, but neither did it lack symbolic value. In 1899, one year after the conclusion of the thirty-year struggle for Cuba’s national independence, court documents still written on the Spanish government’s letterhead had the coat of arms punched out of them, leaving a gaping hole at the top of the page. 1 So much talk of loyalty does not entirely square with common historical associations pertaining to Cuba, namely, the rebellions and revolutions that have given shape to its unique political culture. Today, at the Museo de la Revo- lucion in Havana, the narrative of the Cuban Revolution begins with the resis¬ tance of African slaves in the nineteenth century. But at a time in the Atlantic “ * S. © ® REAL LOTERIA KIEL IS LA *£< © © © ©®©©©©®©©®& 320. | UK LA SIEMPRE® ",^ 4 A - ® sc ha ! 1 I 488! 1 » | 4 „ ! a " {£, jjlrbillete para el soriw> ircscientos veinte, que de celebrar el dia 7 de marzo de 1840. 5£ IS* fTiZe cuatro reahs S~s^. .**, ,rs xs^f's 4 WV ♦TtV figure i.i • Cuban lottery ticket, 1840. Private collection. © © © © © © world when anticolonial movements in Europe’s American colonies gave rise to new national states and the promise (if not the uniform practice) of liberal citizenship, Cuba did not experience revolutionary upheaval and, in fact, pros¬ pered greatly as a colony. Cuba’s loyalty to Spain was not the outcome of the wishful thinking of the Spanish government, no matter how persistently it affirmed the ever-faithful island. Nor was repressive violence the lone expla¬ nation. That allegiance depended on the support of Cubans and on the perva¬ sive ideas about race that shaped Cuban society. This book attempts to understand that support from the inside out: not as an aberration of Cuban history, nor as a pothole in the road to national inde¬ pendence and citizenship—the benchmarks of political modernity—but as a meaningful political relationship that expressed mutual and reinforcing inter¬ ests between the Spanish state and Cuban society. Moreover, loyalty to colonial rule did not slowly fizzle throughout the nineteenth century, paving the way for the empire’s demise. In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century, popular ex¬ pressions of allegiance found new means of expression that had been stifled earlier, when colonial authorities more strictly policed spaces for public delib¬ eration and limited citizenship based on race as well as colonial status (and on gender, age, and many other criteria). The fact that these spaces allowed, and sometimes encouraged, the participation of Cubans of African descent helped bind together ideas about political inclusion and social subordination. 2 INTRODUCTION Scholars of Spanish and Portuguese American independence have gone to great lengths in recent years to explain the multiple contingencies that con¬ verged to effect the end of Iberian rule. 2 With a few exceptions, colonial Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century was no powder keg, no combustible mess of tensions and contradictions caused by the worst aspects of colonial rule. Still, the general absence of anticolonial fervor in the Spanish Caribbean perplexed the great liberator of Spanish America, Simon Bolivar: “But aren’t the people of those islands Americans? Are they not oppressed? Do they not desire their own happiness?” he wrote from Jamaica in 1815. 3 Popular support for the Spanish empire in Cuba, even if it appeared counterintuitive to Bolivar and still does to many people today, is a topic that pushes us to re¬ consider much of what recent scholarship has made visible: the agency of African-descended people, the relationship of racial ideology to empire and nationalism, and the ascendancy of the nation-state as the outcome of politi¬ cal struggles in the nineteenth-century Americas. Loyalty, Race, and Slavery In many ways, histories of race and loyalty in Cuba are nothing new. Race has long figured prominently as an explanation of Cuba’s “ever faithful” political culture during the nineteenth century. By far the most common argument has cited white Cubans’ fears of racial reprisal as the African slave population increased to accommodate the explosive growth of the sugarcane industry. John Lynch, for example, writes that “slave revolt was so fearful a prospect that creoles were loathe to leave the shelter of imperial government and break ranks with the dominant whites unless there was a viable alternative.” 4 Other scholars, too, have put the decision-making power in the hands of the island’s economic elite. This focus makes sense, given the considerable power that the elite held both locally and in their negotiations with the crown for the con¬ cessions that enabled the expansion of the slave trade and sugar cultivation. Capital often superseded, controlled, and coincided with the interests of state, and not surprisingly the Spanish empire functioned in ways that distributed power to those who profited from the island’s agricultural enterprises. In other words, the choice (to the extent that it could be chosen) between colo¬ nial rule and national independence was one made by a small segment of the island’s white population, one with deep investments in the stability of the growing slave society. 5 A thin echelon of privileged Cubans benefited both from the coercive and violent powers of the Spanish state and by the state’s delegation of coercive and violent powers to slaveowners. The loyalty of A Faithful Account 3 the white elite postponed national independence, as common arguments go, and other Cubans endured the mechanisms of social control imposed by the Spanish government, especially those designed to regulate slavery, capture runaway slaves, suppress rebellions, and limit political discourse. This interpretation is persuasive. But by widening the frame of Cuban his¬ tory to examine race and loyalty in the context of Spanish America and the African diaspora, more expansive arguments become visible. Instead of lo¬ cating support for Spain primarily in the Spanish and creole population, and linking them to a particular class experience, historians of the Americas have found the support of ordinary colonials, including those of indigenous and African ancestry, critical in explaining the trajectories of colonial and repub¬ lican rule. Jorge Dominguez notes “the enormous variety of reasons why a great many people in Spanish America across the economic hierarchies and the color spectrum resisted those who clamored for independence and often fought with their blood and guts” against it. 6 Attention to popular politics has not simply made visible a wider cast of actors; it has also revealed how racial ideology shaped projects of independence, royalism, and many other imagined political communities whose possibilities have been rendered in¬ visible by a near single-minded focus on the formation of national states. Thus the title phrase “ends of empire.” Rather than identifying the genera¬ tion of wealth for planters and the Spanish state as the sole end, or goal, of the imperial project, this book emphasizes the multiple reasons that empire lasted so long in Cuba, namely because so many individuals looked to colonial rule to attain a wide variety of ends. Among those aims figured formal member¬ ship in a political community that was sometimes inclusive of (but never ex¬ hausted by) the idea of liberal citizenship. We can also understand the ends of empire to refer to its limits or extremities. Indeed, the history of loyalty in Cuba cannot be told as one of unqualified success. One of the reasons that the concept held so much value throughout the nineteenth century was be¬ cause at some point just about everyone expressed discontent with Spanish rule on the island. They discovered and tested the limits of empire—where their loyalty began and ended—including the question of whether Cubans of African descent could be considered, and know themselves to be, loyal sub¬ jects. Finally, the ends of empire are obviously chronological. No single year marked the end of the Spanish empire, as various areas of Spanish territory declared independence at different times. Moreover, the many new nations that emerged during the nineteenth century felt the effects of colonial rule long after its formal conclusion. And of course, empire in Cuba did not end in 1898 with victory against Spain in the independence war; the intervention of 4 INTRODUCTION the United States at the end of the conflict signaled a new imperial presence that operated on new terms. Thus, the goals and limits of Spanish imperialism in Cuba intersect with the chronological questions of why empire didn’t end earlier and how it eventually did. Looking to beginnings, in contrast, the importance of popular support for European rule in the colonial Americas had almost always been necessary for the establishment of empire, and for much of the colonial period that support coalesced around the figure of the benevolent and protective monarch. 7 De¬ pending on their legal and social status as slaves, free people, Indians, or women and children, individuals assumed to be inferior could lay claim to royal benefaction by occupying a subject position as humble and loyal sub¬ jects with affective ties to empire. For example, Eric Van Young has argued about New Spain that “in the Spanish colony as one descended the social pyramid and found one’s self in a countryside still predominantly indigenous in makeup, the sign of the tyrannous monarch reversed itself into that of the defender of his most humble subjects, who became the object of messianic fer¬ vor.” 8 At the same time, assumptions (and inventions) of indigenous alle¬ giance to the Spanish system allowed independence supporters to cast Indians as backward and unfit for the Mexican nation. 9 The protective ethos could be extended as well to the multiple holders of sovereignty in the colonial world: colonial officials in Spain and in the colonies at the level of vice-royalties, captaincies general, provinces and towns, and even slaveowners. Native elites whose claims to nobility were backed by Spanish authority found strategic reasons to support colonialism: Andean peasants in the Ayacucho region ar¬ ticulated alternatives to the nascent Peruvian state in the language of loyalty to the Spanish crown. 10 Slaves in New Granada identified themselves “his Majesty’s slaves” in a petition at the end of the eighteenth century, and racial hierarchies there relaxed as the Bourbon state recognized the political bene¬ fits of affirming slaves’ claims to honor and respect. 11 With the arrival of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, Brazilian slaves used royal courts to advance petitions for freedom, which, though they were rarely successful, affirmed the authority of the monarch over that of slave owners. 12 And Spanish officials actively sought the military support of African-descended subjects, both free and enslaved, during the South American wars for independence. For some free men, this extended their service in free-colored militias and, for some slaves, it represented an opportunity for freedom. 13 The cumulative impact of these histories encourages a reexamination of the racial politics of Cuban loyalty to Spanish rule. This need not negate the significance of Cuba’s Spanish and creole leaders, whose class interests and A Faithful Account 5 racial anxieties informed their own allegiance. Rather, it opens up new possi¬ bilities for understanding the role of race in nineteenth-century Cuban soci¬ ety, and it broadens a field of politics typically divided into discrete colonial and national units. Indisputably, most Cubans of African descent regularly confronted discrimination, violence, and legal subordination under colonial rule. Many (often those who were legally free) also found opportunities for membership and mobility in Spanish institutions. Separate militia units com¬ posed of free black and mulatto men, for example, had existed in some Cuban towns since the sixteenth century. The mass arrivals of African slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dwarfed but never extinguished the communities of relatively prosperous free people of color, particularly in urban areas. Cabildos and cofradias , lay brotherhoods and mutual aid orga¬ nizations, gave sanctioned institutional structure to organizations of free and enslaved Cubans of color that sometimes preserved African ethnic des¬ ignations . 14 No wonder, then, that the slaves living in the copper-mining community of El Cobre, in eastern Cuba, experienced a highly conditional freedom once the crown confiscated derelict mines. A direct line to royal authority allowed the “royal slaves” to make claims based on their professed loyalty to their king and master. Slaves in the early nineteenth century acted on rumors of emancipation by royal authority, a phenomenon that Matt Childs terms “rebellious royalism .” 15 None of these aspects of Cuban society guaran¬ teed loyalty to Spanish rule, but they offered status linked to, and not in defi¬ ance of, putatively subordinating racial identifications. The principal contrast between pro-colonial allegiance in nineteenth-century Cuba and the earlier examples in Iberian America is that the figure of the monarch held much less purchase as the embodiment of Spanish justice. Dramatic transforma¬ tions in Spanish politics throughout the century made forms of republican government—the Cortes (the parliament), various constitutions, and even political parties—a more visible signifier of Spanish sovereignty and the pos¬ sibility of rights, citizenship, and inclusion. Running throughout these developments, the political question of whether Cubans of color could express loyalty to Spanish rule was inextricably bound up with the social realm, particularly the quotidian experience of slavery. “Humility, obedience, loyalty,” wrote Brazilian historian Katia Mattoso; “these were the cornerstones of the slave’s new life.” Indexing the terms by which the “good slave” could “acquire the know-how” to improve her or his situation, Mattoso makes clear the paternalistic values common to many slave societies in the Americas, Cuba included . 16 This idealized relationship has played a complicated role in depictions of slavery in the Americas, and it conditioned 6 INTRODUCTION thinking about obedience and loyalty in its political forms. Countless fictional accounts contain stock characters of docile and loyal slaves who accept their conditions uncritically and sometimes continue to work for their masters after their freedom. 17 In the United States, the figure of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) has been transposed, inaccu¬ rately, as a condescending stereotype for African Americans’ passive accep¬ tance of discrimination. Narratives about faithful slaves content with slavery and loathe to challenge their legal status, much less political rule, proliferated when slavery was in full swing. They lived on in subsequent histories to be memorialized in ways that reproduced and mollified the inequalities wrought by slavery. 18 Thus, historians in their wake faced an uphill historiographic battle in documenting the resistance of the enslaved and free to the inequali¬ ties they faced. 19 The figure of the loyal slave captured the attention of Cubans as well dur¬ ing the nineteenth century. At their most idealistic, Cuban planters linked the hierarchy between colony and metropole to the hierarchy between mas¬ ters and slaves, even using the risky rhetorical strategy of decrying unfair conditions under colonial rule as enslavement. Assurances of colonial stabil¬ ity could link royal and private authority through evidence of slaves’ sup¬ posed loyalty. Writing to the king in 1790, a group of planters recalled the widespread flight of slaves during the occupation of Havana by the British in 1762-63. But “once Your Majesty’s august father was restored,” they argued, “the slaves themselves sought us out on their own, under no undue influence or persuasion (fugitives, criminals, and the wicked excepted).” Spanish benev¬ olence also explained to them why freed slaves often continued working on the same sugar estates, which they would never have done “if those very same owners had been such tyrants.” 20 The fantasy of the submissive slave, as Sib- ylle Fischer has noted of Cuban literature, gained particular resonance in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and, in that fantasy’s sublimation of black agency, could have shaped the political imagination of the creole elite. “The possibility of Cuban autonomy and independence,” she argues, “depends on the suppression of black insurrection and the substitution of affective, vol¬ untary submission through brute force.” 21 A main goal of this book is to re¬ visit questions of race and loyalty without assuming affective and voluntary submission as fact but seeing its figuration as central to Cuban racial poli¬ tics. That Cubans of all backgrounds could express support for colonial rule does not imply that they did so based exclusively on their whiteness, blackness, wealth, poverty, and so on. They did, however, express that sup¬ port frequently through language that drew on deeply entrenched ideas A Faithful Account 7 about social status, hierarchy, and belonging—including the idea of the loyal slave. The significance of this story to the history of the African diaspora cannot be understated, even if it can be difficult to document. Enslaved Africans and their descendants constituted one of the populations that felt the inequality, violence, and exclusion of imperialism most severely in the Americas. But they also, against the odds, formed bonds of community, political in nature and sometimes drawing on iconographic vocabularies of monarchical rule and empire. Anthropologist Lorand Matory acknowledges that “the people of the black Atlantic never simply embraced nation-states as sufficient indices of their collective identities.” His insights into Afro-Brazilian religious prac¬ tices confirm that the transnational processes that define the African diaspora perhaps best demonstrate that “territorial jurisdictions have never monopo¬ lized the loyalty of the citizens and subjects that they claim, and they are never the sole founts of authority or agents of constraint in such people’s lives.” 22 Alternative conceptions of community in the diaspora have often been expressed in idioms of culture and religion, and to great effect. 23 But what about politics? To the extent that these frames can be discrete, scholarship about the African diaspora has focused on culture more than politics. To take seriously, as historian Steven Hahn describes them, “the political tenden¬ cies of self-determination and self-defense” in the history of African Ameri¬ cans (imagined hemispherically) is to allow the possibility of imperial affiliations in their multifaceted struggles for freedom. 24 It is also an invitation to move past plotting royalist or monarchist ideologies along a spectrum that renders them archaic and retrograde in relation to liberal and national forms, and to consider instead a hidden history of modern politics based on earlier tradi¬ tions of community and belonging. 25 Empires, Nations, and Liberal Subjects What does it mean to be loyal to an empire? From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, questions of patriotism and political allegiance usually target nation-states, while dismissing pro-colonial affinities as the misfires of historical subjects acting against their interests: dupes, victims, collabora¬ tors. 26 On closer inspection, answers for the two political forms can be strik¬ ingly similar when placed side by side. Asking how loyalty to an empire differs from loyalty to a nation-state implies, at least in part, that the two political forms are mutually exclusive; this was not the case in nineteenth-century Cuba. In the context of the Americas, singling out imperial loyalty as a historical 8•INTRODUCTION “problem” reinforces an assumed evolutionary progression from colonial rule to national independence, or at least to political affiliations that are non- or postimperial. Those assumptions do not originate with contempo¬ rary scholars. Cuban intellectual Father Felix Varela, for example, wrote in 1824 that whatever support existed for King Ferdinand VII of Spain would never survive the march of progress: “Whether Fernando wants it or not, and regardless of the opinion of his vassals on the island of Cuba, the country’s revolution is inevitable.” 27 The unavoidability of national independence rou¬ tinely implies that “bad” political traditions originated with colonial rule and that the “good” ones emerged with nation-states, even when their ideals of national rights and citizenship are not fully realized. The point here is not that colonial rule was good or bad for the Cubans who lived under it, or better or worse than a national government. One pur¬ pose of this book is to broadly explore what political practices colonial rule enabled and suppressed, who could practice them, and the criteria for deter¬ mining that “who.” My approach stands in contrast to histories of late Span¬ ish colonialism that adopt the frame of nation-states (and their anachronistic postcolonial names such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, or Bolivia) and work backward to trace the historical events that led to the successful realiza¬ tion of nations. Instead, I take up Frederick Cooper’s challenge to consider “what it meant for a polity to think like an empire, to conjugate incorporation and differentiation, to confront problems of long-distance extension and rec¬ ognize limits of control over large and diverse populations .” 28 Thinking like an empire was not limited to its political and economic elites, and it helps explain why the Spanish might have cultivated and received the support of ordinary Cubans. This approach to empire also restores some contingency to Cuban his¬ tory by avoiding easy assumptions that the island’s trajectory was delayed or out of step, that opposition to Spanish rule was the default position of most Cubans, or that Cuban nationalism was the sole engine of popular politics in the nineteenth century. Ada Ferrer, forge Ibarra, and Francisco Perez Guzman, among others, have thoroughly demonstrated that the path to Cuban independence was by no means preordained; nor was the race- transcendent vision that developed within it and became central to its pur¬ pose . 29 The dramatic transformations that accompanied the independence movement occurred alongside, in reaction to, and sometimes in the shad¬ ows of changes happening within a Spanish polity by no means slowly fiz¬ zling out over the course of the century. Seeing the dynamism of Spanish rule brings even the struggle for Cuban independence into sharper view as A Faithful Account 9 one of multiple and overlapping political projects that attracted popular support. Extending to Cubans public rights already enjoyed by citizens in Spain, for example, marked a change in the late nineteenth century from earlier poli¬ cies that excluded Cubans from the promises of Spanish liberalism. Thinking like an empire, it turns out, was complicated when Spaniards thought simul¬ taneously like a nation. 30 Cubans experienced the tensions between nation and empire acutely as their status shifted with the winds of Spanish constitu¬ tional politics. The Constitution of 1812 embraced liberal principles earlier than most other European constitutions, and its definition of citizenship in the Spanish nation—which included the indigenous inhabitants of Spanish Amer¬ ica but not those of African descent—drew on liberalism as well as early modern Castilian notions of citizenship and belonging. 31 The promise of those rights in Cuba was unevenly fulfilled in the years when the constitution was in effect (1812-14,1820-23), and even when a new constitution in 1836 explic¬ itly excluded the colonies, aspirations toward Spanish citizenship—by the end of the century, particularly among Cuban men of color—contrasted sharply with the imagined citizenship of an independent Cuba. It also con¬ trasted with the privileges and incentives extended to imperial subjects, which had a long history in Spanish America. It required Cubans to imagine the reciprocities of pro-colonial loyalty in Cuba in terms of both citizenship and rights, on one hand, and privileges and protections, on the other. If Cuban independence was not the universal aspiration of the island’s inhabitants, and if slavery and racial hierarchies (to say nothing of gender distinctions) shut out many inhabitants from claiming Spanish citizenship, there was still another path to political personhood and belonging: the forms of public expression predicated on the inequality, subordination, and vulnera¬ bility of being a colonial subject. Throughout the book, I refer to this path, and the kinds of subjects idealized by the Spanish state and Cubans themselves, as loyal subjectivity. 32 Cubans of color, slave and free, could inhabit loyal subjec¬ tivity because of, and not despite, the so-called “defects” of their status. That this mode of political expression infused discussions of citizenship and rights invites a dialogue with scholars of mainland Iberian independence who have recognized the colonial moorings of putatively “national” forms of representation, sovereignty, legitimacy, and inclusion. Excessive attention to the burden of the Spanish past on Latin American nation-states compounded the region’s problem of persistence, as Jeremy Adelman has called it, and histo¬ rians of Latin America have balanced attention between the influences of Spanish structures and ideas and the innovativeness of experiments with 10 INTRODUCTION liberal citizenship following independence. 33 Cuba can thus be seen as cen¬ tral, rather than peripheral, to the political history of Latin America in the nineteenth century if we understand, following Adelman, that “the ambigui¬ ties of sovereignty could not be easily dissimulated in visions of nationhood or political power without the existence of previous deep-seated ideologies to justify them.” 34 Loyalty to Spanish rule was always about more than strategic calculations and anxiety about radical change. It was imbued with long¬ standing principles of political membership expressed affectively and whose traces remained long after independence. Those principles were by no means unique to Cuba or to the Spanish em¬ pire. Given my interest in a diasporic population and a form of politics ex¬ ceeding a national frame (whether Cuban or Spanish), Ever Faithful should not be read as a story of Cuban exceptionalism. The major themes of the book also find parallels in Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone colonial histo¬ ries. And, as Rebecca Scott notes, Cuba was among many slave societies that experienced “pervasive uncertainty over whether persons held as property could, in practice, also be colonial subjects deserving of protection.” 35 If colo¬ nial loyalty might appear anachronistic within the history of Cuban national¬ ism, it should appear downright typical in the context of the Caribbean, where the British empire held on until the 1980s, Martinique and Guadeloupe are still departments of France, and the historical presence of the United States chal¬ lenges easy declarations of the end of empire. Spanish attempts to merge lib¬ eral principles with imperial practices exposed the limits of Cuban political inclusion, particularly around questions of race and slavery. Those attempts also resemble other forms of imperial citizenship more closely associated with French and British rule during the period. 36 Loyal subjects were ubiquitous in Europe’s African, Asian, and Caribbean colonies, and they were more than understudies in the performance of liberal politics; they shared the stage, and sometimes even roles, with national citizens. Writing a History of Loyalty Histories of the people, politics, and culture of Cuba and the African diaspora have for decades circled around the theme of resistance. Given the weighty legacies of slavery, imperialism, capitalism, and their attendant violence, it is of little surprise that attention has focused on challenges to those deep struc¬ tures. Historians have read sources “against the grain” to emphasize the visi¬ bility of people who openly contested their exclusion from power. But what about when those people didn’t? Rebellion, revolt, and revolution have been A Faithful Account 11 privileged modes of identifying subaltern agency—including African Ameri¬ can politics—with the effect that disloyalty is far better understood than loy¬ alty. If the latter may hold less appeal for its associations with conservative or accommodationist politics, attending to it may loosen the tight connection drawn between resistance and agency . 37 Yet attempts to historicize loyalty run afoul of formidable methodological hurdles. Perhaps the most significant problem lies in the sources themselves. To the extent that pro-Spanish loyalty represented a normative political position against which others were contrasted, it often went unmarked in the his¬ torical record—no head counts, no lengthy theorizing, and no generous doc¬ umentation produced within a fully formed social movement. At the same time, there is the ever-present “Ever Faithful” emblem marked on official cor¬ respondence. Its pervasiveness does not prove its sincerity any more than signing “sincerely” at the end of correspondence today. But filtering it out as an irrelevant formality glosses the power relations that shape the material production and reception of documents. Recipients of royal decrees in Span¬ ish America ritually kissed the royal seal on the document and then held it above their heads to acknowledge the monarch’s authority . 38 As Kathryn Burns writes of colonial notarial templates, “knowing something about the formulae one encounters in the archive is as useful as having some insight into the re¬ lations between the parties involved .” 39 The struggles of colonial officials charged with maintaining Cuba’s fidelity come into sharp relief when they entertained the possibility of extending privileges to African-descended Cu¬ bans persistently characterized as rebellious and unfit for political participa¬ tion. How well can an official report, then, index political subjectivity when both the language of loyalty and the language of resistance may be so com¬ monplace as to overdetermine even basic description? Drawing on periodicals, literary sources, and proceedings of associations, political parties, military units, and municipal, island-wide, and Spanish “na¬ tional” governing bodies, this book draws on a wide range of sources to exam¬ ine loyalty as something neither merely rhetorical nor a verifiable belief. One case in point bears attention. Scholars who have searched for evidence of re¬ sistance and rebellion in Cuba’s colonial past have been intrigued by the sub¬ versive behavior or African-derived cultural practices that might have been taking place in various urban clubs and associations. They have productively interpreted such documents against the grain of colonial discourse, reading past the language of loyalty and subordination that characterizes the public statements of those institutions . 40 My reading of nineteenth-century docu¬ ments places this language front and center: as evidence of a mode of engage- 12 INTRODUCTION ment with the colonial state that may fit uneasily with the language of liberal citizenship or revolutionary rhetoric but that nevertheless offered African- descended Cubans a public voice for inhabiting loyal subjectivity. For histori¬ ans conditioned to examine sources for perspectives silenced or forgotten by the archival record, however, there might be good reason to suspect that statements of popular support for empire served as “respectable perfor¬ mances” and little else. 41 But to write them off them entirely as elite fantasies or false consciousness is to miss the chance to glimpse what Ann Stoler calls “the febrile movements of persons off balance—of thoughts and feelings in and out of place.” “In tone and temper,” she continues, “[archives] convey the rough interior edges of governance and disruptions to the deceptive clarity of its mandates.” 42 In other words, summary dismissal prevents us from imagining that the point of contact between subjects and representa¬ tives of the colonial state might sometimes identify—uneasily and messily— common ground or a shared ideology of rule, as opposed to exclusively adversarial relationships. Another problem of grasping loyalty revolves around identifying who sup¬ ported Spanish rule in the nineteenth century. Attempts to provide a demo¬ graphic profile of pro-Spanish loyalty in Cuba miss an always shifting target. No matter how hard they tried, Spanish officials could never measure or predict, or document, the demographic dimensions of popular loyalty. Num¬ bers of soldiers, even, were difficult to aggregate, and concealed the deser¬ tions and defections common on all sides of the island’s military conflicts. Political affiliations never mapped neatly onto geographical regions or census categories, and certainly not racial identifications, in a way that allows for neat conclusions about who might predictably have affirmed colonial rule. Given the nature of the evidence, it is tempting to characterize the Cubans of Afri¬ can descent most likely to support colonial rule as urban, free, island born (as opposed to African born), and overwhelmingly male. Indeed, much of the evidence for this study points to such individuals. But there are plenty of ex¬ amples of rural, enslaved, African-born men and women who found them¬ selves fighting alongside the Spanish army, traveling to see a politician passing through town, or phrasing a petition in the language of humility and obedi¬ ence. Despite the exciting evidence of women of color participating in public life and the surprising evidence of slave women engaged in Spanish military campaigns, one definitive demographic conclusion about loyalty is that women faced serious challenges to inhabiting loyal subjectivity, which means that examples of their success might better be understood as exceptions rather than the rule—or, in contrast, that Spanish authorities and other observers A Faithful Account« 13 had reasons for erasing or understating the presence of women in a public world that operated on paternalistic terms and that posed challenges for sub¬ altern men to make their voices heard. No matter who claimed it, loyalty was, and is, a slippery concept. It at once occupies an old-fangled and modern place in political imaginaries: on one hand, the feudal pacts between lord and vassal; ancient conflicts between fam¬ ily and community; the thick ties of blood, faith, and status evoke primordial bonds that resist the spaces of modern, secular politics. On the other hand, political allegiance appears in some political theory as a product of the indi¬ vidual will or choice that is constitutive of the modern liberal subject. In fact, thinking about patriotism or affinity is so closely linked to liberal political theory—or to the nation-state—that there seems little room to consider indi¬ vidual choices affecting empires, dictatorships, or other systems reflexively deemed undemocratic or illiberal. 43 In part, this association appears so perva¬ sive because claims about loyalty rest more on theory than on the function of the concept in specific historical circumstances. Historicizing key political concepts has yielded great insights into Latin American society when ap¬ plied, for example, to the idea of honor. 44 In methodological terms, histori¬ cizing loyal subjectivity draws on many of the approaches that historicize resistance; rather than delineating the repertoires of rebellion and revolution so central to Cuban, Latin American, and African American history, this book offers instead a genealogy of consent. One useful approach to understanding loyalty can be found in Albert Hirschman’s classic study of how individuals respond to a qualitative decline in firms. Hirschman postulated three basic possibilities. The first, exit—or leaving—stands in contrast to the second, voice—an attempt to change “an objectionable state of affairs.” A third option is loyalty, a “feeling of attach¬ ment” and the “reluctance to exit in spite of disagreement.” Loyalty benefits institutions (such as states), Hirschman argues, when the costs of exit are low and when alternatives are less than desirable. The “consumer,” or, for our pur¬ poses, the political subject, finds loyalty beneficial because it opens up possi¬ bilities for dialogue and critique 45 Within the problem-space of colonial and national politics, Hirschman offers a path forward from national histories centered on exits from colonial rule, and he also foregrounds loyalty as an affective posture that allows for the potential to express voice within the world of empire. Jeremy Adelman, for example, has fruitfully brought Hirschman’s concept to bear on the South American independence movements, taking care to note the loyalty expressed by most of colonial Spanish America when crisis erupted in Spain. 46 14 INTRODUCTION Bringing Cuba into the picture only amplifies the importance of looking at colonial politics on its own terms, rather than from the outside space of the modern nation. It revives loyalty to colonial rule as an active histori¬ cal process and a crucial element in cementing Spanish hegemony, rather than an inertial default position obstructing radical change. As useful as Hirschman’s framework may be, I try not to remain bound to a single sche¬ matic throughout the book. Instead, I try to understand the historical actors I encounter to be theorists of loyalty in their own right: when slave-soldiers explained why they enlisted in the Spanish army; when a colonial official re¬ instated the militias of color after their abolition; when the editor of a black newspaper explained how racial affiliations could complement, rather than compete with, ties to Spanish rule; or the myriad instances in which Cubans themselves defined loyalty in counterpoint to the disloyalty they believed was always around the corner. Within particular contexts, I also analyze be¬ haviors and actions not named as loyalty front and center but that conform to patterns that people elsewhere commonly acknowledged as loyalty. If we can understand that invocations of loyalty may sometimes have been disin¬ genuous, we should also acknowledge other instances when Cubans grappled with questions of loyalty without actually naming it as such . 47 Because attention to the issue of Cuba’s continued colonial status became acute during the early nineteenth century, or the tail end of the Age of Revolu¬ tions, I begin the book with two chapters that survey those decades from two angles. In chapter 1 ,1 consider the implications of the tectonic political shifts in the Spanish empire for Cubans’ status as subjects and citizens. The Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the independence movements, and most important, the lib¬ eral Spanish Constitution of 1812 redefined the relationship between Spain and its colonies and the categories of political belonging available to colonial sub¬ jects. Colonial officials wavered on how these changes would affect political definitions of being Spanish or white, the freedoms of free men of color, and even the status of the inhabitants of Cuba’s last two Indian pueblos. With for¬ mal citizenship and representation off the table more often than not, chapter 2 explores how Cubans attemped to express loyalty to Spain rule as a historical strategy for gaining privileges, access, and mobility. Colonial policies aimed at stifling seditious activity and slave rebellions restricted opportunities for pop¬ ular politics in general, but a coherent picture of what a loyal subject was sup¬ posed to be still came into focus. Restrictive measures left Cubans at midcentury with an ambivalent sense of belonging to the Spanish empire, especially people of African descent, who saw the militias abolished and reinstituted and who found their desires to be loyal subjects checked by other Cubans. A Faithful Account 15 The initiation of the Ten Years’ War (1868-78) reactivated the military di¬ mension of popular allegiance to colonial rule at the same time at which Spain began the gradual process of slave emancipation. Chapter 3 plunges into the wartime drama to reveal a resurgence of active support for Spanish rule, even as the incorporation of slaves and free people of color into counter¬ insurgent ranks operated on more limited terms than in the multiracial rebel army. 'Ihe military adjustment to the presence of Cubans of color overlapped with one crucial component of the abolition law, which offered freedom to slaves who fought against insurgents. The interrogations of slave-soldiers pro¬ vide a rich source for the construction of loyal subjectivity as soldiers and officers often disagreed on its definition. The last three chapters of the book address the flourishing of public life in Cuba following the war. Cubans of African descent took great advantage of the extension of Spanish constitutional protections in the forms of press and associational freedoms and sanctioned political parties. Chapter 4 examines the amplified meaning of loyalty in the burgeoning public sphere as black newspapers and organizations attempted to prove their readiness for free¬ dom and citizenship. Chapter 5 zooms in on an incident that took place in the southern port city of Cienfuegos just weeks after the formal abolition of slavery in 1886. The racial politics of traveling representatives of the Liberal Autonomist Party blurred the boundaries between robust popular loyalty and violent public disturbance. Finally, chapter 6 looks at the final years of Span¬ ish rule in terms of how the proliferation of political affiliations merged with frustrations about the slow pace of postemancipation improvements to mar¬ ginalize the role of the loyal subject. The war for independence that began in 1895 only increased the fragmentation on the island, and by 1898 new rela¬ tionships between race and loyalty emerged as Spain was defeated, the United States intervened, and a race-transcendent vision of Cuban independence faced an uncertain future in a new republic. Throughout the book, cities and towns frequently provide the setting for the main developments and patterns that I trace. Clearly, Havana, the capital, and Santiago, the second-largest city and main anchor of eastern Cuba, fea¬ ture prominently. I give particular attention as well to the southern port city of Cienfuegos. This focus emerged at first from encountering the rich docu¬ mentation in its provincial archive and the effervescent community of schol¬ ars who gravitated toward it. Eventually, Cienfuegos developed a purpose inherent to my argument about race, loyalty, and empire. It was founded in 1819 through a Spanish initiative for white immigration to Cuba but quickly developed an economy that, like most other parts of the island, employed 16 INTRODUCTION African slave labor. As a large slave population, a smaller free population, and a multiracial society took shape, residents of Cienfuegos—and those govern¬ ing it—did not miss the transformation from what was supposed to be a white colony. Its role in the independence wars and its extensive public life shed light on some islandwide trends; of more significance, it offers a glimpse into the workings of race and loyalty not conditioned by competing connota¬ tions ascribed to Santiago and Havana: a center of potential and actualized anticolonial resistance, for the former, and the center of imperial power and intellectual life, for the latter . 48 Finally, a note about terminology. Most books about race in Latin America clarify classifications that might seem most confusing to contemporary English-speaking readers . 49 This is necessary and standard practice: readers should understand the synonymy between designations of pardo and mulato (usually translated as “mulatto” throughout the book)—both referring to mixed African and Spanish ancestry—and between moreno and negro (trans¬ lated as “black” or kept as “negro”—references to blackness and sometimes to “pure” African descent. In many cases, ambiguity in the sources prevents dis¬ tinguishing these groups, so I use the term “Cubans of color” or “Cubans of African descent” when necessary. An increase in references to gente de color (people of color) and the raza de color took place in the second half of the century, which fused mulato and negro nomenclature. Casta, another am¬ biguous term, denoted any person of mixed ancestry. There was a dual use of criollo (creole) to describe Cuban-born Spaniards (in contrast to peninsula- res, from Spain) and Cuban-born people of African descent (in contrast to bozales, who were born in Africa). We should approach the anachronistic term afrocubano with caution, as it speaks more to twentieth-century reck¬ onings of race and nation than to the era of Spanish rule. And above all, read¬ ers should realize how slippery each of these concepts could be, as categories overlapped to collapse and differentiate groups and individuals with frequent inconsistency. For the purposes of this book, equal attention is due to the presumed nor¬ mative categories against which these racial “differences” became meaning¬ ful. A relatively unexplored area of historical research concerns the meaning of whiteness in the colonial world. Being white was by no means inevitably interchangeable with being Spanish. Both categorizations depended on situ¬ ational and relational criteria that could encompass parentage and place of origin (sometimes verifiable with baptismal records) as much as color . 50 The well-known casta paintings of eighteenth-century Spanish America, which visually charted the dizzying number of categories of mixture, placed an espanol, A Faithful Account 17 CUBA 0 50 100 Miles 0 50 100 Kilometers JAMAICA HAITI map i Map of Cuba with major cities and contemporary political boundaries, not a bianco, at the top of the hierarchy. The conceptual links between race, blood, and place of birth made references to Spanish blood more common than white blood, although in the system’s originary trinity of Spanish, In¬ dian, and black, black blood could also be referred to as African blood. 51 Informal estimations of color often identified individuals as white—or some¬ times trigueno, “wheaty” or olive-skinned—and as the century progressed, more standardized censuses and references to Cubans “of color” elevated the category of whiteness above Spanishness. When the Spanish government es¬ tablished a Comision Blanca in the 1810s to encourage “white” immigration to Cuba, it initially had peninsular Spaniards in mind, but low interest on the peninsula forced the commission to broaden out to include French and Brit¬ ish migrants. Even as Cubans increasingly spoke of “whites”—often in rela¬ tion to anxieties about “black” (read as slave and free, negro and mulato) rebellion—they stayed focused on the category of “Spaniard” in light of the Constitution of 1812s provision that anyone residing in Spanish territory could be considered as such. (“Citizen” was a different story.) The shifting uses and definitions of white and Spaniard should encourage readers to avoid easy linkages between the two. An equally relevant clarification at the outset concerns my references to loyalty. Scholarship that considers pro-colonial sentiment in the Franco¬ phone, Anglophone, Tusophone, and Hispanophone imperial worlds regu¬ larly deploys the term “royalism” to shorthand various forms of allegiance during the eras of colonialism and independence, and “loyalists” to refer to the people who pledged it. These terms rarely appear in nineteenth-century Cuban and Spanish documents. The meaning of royal authority changed as Spain became a constitutional monarchy, and the monarch, as the source of authority and paternal rule, lost some of the symbolic prominence it had in earlier centuries, 52 The conflicted and interrupted reigns of specific mon- archs (such as Fernando VII and Isabel II), moreover, dimmed the luster of things “royal.” I tend to avoid the term “loyalists” as well. Reading across the different imperial case studies, supporters of European empires throughout the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolutions often embraced the term. And indeed, one of the richest fields of comparison for this book is that which considers African-descended British loyalists in the Atlantic World after the American Revolution. 53 On closer inspection, a pattern emerges in these studies: individuals and governments identified loyalists primarily after colonial rule or during the military conflicts that ended it, when the ability to win favors and collect reparations or pensions depended on the guise of permanent allegiance to A Faithful Account 19 the metropole. This created “strong identity” (to borrow Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker’s term) intended to remain fixed and durable over time . 54 In¬ stead, popular allegiance might better be understood in more flexible terms, as a mode of political belonging strategically invoked by states and subjects alike and, in the case of nineteenth-century Cuba, a concept joined to racial ideology in order to cement Spanish hegemony in Cuba. This is the idea be¬ hind my discussion of loyal subjectivity. The decision to avoid cementing allegiance as an “-ism” should not imply that Cubans, particularly those of African descent, were incapable of maintaining durable political ideas. They lived during a period when ideologies and social movements changed radi¬ cally and rapidly—even, and perhaps especially, liberalism, a practice whose contingency was evident to almost everyone. 20 INTRODUCTION ONE Belonging to an Empire Race and Rights The blood of colored men is red, and so is that of warriors, of healthy men: pure and noble blood. The juntas established in America have won this class over, granting them the equality for which they yearn. We must win them back with a similar declaration. “Come, pardo,” I would say: “Do not stray in search of the sweet food you desire. Do not flee your home to seek it, poor wretch (for they are very humble and like to be treated like this). Here at home you can have it.” —Jose Mejia Lequerica, addressing the Cortes of Cadiz, 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Spain in 1808 prompted a remarkably uni¬ form response from the Spanish American colonies: demonstrations of loyalty to the exiled monarch Fernando VII and the establishment of juntas (councils) that would rule in the king’s name as Joseph Bonaparte assumed the Spanish throne. Few calls for independence could be heard in the Ameri¬ cas. The Junta Central in Spain called for an assembly to redefine the rela¬ tionships between the king, his government, and his subjects, and in so doing it began to imagine what it meant for Spain to exist as both an empire and a nation. With French troops advancing south from Madrid, the Junta Central retreated in 1810 to the Isla de Leon at the southern port of Cadiz, and dis¬ solved to form a Regency Council that called for an assembly to draff Spain’s first constitution. It included deputies from across the Atlantic but stopped short of asserting the political equality of the American territories; the depu¬ ties instead insisted that they were not from “colonies or outposts ( factorias ) like those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish monarchy.” 1 So many interested parties from across the empire descended on the city to observe and participate in the proceedings that one onlooker wrote that “Spain had almost entirely been reduced to the walls of Cadiz.” 2 That microcosm bustled with people maintaining an empire entering its fourth century. Among the official delegates to the constitutional Cortes (Parliament) figured titled nobles, priests, lawyers, and merchants, and they mingled in the city with the sailors, slaves, and artisans who had done their part, too, for the prosperity and defense of Spain. By 1812, sixty-three of the delegates—about a fifth of the total—represented the American colonies. 3 As the port in Spain through which most trade and communication with the Americas took place, Cadiz was no stranger to transatlantic arrivals or to the presence of slaves, who were bought and sold there as they were in other im¬ perial ports. But during the constitutional debates, the presence of Ameri¬ cans and people of African descent—both of them subjected to a subordinate political status—served as a powerful reminder of the limits of the liberal principles being fiercely debated. That some of the American juntas began to favor independence and seek supporters of native and African origins exposed the contradictions in the Cadiz debates even further. In the midst of the commotion was a free Cuban man of African descent experiencing firsthand how the Spanish state gave political significance to racial difference. Jose Maria Rodriguez, identified in documents as a free mu¬ latto and vecino (resident) of Havana, spent the early months of 1812 stuck in Cadiz with no apparent role in the constitutional drama. Instead, he was strug¬ gling to acquire a passport—in this era, permission to make a single voyage— that would let him travel back to Cuba to take care of urgent financial matters and then return to Cadiz with the money that he needed to conduct business. He was one of several Cubans whose requests to travel stalled as the imperial bureaucracy struggled to stay afloat. Unlike applicants of full Spanish descent, however, Rodriguez had to wait for the Real Audiencia (high court) in Havana to send documentation of his free status back to Spain before he could receive permission to travel. 4 Moving within the empire as well as beyond it irregu¬ larly required state documentation for most people, and a passport—a basic document that identified membership in a sovereign political community— presented particular challenges to free people of African descent, whose full legal personhood was not recognized by Spanish law. In contrast, thousands of enslaved Africans continued to travel the Atlantic against their will each year with no such passports; as far as customs houses and officials were con¬ cerned they were cargo, property, but rarely individual people with fixed legal identities who required documentation. Rodriguez’s hassles occurred as the Cortes of Cadiz was determining the legal status of free people of African descent: whether they could be Spanish citizens or remain Spanish subjects. The crisis in Spain precipitated an empire-wide crisis of coherence, and people from Cortes delegates to frustrated Cubans routinely used the lan¬ guage of race to formulate their responses. Drawing on old languages of 22 chapter 1 citizenship and inclusion, the Cortes of Cadiz initiated new conversations about the political subjectivity of African-descended people in the Iberian world that became particularly resonant in Cuba as it remained part of the empire. Although the Constitution of 1812 was in effect only briefly (from 1812 to 1814 and 1820 to 1823), it established the terms of debates about who did and could belong to the newly imagined Spanish national empire, despite its long-term inability to reconcile liberalism with an ongoing imperial proj¬ ect. 5 In the context of a French invasion of the mother country, restructuring the Spanish nation had immediate implications for Cubans. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, French refugees arrived from Hispaniola. Now that the French had seized Spain, did those immigrants obey the same king? Did support for France equate to sedition or solidarity? Independence movements in mainland Spanish America found their ori¬ gins less in long-simmering nationalisms than in the chaos produced from competing attempts to reformulate Spanish sovereignty after 1808. 6 In this light, the politics of empire in Cuba merit close attention. The historical de¬ velopments that postponed violent independence conflicts in Cuba do not necessarily attest to an inherently conservative, backward-looking, or risk- averse political culture. As is well known many well-to-do Cubans preferred Spanish stability to the risks of a violent conflict when both sugar production and slavery were expanding precipitously—in other words, loyalty to Spain represented “the price of prosperity.” 7 That explanation leans heavily on the racial anxieties of white Cubans. 8 As the Cortes of Cadiz and other imperial projects reconsidered the privileges and meanings of whiteness in the early nineteenth century, the diverse Cubans who shaped the island’s political trajectory did not stop at trying to stifle independence; they sought to rei¬ magine the goals and limitations of loyalty to the Spanish empire and the political languages through which they expressed that support. Race, Rights, and the Constitution of 1812 Spain’s political identity as an empire had long been supported by legal struc¬ tures and governing institutions that generated interrelated hierarchical dis¬ tinctions between its diverse subjects. Representative advisory councils called cortes dated back to medieval Iberian kingdoms, but throughout the colonial period, the colonies had not figured in what had become a fulsome legislative system. All of the monarch’s subjects enjoyed the right of appeal, but the extension of royal justice to social subordinates functioned unevenly and according to paternalistic ideologies that attributed an inherent weakness to Belonging to an Empire 23 women, children, inhabitants of the colonies, and people of indigenous and African ancestry, who required the king’s benevolent protection. Measures to ameliorate the conditions of these weaker people made no presumption of their equality or capacity for membership in a polity. 9 The crisis of 1808 effected dramatic reimaginings of these relationships. In the process of draft¬ ing a constitution in Cadiz, the question of who could belong to Spain overlapped with the question of how Spain would unite its territories around the world, lhe answer offered by the Cortes of Cadiz was to envision Spain much more explicitly as a nation, even as it sought to preserve its older impe¬ rial configuration and regain territorial control from France. As Henry Ka- men explains it, “Spain existed as a nation because absence made it real.” 10 This is not to say that concepts of nationalism and citizenship did not exist before the Constitution of 1812. Among the earliest references to the Spanish nation, even in the absence of a political unit, were contrasts between Span¬ ish naturales (natives) and extranjeros (foreigners), and indeed, the select few who would claim to be vecinos (residents or citizens) enjoyed limited formal rights offered by the crown. Early modern notions of vecindad and natura- leza were primarily local categories of belonging from which broader concepts of a national community later derived, although the monarch could naturalize foreigners by issuing a carta de naturaleza (naturalization letter). Inhabiting those categories involved negotiations and affirmations within towns and cities, and although the boundaries were rigid enough to prevent women from claiming vecindad, early cases of indigenous, mestizo, mulatto, and non- Spanish European vecinos and naturales attest to the fluidity, and perhaps informality, of these designations. What Tamar Herzog notes as a “growing identification between ‘Spanishness’ and citizenship” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often checked by individuals who proved their love of community or “a sufficient sense of loyalty,” according to one eighteenth- century writer. 11 Thus test cases in the colonies often delineated citizenship’s boundaries, as individuals not from Iberia attempted to claim membership and as migrants to the colonies longed for their homeland. The Constitution of 1812 was a radical document that placed Spain far ahead of other European polities in its embrace of liberalism and its exten¬ sion of citizenship rights guaranteed by a constitution. It limited the power of the crown and traced its authority to popular sovereignty; it established civil rights and free trade; and it announced the elimination of entail and seigneur- ial jurisdiction. Beyond the concrete outcomes, the proceedings of the con¬ stitutional Cortes in 1810 and 1811 devoted significant time to discussing basic political questions and how they might be applied to Spain and its empire. 24