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5.HAVANA IN BLACK AND WHITE

From its very beginnings, Cuba’s own independence struggle was closely linked to the racial question. When Carlos Manuel de Céspedes launched the first call for liberation from Spain in 1868, he simultaneously freed the slaves from his own plantation, because there was no room for slavery in a free Cuba. This was the Grito de Yara, named after the plantation where it occurred. The date, October tenth, is still a national holiday, and also explains the name of the Diez de Octubre municipality, next to Old Havana. Céspedes was from Bayamo, a provincial city in Oriente between Las Tunas and Santiago. Bayamo would become a symbol of the independence struggle. The present day Cuban national anthem still reflects it: “Al combate corred Bayameses,” or “Onward to battle, people of Bayamo!”

Among the later leaders of the struggle, the black general Maceo – known as “El Titán de Bronce” – stood out for his leadership and bravery. His part in the struggle turned him into a symbol of a united, multiracial Cuba. Moreover, the independence war was in essence a rural guerrilla, and could not have been waged without the experience black Cubans had accumulated from survival in the wilds as cimarrones (runaways).

But Cuba’s hard-won independence was immediately hijacked by the United States, which turned the island into a de facto protectorate as of 1900. The United States imported its own racial attitudes – mostly the post–Civil War Jim Crow mentality from the South. This was a sad irony, because many of the Cuban freedom fighters had formed their political convictions in the United States, most notably the national hero José Martí in New York. Under U.S. influence, Céspedes’ dream of a post-racial Cuban society became an impossible utopia almost overnight.

The African cabildos gradually became the object of disapproval by white Cuban intellectuals, who saw them as remnants of the backwardness that should be eliminated now that Africans could become “civilized.” But African traditions survived both on the vast sugar estates of the interior and even in Havana. Cuba’s greatest twentieth-century writer, Alejo Carpentier, explored these situations in his writings as late as the 1930s. The yearly influx of workers from other Caribbean islands for the sugarcane harvest – mostly Haitians and Jamaicans – even shaped new blends of beliefs, rhythms, and traditions.

The changing attitudes between white and black Cuba are best illustrated by the career of Fernando Ortiz, the greatest of early Cuban anthropologists. Like his contemporaries, he originally saw the African traditions in Havana and Matanzas as examples of backwardness to be eliminated through enlightened education. His first studies of those traditions connected them almost exclusively to the Havana hampa, or underworld. Ortiz’s early writings explored Havana’s black culture as a criminal milieu, maintaining louche traditions and attitudes imported in colonial times from Seville and Cádiz. Yet precisely because they record that entire culture in great detail, these works – Los negros curros, Los negros brujos – are priceless uncensored testimonials of early African culture in Havana. His later trajectory illustrated the ambiguity of his early disapproval of black Cuba: like the upper-class ladies observing the Día de Reyes, he became fascinated by his own fears. He evolved in his own lifetime to publicly display respect and admiration for Afro-Cuban culture, passing on his later attitude to his main disciple Miguel Barnet, who became an active chronicler of Afrocubanismo, including in his recording of the last direct testimonials of runaway, or cimarrón, life in Cuba.