To Die for the Fatherland!

Daniel Howell Author

02/21/2020 Added

37 Plays

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19th-Century Cuban Nationalism and Havana's Multiracial Working Class

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[00:00:05.360]Welcome, everybody
[00:00:10.350]to our event tonight.
[00:00:13.030]I am very pleased to welcome Daniel Howell,
[00:00:17.920]who is here from Dartmouth,
[00:00:21.060]and who received his PhD from New York University
[00:00:25.540]in comparative literature in 2018.
[00:00:28.940]His dissertation, which was awarded with distinction,
[00:00:33.863]was titled Public Writers and Clandestine Papers:
[00:00:37.150]Labor Literature and Insurgency in Colonial Cuba,
[00:00:41.090]which in 2018, he received his PhD in 2018,
[00:00:45.110]and in 2019, he was the NEH Summer Scholar
[00:00:48.910]at the Center for Jose Marti Studies in Tampa, Florida.
[00:00:54.170]And his research, teaching and research interests are
[00:00:58.090]in literatures of the Western Hemisphere,
[00:01:01.560]media history, especially journalism,
[00:01:04.020]newspapers, radio, and podcasts,
[00:01:06.950]labor studies, critical race theory, queer theory,
[00:01:10.220]theories of historicism, and literary nonfiction.
[00:01:15.490]So he has teaching experience at New York University
[00:01:18.790]in the College of Arts and Sciences,
[00:01:20.410]in the Gallatin School of Individual Study,
[00:01:24.420]and the Steinhardt School
[00:01:25.930]of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
[00:01:31.170]This evening, he is going to talk to us
[00:01:35.660]about Cuban nationalism.
[00:01:38.470]The title of his topic, the title of his talk is
[00:01:41.447]"To Die for the Fatherland: 19th-Century Cuban Nationalism
[00:01:46.127]"and Havana's Multiracial Working Class."
[00:01:51.550]I'm gonna introduce Daniel.
[00:01:56.740](audience applauds)
[00:01:59.390]Thank you.
[00:02:02.110]Is this on?
[00:02:03.340]Okay.
[00:02:04.210]Yeah, so, I wanna first start off just by thanking everyone
[00:02:08.400]here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
[00:02:10.610]for the very warm welcome I've received.
[00:02:13.020]Of course, I wanna thank James Garza,
[00:02:14.800]who's been so hospitable, Waskar Ari.
[00:02:17.840]I wanna thank the support staff,
[00:02:19.730]Tim Mulhaupt, Deborah McWilliams.
[00:02:22.230]In absentia, I also wanna thank Joy Castro,
[00:02:25.340]who was the one who was so kind
[00:02:26.830]to extend this invitation to me to begin with,
[00:02:30.560]and I'm just, I'm really excited to be here.
[00:02:35.560]So I'm gonna be talking about
[00:02:39.920]my book project, or a version of the material
[00:02:43.310]in my current book project.
[00:02:46.230]There's an episode of The Simpsons
[00:02:49.130]where Marge Simpson buys
[00:02:52.500]like a fancy dress kind of on consignment,
[00:02:56.480]and she keeps like cutting it up
[00:02:58.120]and doing different things
[00:02:59.010]with this one designer dress that she owns,
[00:03:00.980]and I feel like that's almost a little bit like
[00:03:02.190]what I'm doing with this project is
[00:03:03.410]I'm constantly trying to like figure out different ways
[00:03:05.520]that I can frame this material,
[00:03:07.340]so this is one in a long series of experiments
[00:03:10.810]in how I'm trying to understand
[00:03:13.150]exactly what this material means and what to do with it.
[00:03:17.600]Specifically, I'm gonna be talking
[00:03:18.641]about intellectual culture
[00:03:20.030]among the 19th-century Cuban working class,
[00:03:22.610]and especially among cigar makers.
[00:03:28.461]I'm gonna be talking especially
[00:03:29.340]about this one newspaper that I've been working on a lot,
[00:03:32.030]which is called La Aurora, which was published in Havana
[00:03:35.070]from 1865 to 1868.
[00:03:39.580]There we go.
[00:03:40.413]There it is.
[00:03:42.410]La Aurora is hardly unknown among Cuba's scholars.
[00:03:46.040]In fact, reams have been written about it,
[00:03:49.580]but I wanna argue that we haven't yet reckoned with it
[00:03:52.010]as an intellectual publication.
[00:03:55.140]I'll explain what I mean.
[00:03:57.290]In his 1998 book "Bread or Bullets:
[00:03:59.707]"Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba,"
[00:04:03.190]historian Joan Casanovas quotes
[00:04:06.040]an 1866 fictional story from La Aurora
[00:04:11.400]in which Casanovas glosses the story this way:
[00:04:14.720]He says the protagonist, quote, "at age 10,
[00:04:18.077]"entered as an apprentice in a press,
[00:04:19.937]"and when he was 40, he had learned
[00:04:21.467]"as much as he knew the first day," end quote.
[00:04:24.430]For Casanovas, this serves as straightforward evidence
[00:04:28.070]of the labor conditions of apprentices at the time.
[00:04:32.140]However, he neglects to contextualize this evidence
[00:04:35.120]within the fantastic and jocular elements of the story
[00:04:38.740]which might raise questions about how easily we can use it
[00:04:42.000]as a transparent historical document.
[00:04:44.850]The story is the second in a series called
[00:04:48.170]Cuentos de Salon, Salon Tales, and is signed
[00:04:51.350]with the indubitably pseudonymous Marco de St. Joseph.
[00:04:55.900]The protagonist is named Rafaguilla,
[00:04:58.280]which I think means 'little gust of wind,'
[00:05:00.110]and he's over seven feet tall.
[00:05:02.220]Upon being fired
[00:05:04.030]from his 30-year apprenticeship for indolence,
[00:05:06.640]he meets the devil, who is disguised as a hunchback,
[00:05:09.670]and who bestows upon him a magic jar.
[00:05:13.000]Rafaguilla then goes on to set sail for the Americas,
[00:05:15.810]which means that his apprenticeship,
[00:05:17.570]taken by Casanovas as a realistic account
[00:05:19.690]of Cuban working conditions,
[00:05:21.520]must have taken place somewhere
[00:05:22.650]outside of the Western Hemisphere.
[00:05:24.930]So here, Casanovas' discomfort
[00:05:27.530]with the literary quality of this newspaper, La Aurora,
[00:05:30.700]leads him to a slightly dishonest use of evidence.
[00:05:34.270]He never explains anything
[00:05:35.390]about the weird story that he's quoting,
[00:05:38.000]and so I think it also potentially leads him
[00:05:39.860]to a misreading of what's going on.
[00:05:42.460]But what comes next in the story indicates
[00:05:46.470]an even more troubling trend in the way
[00:05:48.970]that La Aurora is read.
[00:05:51.360]Once he's in the Americas,
[00:05:53.458]Rafaguilla uses the demonic magic jar to cast a spell
[00:05:56.990]to procure a job for himself writing at a newspaper,
[00:06:00.280]which rolls off the press, quote, "stinking of sulfur,"
[00:06:05.095](Daniel speaks in foreign language)
[00:06:07.460]However, none of the readers can make heads or tails
[00:06:09.680]of what he has produced.
[00:06:11.390]The letters themselves rebelled against Rafaguilla,
[00:06:14.302](Daniel speaks in foreign language)
[00:06:18.840]The very medium conspires against him.
[00:06:20.450]The project is doomed from the outset.
[00:06:22.460]Of all texts for Casanovas to mishandle,
[00:06:24.670]he stumbles precisely over one
[00:06:26.170]in which a worker's literary efforts are spurned.
[00:06:29.410]The episode thus serves
[00:06:30.480]to illustrate the a priori condescension
[00:06:32.430]that the writing in La Aurora has been subject to,
[00:06:35.180]which has obscured the particular kind
[00:06:36.650]of literary intellectual publication that it was.
[00:06:40.060]The case of Rafaguilla also helps to set up my argument,
[00:06:43.570]for Rafaguilla did not merely desire
[00:06:45.760]to spend his time writing as an end in and of itself.
[00:06:49.010]His great frustration in the story arises
[00:06:50.980]when the writing he has labored over is rejected.
[00:06:54.490]In other words, the careful negligence
[00:06:56.430]of La Aurora's literature
[00:06:57.800]on the part of historians constitutes
[00:06:59.640]a fundamental repudiation of the very literary task
[00:07:02.390]of the paper's writers.
[00:07:03.770]They did not write for writing's sake,
[00:07:05.990]nor did they intend their writings to serve
[00:07:08.360]as repositories of neutral evidence
[00:07:10.390]for historical circumstances.
[00:07:12.400]They wrote in order to be read as novelists,
[00:07:14.750]philosophers, historians, and politicos.
[00:07:20.260]But this isn't just a matter
[00:07:21.140]of respecting working-class culture.
[00:07:23.220]When we don't read workers as intellectuals,
[00:07:25.620]we don't actually see what's going on.
[00:07:28.850]I'm not making an argument here
[00:07:30.900]that workers all have common interests,
[00:07:33.170]because I'm not sure if they always do.
[00:07:35.380]I'm also not making a Marxist argument
[00:07:37.090]that workers are the agents of history either.
[00:07:39.530]I'm not sure if that proposition always works.
[00:07:43.830]Rather, I'd like to try to modulate that axiom
[00:07:46.070]that workers are the protagonists of history,
[00:07:47.960]and suggest instead that capitalism,
[00:07:49.850]at least in its historical, agrarian,
[00:07:52.650]imperial, and industrial modes,
[00:07:54.810]seems to thematize labor as the engine of historical change,
[00:07:58.670]and as a result, if you control labor power,
[00:08:01.700]you drive society.
[00:08:02.990]My point is that if you don't listen
[00:08:04.400]to what historical laborers are saying
[00:08:06.200]and if you aren't attentive to the modes of expression
[00:08:08.260]in which they vocalize it,
[00:08:09.440]you'll miss what's actually going on.
[00:08:12.750]And so I'm gonna argue for this phenomena,
[00:08:15.890]argue for this in relation to phenomena
[00:08:18.820]which aren't always even obviously related to labor,
[00:08:20.970]so I sort of tried to jimmy a timeline
[00:08:25.430]of what happens in 19th-century Cuba here,
[00:08:27.710]and it looks like a little bit whimsical.
[00:08:30.670]That's truly just because I didn't know
[00:08:33.530]how to do this in like the way,
[00:08:35.690]I'm sure there has to be
[00:08:36.940]a more straightforward way to do this,
[00:08:38.040]and I just kind of did it with Microsoft Paint.
[00:08:44.122]The beginning of the Caribbean 19th century, of course,
[00:08:47.070]I mean, I would date to the Haitian Revolution.
[00:08:52.600]We see a consistent anxiety
[00:08:56.240]about black rebellion in 19th-century Cuba,
[00:08:59.710]and also probably some inspiration among black rebels
[00:09:05.070]who were looking at Haiti, so of course from 1810 to 1812,
[00:09:08.520]we have the famous Aponte's Rebellion in Cuba.
[00:09:12.130]We'll also have another similar uprising in 1843 to 1844,
[00:09:18.040]dubbed La Escalera that's associated with the figure
[00:09:21.490]of the mixed-race poet Placido.
[00:09:25.510]And then of course at the end of the century,
[00:09:27.210]we have three, a series of three wars,
[00:09:31.980]anti-colonial wars that are fought with Spain.
[00:09:35.940]The longest is 1868 to 1878,
[00:09:39.800]the first of these wars, the Ten Years' War,
[00:09:41.820]and then these wars will conclude
[00:09:44.730]with what in the United States
[00:09:45.820]is often called the Spanish-American War,
[00:09:47.520]but which is periodized differently in Cuba, of course.
[00:09:51.190]There's a three-year war in the 1890s
[00:09:53.690]which becomes the Cuban War of Independence.
[00:09:58.740]So I'm gonna ask us all to cast ourselves
[00:10:01.230]back to the second half of the 19th century
[00:10:03.530]on the island of Cuba,
[00:10:04.620]and I'm going to ask us to resist the teleology
[00:10:07.910]of what we know from the last century and a half.
[00:10:10.860]In the second half of the 19th century,
[00:10:12.840]nobody knew what would become
[00:10:14.800]of the belated colony that was Cuba.
[00:10:17.520]Now we know, of course,
[00:10:19.790]but then there seemed to be many possible outcomes:
[00:10:22.220]Cuba could continue as a colony,
[00:10:23.890]it could be fully integrated as a province of Spain,
[00:10:26.840]it could become semi-autonomous,
[00:10:28.770]it could be annexed by the United States.
[00:10:31.060]There were moments when intelligent, earnest people
[00:10:33.500]in Cuba thought that most of these things could happen,
[00:10:36.120]and sometimes even advocated for them.
[00:10:38.760]In other words, it wasn't only the Cuban state
[00:10:40.790]that had yet to be brought into existence.
[00:10:42.340]It was the Cuban nation itself
[00:10:44.420]as an unambiguous spiritual construct.
[00:10:47.870]So that's one monumental shift that was occurring in Cuba
[00:10:50.700]in the late 19th century,
[00:10:51.810]but since I'm talking about labor,
[00:10:53.050]I of course can't neglect to discuss the other huge change
[00:10:55.580]that was happening and that was revolutionizing
[00:10:57.780]the landscape of labor in that time and place,
[00:10:59.650]namely the abolition of slavery.
[00:11:02.190]In the 1880s, Cuba went from being
[00:11:04.220]what historians call a fundamentally slave society
[00:11:07.260]where the largest industries depend
[00:11:08.880]on the labor of enslaved people
[00:11:10.700]to a society in which slavery no longer existed.
[00:11:13.890]Slavery affected all of Cuban society,
[00:11:16.207]and it certainly disfigured the entirety
[00:11:18.130]of the Cuban labor landscape.
[00:11:20.890]As the Castro era economic historian Julio Le Riverend wrote
[00:11:24.930]in 1965, "In a basically slave society,
[00:11:28.397]"the free worker tends not to remain as such."
[00:11:31.610]I of course want to vigorously reject the suggestion
[00:11:33.790]that non-enslaved laborers
[00:11:34.810]in the Cuban slavocratic order were unfree in any way
[00:11:37.330]that could be compared to enslaved unfreedoms,
[00:11:41.280]but research does indicate that enslaved
[00:11:43.220]and free workers shared a labor market
[00:11:44.960]and that the existence of slavery did distort the dynamics
[00:11:49.070]of that labor market for free workers as well.
[00:11:55.673]In 1866, 20 years before the ultimate abolition
[00:11:58.910]of slavery in Cuba, the Cuban cigar workers
[00:12:00.780]made their first unsuccessful attempt to unionize,
[00:12:03.000]and I would argue
[00:12:03.850]that their efforts were doomed from the start
[00:12:05.720]because, after all, how do you unionize a factory
[00:12:08.930]where many of the workers themselves are also enslaved?
[00:12:14.400]Because as these two monumental shifts of abolition
[00:12:17.970]and decolonization were occurring,
[00:12:19.920]so too was a third shift also occurring
[00:12:22.210]that I would also incorporate into this picture,
[00:12:24.840]namely the rise of urban industrialism in Cuba,
[00:12:28.210]mostly in the form of cigar manufacturing.
[00:12:30.770]By the late 1850s, tobacco,
[00:12:33.220]long the island's second most important commodity,
[00:12:35.750]had grown almost as important as its first, sugar.
[00:12:39.180]By this moment, scholars estimate
[00:12:40.890]that about half of the population
[00:12:42.690]of Havana was involved in the tobacco industry,
[00:12:45.550]thus the large questions proliferated:
[00:12:48.660]What would become of the island of Cuba?
[00:12:50.350]Who was to have a claim on it and what kind?
[00:12:52.230]What would the Cuban economy look like?
[00:12:54.040]Who would have power within this economy?
[00:12:56.090]There were also granular questions
[00:12:57.630]important to political strategy:
[00:12:59.570]How could you revolutionize a society
[00:13:02.640]that was caught under an authoritarian regime?
[00:13:05.270]By what mechanisms do novel political subjectivities
[00:13:08.130]call themselves into existence?
[00:13:14.480]Right, so I'll primarily be discussing
[00:13:19.500]the worker's culture that originated in the 1860s,
[00:13:25.140]but even before that particular culture emerged,
[00:13:28.790]Cubans were grappling with all of these problems.
[00:13:31.490]So for instance, the poet Placido,
[00:13:34.330]who I mentioned earlier, he was accused of
[00:13:37.220]and executed for leading the black uprising
[00:13:40.350]in the 1840s known as La Escalera.
[00:13:45.000]Placido in the 1830s wrote a little-studied poem
[00:13:48.320]that was first published posthumously in 1862,
[00:13:51.690]titled La Utilidad del Trabajo, The Usefulness of Work.
[00:13:58.060]Placido himself, it's worth noting, was also a laborer.
[00:14:01.070]He was a peinetero,
[00:14:02.450]which is to say he made combs out of tortoise shells.
[00:14:09.840]In his poem, after articulating an almost Calvinist elegy
[00:14:15.530]to the virtue of work, he begins to address the workers,
[00:14:20.580]artesanos, in the second person as vosotros,
[00:14:24.670]and he goes on to make a surprising move.
[00:14:30.860]God made us all, all brothers,
[00:14:32.590]at birth and at death the same.
[00:14:34.840]Those who prove most human,
[00:14:36.720]rebellious before the voice of despotism,
[00:14:39.450]whether kings, shepherds, or artisans,
[00:14:42.660]they shall be his favored children.
[00:14:46.920]Reading this poem, I thought that Placido was setting up
[00:14:50.980]the case for, a more liberal case,
[00:14:54.240]a liberal equality of treatment,
[00:14:55.980]but he winds up making an extremely different point.
[00:14:58.700]By his reasoning, the people who show themselves
[00:15:01.140]to be least subordinate in the face of injustice
[00:15:03.780]are ultimately the most human.
[00:15:05.620]Thus Placido addresses a corporatist population
[00:15:10.130]comprised of different sectors:
[00:15:12.620]agricultural workers like shepherds,
[00:15:14.570]industrial workers like artisans, and so on,
[00:15:17.540]who also as workers are politicizable.
[00:15:22.850]The final twist of this very long poem depends
[00:15:26.430]upon the major premise that he spends the first part
[00:15:28.720]of the poem sketching out.
[00:15:31.440]If the reader concurs
[00:15:34.030]that the economy pays those who work, such as artisans,
[00:15:37.100]then why shouldn't it pay everyone?
[00:15:41.990]And if it is right, pastors and artisans,
[00:15:44.040]that a king pay his sentinels,
[00:15:45.530]why mustn't those hands be paid
[00:15:47.200]that are always keeping vigil over your hacienda?
[00:15:50.850]You live free of care, more peaceful, happily,
[00:15:53.520]more peaceful, happy, and healthy
[00:15:55.230]than he who is delivered from his cradle
[00:15:57.050]to the quick caprice of fortune.
[00:16:01.080]The poem continues for four more stanzas,
[00:16:02.840]though this one is the most explosive
[00:16:04.670]and the most damningly final a climax
[00:16:06.920]followed by a denouement,
[00:16:08.530]though as he proceeds to implore them
[00:16:10.290]to heed his final words, to praise work
[00:16:12.740]and to hope that his poetry will reap eternal fame for him,
[00:16:15.690]he doesn't fail to address tobacco farmers, vegueros,
[00:16:19.030]specifically making the appeal to them.
[00:16:23.130]It is only
[00:16:26.130]at this moment
[00:16:27.580]at which the first person appears in his poem.
[00:16:30.300]It's not up here, but he says, "For I too have worked."
[00:16:32.757](Daniel speaking in foreign language)
[00:16:34.932]The critic Ifeoma Nwankwo writes about such moments
[00:16:38.430]in Placido as a kind of coyness characteristic of him,
[00:16:41.300]talking back while seeming to be in agreement,
[00:16:44.710]quote, "The indication of a racial solidarity
[00:16:47.007]"without explicitly naming it."
[00:16:50.480]As forceful as it is, this text is still coy.
[00:16:53.430]Placido does not name slavery in the poem.
[00:16:55.470]He introduces his logic at length
[00:16:57.400]while strategically obscuring his ultimate move.
[00:17:00.160]Rather, the vigilant enslaved people
[00:17:04.180]are like the king's sentinels,
[00:17:05.700]which is to say they deserve payment.
[00:17:08.340]The life of the free farmer or worker is better
[00:17:10.670]than that of someone who is delivered from his cradle
[00:17:12.920]to the quick caprice of fortune.
[00:17:15.920]Part of the effect here is a calculated rhetorical one,
[00:17:18.350]not to over-identify the enslaved man as a slave,
[00:17:21.080]but instead to present him as a he, a human being.
[00:17:26.540]In other words, Placido is thinking rigorously
[00:17:28.470]about an audience of address, and in this case,
[00:17:30.580]I would contend he is imagining an audience
[00:17:33.070]who have some identity themselves as workers.
[00:17:40.290]I'm gonna move into some of my commentary on La Aurora,
[00:17:43.970]but of course, there's something else
[00:17:46.590]that's important to identify about La Aurora,
[00:17:48.780]which is that it is associated with the beginning
[00:17:53.080]of the readings in cigar factories in Cuba in 1865,
[00:17:56.250]the so-called lecturas, 1864, 1865.
[00:18:05.940]Right, so while a lot of attention has been paid
[00:18:08.470]to La Aurora as the first Cuban worker's newspaper,
[00:18:11.890]as I've said, there's been a consistent scholarly impulse
[00:18:14.660]to ignore the fact that the paper was also
[00:18:16.840]an almost entirely literary publication
[00:18:19.970]which often featured some pretty weird stuff.
[00:18:22.220]One was the story I mentioned earlier about Rafaguilla,
[00:18:24.620]the apprentice who inherits
[00:18:25.730]a cursed magic jar from the devil.
[00:18:28.560]Another titled What is in a Cigar Box:
[00:18:30.280]An Industrial Fairy Tale,
[00:18:32.180]is about fairies who represent the different commodities
[00:18:35.900]that make up a cigar box.
[00:18:37.210]So the fairy Nacarada represents mother-of-pearl taken
[00:18:41.360]from the Persian Gulf.
[00:18:43.670]The fairy Elefantina represents ivory from Guinea,
[00:18:46.670]and so on.
[00:18:48.500]After the sun goes down,
[00:18:49.450]the fairies take turns shrieking their stories
[00:18:52.180]into the night of how they were traumatically extracted
[00:18:55.840]from the places of their origin
[00:18:57.550]and inserted into the global chain of commodities.
[00:19:01.000]One story I especially like is about a dandy
[00:19:03.520]who discovers a clump of woman's hair on the ground
[00:19:06.170]which talks to him, and which he proceeds to lock himself
[00:19:09.270]in his bedroom with for unspecified purposes.
[00:19:14.300]I'll be focusing on one text in particular though
[00:19:16.470]here in this context, a sort of prose poem published
[00:19:19.400]at the end of 1865 by Luis Victoriano Betancourt,
[00:19:23.270]titled Morir por la Patria, To Die for the Fatherland.
[00:19:28.410]I'll be using Betancourt's text to think about the lecturas
[00:19:32.340]as a scene of transmission of literature
[00:19:37.240]to a working audience.
[00:19:40.260]The role played by La Aurora in the lecturas
[00:19:42.460]has been explored by scholars such as Jose Rivero Muniz
[00:19:47.026]and Araceli Tinajero,
[00:19:48.850]just a couple of the many who have discussed it,
[00:19:51.490]and here I'll be building on their work
[00:19:53.110]to draw out some meditations on the lecturas
[00:19:55.980]as an epochal and political media modality.
[00:20:00.590]I'll be suggesting that to study the lecturas is
[00:20:02.790]to socialize literature and thus to open up space
[00:20:06.060]for its politicization over and against its atomistic mode
[00:20:09.300]in the form of private silent reading.
[00:20:16.595]La Aurora has become a privileged archive
[00:20:19.240]for documenting the origins of the lecturas.
[00:20:22.320]The paper's audience was either technically illiterate
[00:20:24.580]or at least functionally illiterate
[00:20:26.760]with little time or inclination to read,
[00:20:28.700]so even as La Aurora announced its dedication
[00:20:31.790]to the class of artisans,
[00:20:34.130]it lamented the widespread illiteracy in their ranks
[00:20:37.170]and promoted a number of educational schemes for them,
[00:20:39.990]so there are even some pretty incredible items
[00:20:42.440]in the paper interpolating the audience as illiterate
[00:20:45.070]where they say, "Hey, if you don't know how to read,
[00:20:48.277]"here are some places you might learn,"
[00:20:50.540]so it's pretty incredible for a written publication, right?
[00:20:53.950]In other words, this was a newspaper founded
[00:20:56.170]in advance of the literacy of its public.
[00:20:58.740]After all, as the name suggests,
[00:21:00.510]La Aurora was the dawning of a new day,
[00:21:02.340]an emissary from the future.
[00:21:04.750]Thus, in the political backwater
[00:21:06.210]that was late colonial Cuba,
[00:21:07.720]the cigar rollers undertook one
[00:21:09.260]of modernity's first great experiments in mass media
[00:21:12.290]where the audience did not have to be educated
[00:21:14.350]or enjoy leisure time in order to be folded
[00:21:16.670]into the media system,
[00:21:18.000]and they did this all in the absence
[00:21:19.800]of novel technological instruments.
[00:21:22.550]This is another sense
[00:21:23.460]in which La Aurora was from the future.
[00:21:25.100]It signaled a coming age of media technology
[00:21:27.420]that would penetrate into new spheres of life.
[00:21:30.470]So I want to leverage the idiosyncrasy
[00:21:32.740]of the lecturas to suggest
[00:21:34.180]that La Aurora is of world historical interest
[00:21:37.120]in its will to superintend something
[00:21:38.910]like a truly mass medium.
[00:21:41.440]As historian of the book Martin Leons
[00:21:43.300]has so pointedly written
[00:21:44.520]of late 19th-century Western Europe, quote,
[00:21:47.017]"The first generation which acceded to mass literacy
[00:21:49.637]"was also the last to see the book unchallenged
[00:21:52.017]"as a communications medium by either the radio
[00:21:54.437]"or the electronic media of the 20th century."
[00:21:57.730]At this moment of historical overhang,
[00:21:59.790]it becomes possible to argue that the lecturas responded
[00:22:02.840]to a gestalting epochal desire to turn novel scenes
[00:22:06.250]of society into collective audiences of ideology.
[00:22:09.860]This desire, I would contend,
[00:22:11.470]would later beget broadcast technology
[00:22:13.430]and broadcast culture proper.
[00:22:15.610]So here I'm actually, I unsuccessfully tried
[00:22:17.890]to insert a link here, which I'm,
[00:22:19.680]so I'm gonna exit the PowerPoint.
[00:22:26.182]This is a clip from 1930,
[00:22:28.280]so certainly after the period
[00:22:29.960]that I'm actually talking about, but still pretty early,
[00:22:33.270]which was actually really illuminating for me when I saw it.
[00:22:40.180]So this was actually,
[00:22:41.013]some of you might have already seen it.
[00:22:42.210]It was sort of making the rounds
[00:22:44.720]on Cuban studies Twitter,
[00:22:46.080]but I'll just play a bit for you to kind of give a sense
[00:22:50.580]of what this looked and felt like in the early days.
[00:22:54.963](man shouting faintly)
[00:23:02.815](men laughing faintly)
[00:23:16.410]Well, okay.
[00:23:18.636]I guess you can't really hear it.
[00:23:23.540]I found this to be not exactly like
[00:23:25.940]what I had imagined this phenomenon
[00:23:28.170]that I had already been studying
[00:23:29.030]for a couple years when I saw it,
[00:23:30.350]namely there's kind of chatter going on around you,
[00:23:33.840]you perceive how other people around you are also reacting.
[00:23:38.280]Sometimes there are even responses to the lector.
[00:23:48.130]So why did this practice take place,
[00:23:50.930]take hold in Cuba of all places?
[00:23:54.710]We can document cases of factories
[00:23:56.490]around the world in the 19th century
[00:23:58.290]where workers would read out loud to each other.
[00:24:00.290]However, these experiments outside
[00:24:01.770]of Cuba had a decidedly informal quality to them.
[00:24:05.390]The workers would simply steal time during lulls
[00:24:08.220]in work to read out loud.
[00:24:10.060]Meanwhile in Cuba, the whole thing was so institutional
[00:24:12.440]that readers would actually have a dais
[00:24:14.870]in the cigar factories
[00:24:16.120]and would actually receive a salary to do this.
[00:24:19.470]So the first answer to this question
[00:24:22.120]of why Cuba is somewhat accidental,
[00:24:24.350]it's namely that the production of cigars,
[00:24:26.460]the primary commodity of Cuban urban industrialism,
[00:24:29.360]lent itself uniquely to reading
[00:24:31.000]because cigar production illustrates something
[00:24:33.810]about the Industrial Revolution.
[00:24:35.180]It was not always about technology.
[00:24:37.500]When cigar production, quote-unquote, industrialized,
[00:24:40.540]no machines were introduced.
[00:24:42.020]A cigar factory was merely a bigger space
[00:24:44.200]than a cigar workshop,
[00:24:45.790]where more workers could be surveilled
[00:24:47.670]and disciplined and their work standardized.
[00:24:50.890]The absence of machines kept cigar-making silent,
[00:24:53.700]which meant that the cigar factory was quiet enough
[00:24:55.960]to read out loud in.
[00:24:58.630]Right, so the silence in cigar factories is perhaps
[00:25:01.200]a contingent factor in this story,
[00:25:03.270]but as a second, perhaps more speculative,
[00:25:05.510]though also broader and less incidental reading
[00:25:08.340]that the lecturas emerged in Cuba,
[00:25:10.510]I would like to suggest
[00:25:11.410]that they performed a compensatory function
[00:25:13.390]for the deficiencies created
[00:25:15.130]by the belated colonial regime on the island,
[00:25:18.480]serving as an ersatz schoolhouse for cigar rollers,
[00:25:21.510]or even an occasion to circumvent the colonial censor.
[00:25:25.040]The Spanish censors in Cuba were
[00:25:26.410]by turns brutal, arbitrary, and inept.
[00:25:34.140]The lecturas, which depended upon performance
[00:25:36.460]and collective understanding as we've seen,
[00:25:38.210]represented the possibility not only
[00:25:40.280]to expand the reach of literary circulation,
[00:25:42.770]but also to transform the valences of meaning,
[00:25:46.500]and so here I'm gonna circle back to Morir por la Patria.
[00:25:50.640]As Araceli Tinajero points out, what set La Aurora
[00:25:54.030]apart from other newspapers is
[00:25:55.380]that it was meant to be read out loud.
[00:25:58.170]So we can imagine that this poem was read
[00:26:02.280]out loud to cigar workers,
[00:26:04.480]which thoroughly colors the way that I understand it.
[00:26:08.060]In Morir por la Patria, Betancourt lists florid descriptions
[00:26:11.890]of great ideals of Romanticism,
[00:26:13.860]such as love, nature, family, genius, and so on,
[00:26:17.590]concluding after each that though it is indeed beautiful,
[00:26:21.040]it is more beautiful to die for the fatherland.
[00:26:24.400]A naive silent reading of Betancourt's text might see this
[00:26:27.440]as a pro forma exercise in vacuous nationalist cliche.
[00:26:32.730]Thus it would seem to take its cue
[00:26:34.140]from the storied tradition of hackneyed nationalist poetry
[00:26:37.290]which marks the earliest Cuban letters.
[00:26:39.340]For instance, Betancourt's text might be at home
[00:26:41.840]in the first-ever anthology of quote-unquote Cuban poetry,
[00:26:44.900]the 1859 "Cuba Poetica."
[00:26:50.060]The volume's editors counted as the island's first poet
[00:26:52.990]the Creole Manuel de Zequeira y Arango,
[00:26:56.540]a colonial in the Spanish army who wrote
[00:26:58.500]in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
[00:27:01.477]"Cuba Poetica" opened with a poem of his
[00:27:03.840]that began in this way:
[00:27:08.040]He who dies honorably lives eternally,
[00:27:10.750]and may he who does not vibrate avenging steel bravely
[00:27:13.800]for the sake of the fatherland die buried
[00:27:16.440]in infamous oblivion.
[00:27:20.160]Thus the equivocal history of Cuban literature begins
[00:27:22.730]with the doggerel of dulce et decorum est
[00:27:25.740]for the benefit of a country that was not Cuba,
[00:27:27.790]for the fatherland here is Spain.
[00:27:30.210]This poem about the 1808 siege of Zaragoza,
[00:27:32.970]published some two years after the siege was over,
[00:27:35.450]was composed with a certain
[00:27:36.620]anti-Napoleonic ideological urgency,
[00:27:39.410]though not with a military urgency.
[00:27:42.050]If the same Spanish nationalism
[00:27:43.700]were to have structured Betancourt's text,
[00:27:46.840]the patria, fatherland, could be invoked
[00:27:49.520]as little more than an aesthetic token.
[00:27:52.390]However, Betancourt's fatherland was decidedly not Spain,
[00:27:55.680]and herein lies the difference
[00:27:56.930]between Zequeira and Betancourt.
[00:27:58.980]To Die for the Fatherland,
[00:28:00.170]published only a few years before the outbreak
[00:28:02.160]of the Ten Years' War with Spain,
[00:28:03.460]was all but a naked call to insurrection.
[00:28:06.250]From his biography, we know that Betancourt
[00:28:08.220]would take up arms himself in 1868 and even participate
[00:28:11.290]in the constitutional assembly at Guaimaro.
[00:28:15.080]Under the Spanish colonial authority,
[00:28:16.850]this text should not have been allowed to exist,
[00:28:18.910]but thanks to a wooden censorial understanding,
[00:28:21.130]a minimum of artifice was needed
[00:28:22.700]to disguise its significance.
[00:28:24.760]Where Betancourt wagered the patria
[00:28:26.670]would look like Spain on the page,
[00:28:28.200]he knew that his listening audience
[00:28:29.570]would understand it as Cuba.
[00:28:31.640]The apparently empty, universalizing,
[00:28:33.640]unoriginal content that seems to have been produced
[00:28:36.630]in accordance with perfunctory genre conventions
[00:28:39.330]ultimately served as a smokescreen.
[00:28:41.480]A silent reader would not meditate
[00:28:42.960]on the specific contextual meaning,
[00:28:44.360]for none would be presumed to exist.
[00:28:46.420]All the while, the references to nationalist commonplaces,
[00:28:49.130]such as the beauty of the Cuban countryside,
[00:28:51.460]constitute a wink to the listener
[00:28:52.900]who would have understood the political game.
[00:28:56.700]By 1865, Betancourt was already an established writer
[00:28:59.930]who contributed regularly
[00:29:01.140]to the more prestigious publication El Siglo,
[00:29:03.980]yet he chose to publish To Die for the Fatherland
[00:29:06.510]in La Aurora of all places.
[00:29:08.420]Could it be that
[00:29:09.253]in order to create militant Cuban nationals,
[00:29:11.170]it was necessary to penetrate into layers of society
[00:29:13.680]that precisely did not read newspapers,
[00:29:16.130]La Aurora would have been useful to Betancourt
[00:29:18.120]not out of any particular commitment to workers themselves,
[00:29:20.800]but rather as a path of access
[00:29:22.620]to the deep untapped power
[00:29:24.280]of Cuba's slumbering lumpen proletariat.
[00:29:29.080]When war finally did break out in 1868,
[00:29:31.270]a vogue would emerge among Cuban nationalists
[00:29:33.430]to use a formula that almost exactly follows Betancourt's.
[00:29:37.000]Most famous is the text of "La Bayamesa,"
[00:29:39.040]the Cuban national anthem,
[00:29:40.170]composed in 1868 by Perucho Figueredo,
[00:29:44.080]which of course features the line,
[00:29:46.142](Daniel speaking in foreign language)
[00:29:48.189]To die for the fatherland is to live.
[00:29:50.940]Figueredo's text came out three years after Betancourt's,
[00:29:54.550]in the first year of the Ten Years' War.
[00:29:56.890]Luis Perez Jr. documents a spate
[00:29:58.710]of similar rhetorical constructions in both prose and poetry
[00:30:01.930]from the more than 30-year-long
[00:30:03.160]anti-colonial struggle of thoughtless pain,
[00:30:05.270]though none as early as Betancourt's.
[00:30:07.650]Morir por la Patria represents a hinge
[00:30:09.610]between Zequeira's Cuban-based Spanish nationalist poetry
[00:30:13.300]with its dilettantish aestheticization of war ideology
[00:30:16.730]to Figueredo's outright call for martyrs.
[00:30:19.370]Betancourt self-consciously, even parodically,
[00:30:21.760]literary style obscured to a silent reader
[00:30:24.520]what it would have made clear to a listening audience
[00:30:26.810]like the kind we saw in the archival footage.
[00:30:31.250]Betancourt is thus instructor
[00:30:32.570]for imagining how a non-reading audience
[00:30:34.340]could have understood Cuban nationalism
[00:30:35.870]at a moment when it could not be openly documented.
[00:30:39.160]Moreover, because he,
[00:30:42.020]because the communal environment
[00:30:43.230]of the lecturas exaggerated dimensions of the text
[00:30:45.510]that would have otherwise been subtle,
[00:30:48.010]in at least his case they probably helped
[00:30:49.760]to convey an implicit message in a text
[00:30:52.970]that a censor would not have approved had it been explicit.
[00:30:57.520]As a result, La Aurora helps us
[00:30:58.940]to take the pulse of a populist nationalism
[00:31:01.300]that doubtlessly existed,
[00:31:02.530]but is otherwise not easy to document.
[00:31:09.390]Despite considerable scholarly attention
[00:31:12.280]devoted to La Aurora,
[00:31:13.290]texts such as Betancourt's have been read around
[00:31:15.360]in an almost surgical way.
[00:31:17.260]At least part of the problem can be chalked up
[00:31:19.040]to the inattentiveness, to an inattentiveness
[00:31:22.320]to the text's aural mode of transmission.
[00:31:25.710]Of course in large part this neglect also stems
[00:31:27.870]from historians' unwillingness to engage
[00:31:29.620]with plebeian culture
[00:31:30.570]in anything but the most utilitarian manner.
[00:31:33.000]In fact, in the cigar factory,
[00:31:34.610]a community did not have to be imagined.
[00:31:36.760]It could be seen, felt, smelled, and of course heard.
[00:31:40.770]Thus the working class provided a channel
[00:31:42.730]through which the nation
[00:31:43.580]could not only be theorized, but mobilized.
[00:31:46.970]We can hang an identifiable politics on Betancourt.
[00:31:49.750]He was, for as long as we're able to document him,
[00:31:51.660]a nationalist.
[00:31:52.670]The next two figures I'm going to discuss, however,
[00:31:54.580]Martin Morua Delgado and Jose de Jesus Marquez,
[00:31:58.390]are much more politically ambiguous,
[00:32:00.500]perhaps in part due to the fact
[00:32:02.070]that they were politically active in the 1870s
[00:32:04.230]and later through very difficult
[00:32:07.060]and complicated times and circumstances.
[00:32:10.250]Martin Morua Delgado is certainly, along with Rafael Serra,
[00:32:14.130]one of the black labor intelligentsia
[00:32:16.080]from the late Cuban 19th century best known to historians.
[00:32:20.673]In the 1980s, no less a figure than the poet Nicolas Guillen
[00:32:23.390]even authored a book titled
[00:32:25.317]"Quien Fue Martin Morua Delgado?"
[00:32:28.570]Born a free Cuban of color, Morua Delgado published
[00:32:31.280]his first articles in the Havana-based,
[00:32:33.210]pro-Spanish newspaper El Ciudadano in 1879,
[00:32:37.860]immediately after the conclusion of the Ten Years' War.
[00:32:40.300]Subsequently he moved to the province of Matanzas
[00:32:42.660]to run a newspaper there called El Pueblo,
[00:32:45.400]which was the organ for a black mutual aid society,
[00:32:47.850]because at the time, mutual aid societies were segregated.
[00:32:51.640]Under the tutelage of the famous Afro-Cuban journalist
[00:32:53.950]and political activist Juan Gualberto Gomez,
[00:32:57.310]Morua Delgado became a separatist,
[00:32:59.230]believing at least for a period
[00:33:00.530]that independence from Spain represented the best chance
[00:33:02.650]for Afro-Cubans to be accepted by white Cubans.
[00:33:05.980]After the Spanish colonial government found him out
[00:33:08.420]for a conspiracy to overthrow the regime,
[00:33:10.240]he was deported to the United States.
[00:33:12.810]Over the course of a decade,
[00:33:14.270]Morua Delgado lived in the three biggest Cuban communities
[00:33:17.680]in the country at the time:
[00:33:18.860]New York, Key West, and my home city of Tampa,
[00:33:22.660]which when Morua Delgado landed there,
[00:33:24.700]had only recently been incorporated into a city.
[00:33:27.530]All three of these cities
[00:33:28.370]boasted significant cigar industries,
[00:33:30.160]which Morua Delgado also worked in.
[00:33:33.240]Some scholars have identified him in fact
[00:33:35.100]as the first Afro-Cuban to work
[00:33:37.913]as a lector in a cigar factory,
[00:33:39.460]which will of course be important
[00:33:40.970]for the way that we interpret him.
[00:33:43.240]While living in these various Cuban exile communities
[00:33:45.670]along the eastern seaboard of the US,
[00:33:47.960]Morua Delgado remained engaged with intellectual life,
[00:33:51.590]including exile Cuban political activism.
[00:33:54.320]He brought his newspaper El Pueblo with him
[00:33:56.290]to a number of the cities he lived in
[00:33:58.080]and wrote for others as well.
[00:34:00.180]In Key West in the early 1880s,
[00:34:02.100]he distinguished himself from other Cuban nationalists
[00:34:04.590]by opposing the notorious anarchist group known
[00:34:08.390]as the Nihilistas Ubiquitarios, or the Ubiquitous Nihilists.
[00:34:13.590]The nihilists advocated the use of dynamite
[00:34:15.740]in their struggle against various oppressors,
[00:34:17.560]in particular against the Spanish.
[00:34:19.270]However, Morua Delgado championed the contrarian view,
[00:34:22.200]unpopular in separatist circles of the time,
[00:34:24.570]that the radicals limit themselves
[00:34:26.010]to only noble and dignified means of struggle,
[00:34:29.497]and that they outright reject the use of dynamite.
[00:34:32.990]Perhaps this was a sign
[00:34:34.010]of his waning commitment to separatism,
[00:34:35.810]for later in the decade, in the 1880s,
[00:34:38.050]Morua Delgado sided with labor radicals
[00:34:40.190]against Cuban nationalists
[00:34:41.540]who wanted to block cigar factories
[00:34:43.170]from hiring Spanish workers.
[00:34:45.660]Morua Delgado wrote that class solidarity
[00:34:48.070]should trump national and ethnic divisions,
[00:34:50.130]and declared his affiliation with the then-influential
[00:34:52.580]Havana-based anarchist Enrique Roig,
[00:34:55.580]who had written that capitalism was the fundamental,
[00:34:58.770]quote, "bourgeois regime that enslaves us," end quote.
[00:35:02.270]By the same token, during his time in the United States,
[00:35:04.840]Morua Delgado seems to have become more uncompromising
[00:35:07.680]in his vision of how Cuba was to overcome racism
[00:35:09.930]in the wake of slavery.
[00:35:11.520]While his erstwhile collaborator Juan Gualberto Gomez
[00:35:14.770]shared Morua Delgado's ambition
[00:35:16.840]that Cuba could achieve what Ada Ferrer has called,
[00:35:19.370]quote, "racial transcendence,"
[00:35:21.340]the two men disagreed on exactly how to bring it about.
[00:35:24.200]When Gomez and Morua Delgado met
[00:35:25.940]upon the latter's return to Cuba in 1890,
[00:35:28.790]Gomez extended an invitation to his friend
[00:35:30.830]to join his black organization,
[00:35:32.520]El Directorio Central de la Raza de Color,
[00:35:35.840]dedicated to defending the rights
[00:35:38.110]and liberties of black Cubans in post-abolition Cuba.
[00:35:41.200]However, Morua Delgado rebuffed Gomez,
[00:35:43.390]arguing that organizing even into an anti-racist society
[00:35:46.780]of black men threatened to re-entrench their status
[00:35:49.130]as racialized others.
[00:35:51.260]At several moments, Morua Delgado used rhetoric
[00:35:54.060]that Jose Marti will pick up on later,
[00:35:55.930]namely that black identity threatened to,
[00:35:57.700]quote, "enslave black people all over again."
[00:36:01.120]To many today, Morua Delgado's commitment
[00:36:03.000]to strategic colorblindness will seem naive.
[00:36:06.150]Indeed it was this conviction which ultimately led him
[00:36:08.530]to support the catastrophic piece of legislation
[00:36:10.800]that would ban all political parties in Cuba
[00:36:12.750]based on racial affiliation,
[00:36:14.290]and which has come to be very tightly identified with him,
[00:36:16.940]the so-called Ley de Morua, or Morua's Law.
[00:36:20.360]As a result of all of this, historian Philip Howard has read
[00:36:23.170]in Morua Delgado's general up-by-our-bootstraps ethos
[00:36:26.890]as evidence of the, quote,
[00:36:28.077]"internalization and acceptance of the racial inferiority
[00:36:31.047]"of blacks constructed by whites," end quote.
[00:36:36.000]However, there is enough counter-evidence
[00:36:37.370]that it becomes possible to read Morua Delgado
[00:36:39.410]in a very different way.
[00:36:40.250]For instance, in the 1890s, when Morua Delgado abandoned
[00:36:44.070]the cause of separatism to advocate instead
[00:36:46.630]for greater autonomy for Cuba under Spanish rule,
[00:36:49.110]he suggested that black people would bear the greatest brunt
[00:36:51.700]of any violence sustained in service of independence,
[00:36:54.400]and indeed he was right on this point.
[00:36:56.860]That same decade, Morua Delgado declared war
[00:36:59.020]on the writer Cirilo Villaverde,
[00:37:01.280]whose famous anti-slavery novel "Cecilia Valdes"
[00:37:04.381]Morua Delgado decried because in it he saw a capitulation
[00:37:07.900]to larger structures of racism,
[00:37:09.780]for Morua Delgado never believed
[00:37:11.680]that the abolition of slavery alone
[00:37:13.670]would end black oppression.
[00:37:15.550]He set out to rewrite this novel in a way
[00:37:17.650]that was more true to life and more politically aware.
[00:37:20.640]The resulting pair of novels,
[00:37:21.897]"Sofia" and "La Familia Unzuazu,"
[00:37:24.910]features many depictions of and meditations
[00:37:27.500]on racist behaviors experienced by Afro-Cubans.
[00:37:31.100]The critic Carmen Lamas has argued
[00:37:33.630]that Morua Delgado's novels included calculated signals
[00:37:37.000]for a black audience.
[00:37:38.340]For instance, she points to the character of Magdalena
[00:37:40.270]in the novel "Sofia," who is born in Cuba
[00:37:42.590]but raised in the United States.
[00:37:44.230]When Magdalena returns to Cuba as an adult,
[00:37:46.870]she brings with her a belief taught to her
[00:37:48.870]in her Quaker school
[00:37:50.030]that whites should maintain a distance from black people.
[00:37:52.960]In this, Carmen Lamas reads a general wariness
[00:37:56.310]about the Americanization
[00:37:57.370]that threatened to subsume Cuba in the 1890s.
[00:38:00.210]Moreover,
[00:38:03.100]the specific reference to the Quakers seems
[00:38:06.100]to be an attack directed at both the novelist Villaverde
[00:38:08.910]and also at the leader at the time
[00:38:11.490]of the Cuban independence movement, Tomas Estrada Palma,
[00:38:15.010]who would go on to be the first president
[00:38:16.540]of the Cuban Republic.
[00:38:18.210]Both of them had connections to Quakerism,
[00:38:20.780]and Morua Delgado deemed both of them to be racists.
[00:38:24.320]So Morua Delgado's legacy is complicated.
[00:38:27.370]I don't necessarily think
[00:38:29.030]that I'm the appropriate arbiter of this complicated legacy,
[00:38:32.470]and important work has been done to grapple with it
[00:38:34.600]by scholars of color and actual Cubans,
[00:38:36.470]such as Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, Phillip Howard,
[00:38:39.130]and the aforementioned Carmen Lamas.
[00:38:42.660]I will say that Morua Delgado, who is a searing polemicist,
[00:38:45.440]can be exhilarating to read.
[00:38:46.810]I would especially recommend his critique
[00:38:49.010]of "Cecilia Valdes" to anyone.
[00:38:50.940]Nevertheless, reading him, I am also moved to reflect
[00:38:53.350]on the way that Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot
[00:38:58.880]theorizes about how power is built
[00:39:00.630]into archives in different ways.
[00:39:03.000]Historians have cataloged dozens
[00:39:05.000]of black working-class newspapers
[00:39:07.410]from the 19th century in Cuba.
[00:39:09.610]However, Morua Delgado's El Pueblo is the only one
[00:39:12.330]that I've actually found archived anywhere.
[00:39:14.440]So I wonder, could it be that Morua Delgado
[00:39:16.470]is well preserved because his anti-racism,
[00:39:18.800]while insistent, also placed much of the onus
[00:39:21.380]of action on black people
[00:39:22.640]and because he so fervently believed
[00:39:24.230]in black assimilation to dominant white culture?
[00:39:27.570]In 1894, Morua Delgado also weighed in on a debate
[00:39:31.050]that was then raging about the historical memory of Placido,
[00:39:34.070]who I mentioned at the beginning of the talk.
[00:39:36.190]You'll recall that Placido was the one
[00:39:37.840]who was accused of leading a black uprising in Cuba in 1844.
[00:39:43.390]Like many others in the 1890s,
[00:39:44.950]Morua Delgado argued that Placido should be recuperated
[00:39:47.590]as a symbol of Cuban opposition to the Spanish,
[00:39:51.320]characterizing the so-called Escalera Uprising of 1843-44
[00:39:55.470]as a fundamentally anti-colonial action.
[00:39:58.930]I wanna focus here on an outlier
[00:40:00.790]in this debate named Jose de Jesus Marquez,
[00:40:04.410]whose opinion on the topic
[00:40:05.600]I do not believe has ever received any scholarly attention.
[00:40:10.390]Like Morua Delgado,
[00:40:11.570]Marquez believed in vindicating the memory of Placido.
[00:40:14.740]However, exceptionally, Marquez disputed the claim
[00:40:18.020]that Placido's uprising was at all anti-colonial,
[00:40:20.450]declaring that Placido fought, quote,
[00:40:22.297]"not for the freedom of his country, but his race."
[00:40:25.820]That's him.
[00:40:28.190]The desultory political development
[00:40:30.380]of Marquez bears many similarities to Morua Delgado's.
[00:40:33.560]Unlike Morua Delgado, Marquez was white.
[00:40:36.360]However, the two men both had careers as laborers.
[00:40:39.550]Whereas Morua Delgado worked in cigar factories,
[00:40:42.170]Marquez worked as a mechanic on a sugar mill,
[00:40:44.180]where, as he would later write,
[00:40:46.260]he often saw enslaved people beaten
[00:40:48.030]to within an inch of their lives.
[00:40:50.550]Like Morua Delgado,
[00:40:51.610]Marquez lived for a stretch in the United States
[00:40:53.810]where he did his technical training,
[00:40:55.460]and also where he seems to have discovered
[00:40:57.510]radical labor movements.
[00:40:59.580]In 1866, Marquez became co-editor of La Aurora,
[00:41:02.600]where he outlined his idiosyncratic understanding
[00:41:04.660]of anarchism in a series of editorials.
[00:41:07.280]He was not to hold this post for long, however,
[00:41:09.090]resigning within a year
[00:41:10.020]so that he could dedicate himself fully
[00:41:11.560]to the struggle for unionization.
[00:41:13.820]In 1870, Marquez would be deported
[00:41:15.750]to the Isle of Pines for revolutionary activity
[00:41:17.820]against the Spanish colonial government.
[00:41:19.860]When he returned to the main island later in the decade,
[00:41:22.500]he seems to have resumed writing
[00:41:23.710]about anarchism and socialism.
[00:41:25.550]By the 1890s, Marquez, like Morua Delgado,
[00:41:28.210]seems to have adopted a reformist,
[00:41:29.820]anti-separatist position on Cuban nationhood.
[00:41:33.220]However, the most interesting turn
[00:41:34.780]in Marquez' writing life occurs in 1894
[00:41:37.200]when he begins to write
[00:41:38.250]about historical black revolt in Cuba,
[00:41:41.200]which is when he published an article on La Escalera.
[00:41:45.890]Among the insights that he brings to his treatment
[00:41:48.940]of the rebellion is to document on the basis
[00:41:50.910]of a long-evidentiary dossier appended to the article
[00:41:54.760]that the romantic poet Placido
[00:41:56.100]was indeed intimately involved with the uprising.
[00:41:58.820]This had been previously disputed
[00:42:00.420]and would be subsequently disputed again.
[00:42:04.380]The fact that he produced a similar account
[00:42:06.660]of Aponte's Rebellion several months later in 1812,
[00:42:10.950]the other major black uprising in early 19th-century Cuba,
[00:42:17.450]has gone unnoticed in commentaries
[00:42:19.060]on his article about Placido.
[00:42:21.320]After the first article,
[00:42:22.270]Marquez realizes he has hit on a novel interpretation
[00:42:24.960]of important events in the Cuban 19th century
[00:42:26.880]and returns to reform a similar analysis
[00:42:29.020]of the Aponte incident.
[00:42:30.360]Marquez ascribes authorship of the uprisings
[00:42:32.790]to Placido and Aponte respectively,
[00:42:35.160]though in the case of Aponte,
[00:42:36.600]he provides less novel evidence.
[00:42:38.950]The most compelling aspects of both of these articles,
[00:42:41.110]however, come in Marquez' dual assessment
[00:42:43.740]that these uprisings primarily concerned racial oppression
[00:42:46.520]to the exclusion of colonial oppression,
[00:42:48.550]and that the enslaved rebels were to be vindicated
[00:42:50.960]for struggling against their white oppressors.
[00:42:53.680]In 1892, Juan Gualberto Gomez seems to have set the tone
[00:42:57.480]for Cuban nationalists in this debate by writing of Placido
[00:43:00.027]and the other black residents of Matanzas
[00:43:02.170]who were executed in the wake of La Escalera that, quote,
[00:43:05.217]"Tyranny was not satisfied with taking their lives.
[00:43:07.957]"It also went to great trouble to, in Machiavellian style,
[00:43:11.127]"attribute to them the odious project of murdering whites
[00:43:14.187]"with the aim of spreading outrage and terror,
[00:43:16.127]"thus erecting a divisive barrier
[00:43:17.847]"between the two great branches of the Cuban family."
[00:43:22.790]Gomez, like many other nationalists,
[00:43:24.980]shows a desire to exculpate white Cubans,
[00:43:27.320]displacing the Creole complicity
[00:43:28.840]in the cleavage between the, quote,
[00:43:30.547]"two great branches of the Cuban family"
[00:43:32.550]that was slavery entirely onto the colonial system.
[00:43:36.390]In this way, Gomez made a space for Placido
[00:43:38.270]on the nationalist historical consciousness
[00:43:40.900]by cleansing him of associations
[00:43:42.570]that might make whites uncomfortable.
[00:43:44.950]In the wake of Gomez' reassessment,
[00:43:47.250]other Cubans such as Morua Delgado and Jose Marti
[00:43:49.980]also tried to cast Placido as an anti-colonial crusader.
[00:43:54.260]Some separatist Cubans even began to agitate
[00:43:56.660]for a statue to be erected in Placido's honor,
[00:43:59.830]and this is when Marquez wrote his article.
[00:44:02.460]Marquez' response to the statue proposal
[00:44:04.560]was a full-throated endorsement,
[00:44:06.090]though precisely for a reason that Gomez sought to suppress.
[00:44:09.520]In support of the campaign, he wrote, quote,
[00:44:11.657]"The memories of those who struggle
[00:44:13.027]"to break the chains of tyranny ought to be cast in bronze
[00:44:15.587]"so they will never perish."
[00:44:17.330]But while Marquez seconded Gomez' reverence for Placido,
[00:44:20.380]he reversed the justification.
[00:44:22.370]Placido was noteworthy for his hatred
[00:44:25.900]rather than for any spirit of reconciliation.
[00:44:28.990]Early in the article,
[00:44:29.890]Marquez will make his case against Gomez clear,
[00:44:31.930]maintaining that, quote, "Placido, like his companions,
[00:44:34.967]"was not a political conspirator,
[00:44:36.727]"but rather an enemy of the white race.
[00:44:38.957]"He did not conspire for the independence of his country.
[00:44:41.127]"He conspired for the independence of his race."
[00:44:46.210]Lest this position be misunderstood,
[00:44:47.890]Marquez goes on to command, "Let it not be believed
[00:44:50.847]"that we desire to deprive Placido of the glory owed to him
[00:44:53.957]"for having conspired against his oppressors.
[00:44:56.317]"We believe he was right."
[00:44:58.640]The exchange was not to end there, however.
[00:45:00.310]The Cuban nationalist Manuel Sanguily, who was also white,
[00:45:04.270]it's complicated to say that
[00:45:05.103]because I say white nationalist.
[00:45:07.200]He was a nationalist who just happened to be white.
[00:45:09.600]I mean, not happened to be.
[00:45:11.300]Okay, so, Sanguily would also participate in the debate.
[00:45:14.880]Writing in 1893, after Gomez, but before Marquez,
[00:45:18.500]Sanguily first estimated that Placido had been a traitor
[00:45:22.020]and a bad poet, a conspirator who deserved punishment,
[00:45:25.210]the punishment he received for his violent ideology.
[00:45:27.870]But after Marquez' article on Placido,
[00:45:30.350]Sanguily wrote another article,
[00:45:31.980]now questioning half-heartedly
[00:45:33.390]whether it was really possible to know
[00:45:35.300]about Placido's guilt on the basis of Spanish evidence,
[00:45:38.130]all the while still repeating his dismissal
[00:45:39.990]of Placido as a poet.
[00:45:41.840]Marquez opposed all of these views.
[00:45:44.530]Against the subtly,
[00:45:46.370]or not so subtly racism of Cuban nationalist Sanguily
[00:45:50.710]and the overtly racist nationalism of Spanish loyalists,
[00:45:55.680]he held that Placido was indeed a hero.
[00:45:59.160]Against leaders of the Cuban independence movement
[00:46:00.950]like Gomez and Marti, who spared little effort
[00:46:03.000]in trying to reverse the Spanish propaganda efforts
[00:46:05.380]that would pit white against black, he disputed, quote,
[00:46:11.098]"the formulation of an ideal black insurgent
[00:46:13.377]"who rose above others in acts of selfless
[00:46:15.637]"and raceless patriotism."
[00:46:17.620]That's Ada Ferrer's language.
[00:46:22.970]However it was that Marquez may have come
[00:46:24.610]to be interested in the subject,
[00:46:26.140]and however he may have come to this position on it,
[00:46:28.230]he ultimately makes a relatively schematic point.
[00:46:30.520]In both articles he uses,
[00:46:32.070]both his article on Placido and his article on Aponte,
[00:46:34.550]he uses the language of logic and justice
[00:46:37.190]to vindicate the right of the oppressed,
[00:46:39.240]in this case, enslaved Africans in Cuba,
[00:46:41.840]to fight violently against their oppressor,
[00:46:43.720]here, the white race.
[00:46:46.800]On Placido he writes, "All conspiracies obey a cause,
[00:46:51.017]"that of the colored race discovered in 1844
[00:46:53.597]"as with others have occurred on this island
[00:46:56.137]"have obeyed the struggle that has always existed
[00:46:58.127]"between black and white,
[00:46:59.207]"that is to say between the oppressed and the oppressor."
[00:47:02.140]And on Aponte, quote, "It was just and even logical
[00:47:05.447]"that the oppressed should think of escaping
[00:47:07.147]"from the tutelage of the oppressor," end quote.
[00:47:11.380]His commentary on the precise oppression represented
[00:47:13.970]by slavery is elliptical, appealing to the, quote,
[00:47:16.137]"knowledge that so many Cuban intellectuals have come to
[00:47:19.067]"in the wake of abolition."
[00:47:20.240]For instance, in his article on Placido,
[00:47:22.000]Marquez writes, quote, "We all know the cruel treatment
[00:47:25.497]"that was meted out to these men on our plantations.
[00:47:28.037]"Thus it was inevitable that enemies of the white race
[00:47:31.417]"were created at the time.
[00:47:33.157]"The acrimony that the enslaved feel
[00:47:34.927]"towards their masters is logical, comprehensible,
[00:47:37.607]"and thus to be expected."
[00:47:39.130]Similarly of Aponte, he writes,
[00:47:45.177]"The history of slavery on the island
[00:47:46.527]"of Cuba is known to all,
[00:47:47.867]"which is why we omit all commentaries on it,
[00:47:50.407]"but we will recall as the motive of the conspirators
[00:47:53.187]"the tyranny with which the slaves
[00:47:55.187]"who worked without respite
[00:47:56.267]"or hope of improving their situation were treated
[00:47:58.787]"in order to amplify the wealth of their masters.
[00:48:01.247]"In this case, in spite of the criticism of detractors,
[00:48:03.557]"we hold as justified revolutions emanating
[00:48:05.727]"from the social order
[00:48:06.687]"for as long as they have their justification
[00:48:09.467]"in the advancement of society."
[00:48:11.770]On the subject of the brutality of slavery,
[00:48:13.800]Marquez will go on to recount one story in particular
[00:48:15.920]that he himself witnessed as a machinist
[00:48:17.670]on the Santa Rosalia sugar mill in 1856.
[00:48:20.860]An enslaved overseer who had long before survived the period
[00:48:25.420]of Aponte's Rebellion recounted how he at the time,
[00:48:28.910]quote, "grew tired of whipping."
[00:48:31.300]Marquez reflects with horror that, quote,
[00:48:33.067]"his master did not grow tired of ordering the whippings."
[00:48:40.410]Marquez encouraged a re-evaluation of Aponte in particular,
[00:48:45.050]pulling apart some of the received wisdom about the case.
[00:48:47.920]After cataloging the expression 'worse than Aponte,'
[00:48:51.366](Daniel speaking in foreign language)
[00:48:52.510]employed by those who think of Aponte
[00:48:54.190]as an inveterate criminal,
[00:48:56.570]Marquez goes on to dispute the popular image of him,
[00:48:59.920]for instance, the claim that Aponte's people killed
[00:49:02.270]all the white men they could while sparing the women
[00:49:04.790]strikes him as, quote,
[00:49:05.977]"an extremely exaggerated assessment."
[00:49:08.740]And of Francisco Calcanos assertion
[00:49:11.170]that Aponte had been, quote, "a mercenary assassin
[00:49:14.037]"and kidnapper in the service
[00:49:15.247]"of several disturbed potentates of the epoch,"
[00:49:18.350]Marquez notes dryly
[00:49:20.980]that there doesn't seem to be any evidence.
[00:49:23.440]Most importantly, Marquez observes
[00:49:25.080]that there was very good reason to burn the plantations.
[00:49:27.400]Namely, the destruction of the plantations would imply,
[00:49:29.650]quote, "the complete destruction
[00:49:31.227]"of their agricultural wealth,
[00:49:32.587]"and thus the disappearance
[00:49:34.087]"of the capital used to buy slaves," end quote.
[00:49:37.010]In other words, to destroy the plantations represented
[00:49:38.940]both the deserved moral retaliation
[00:49:40.540]against the engine of capital driving slavery,
[00:49:43.010]as well as a tactic to bring down the institution.
[00:49:45.380]Thus the deflagration associated with Aponte,
[00:49:48.630]the most menacing and infernal dimensions
[00:49:50.430]of his story sometimes told by whites,
[00:49:52.330]was both justified and strategic.
[00:49:54.800]Though Marquez was not the first white commentator to argue
[00:49:57.870]that the major 19th-century Cuban black revolts
[00:50:01.140]targeted white people without regard to national origin,
[00:50:04.070]he may have been the first
[00:50:05.000]in print to follow this argument with an endorsement.
[00:50:08.390]This is not to say that he was original.
[00:50:10.130]Marquez' accounts resembled some of the oral traditions
[00:50:13.020]about Aponte collected in outlying neighborhoods
[00:50:15.610]of color of Havana in the 1970s by Jose Luciano Franco,
[00:50:19.380]which not only affirmed Aponte's involvement
[00:50:21.310]in the uprisings,
[00:50:22.150]but stressed their fundamentally emancipatory character
[00:50:24.860]which seemed to date back to the 19th century.
[00:50:27.450]Franco also stresses the admiration among Aponte's forces
[00:50:30.520]for the liberatory Haitian Revolution
[00:50:32.530]which is how Marquez also frames his discussion of Placido.
[00:50:36.380]A black Cuban who had published anything
[00:50:38.300]as daring as Marquez' text
[00:50:39.760]might have jeopardized his own safety.
[00:50:45.070]At the same time, Marquez' rhetoric of logic
[00:50:49.620]and justifications in his schematic portrait of Placido
[00:50:51.767]and Aponte as the oppressed struggling
[00:50:53.700]against the oppressors is not very sensitive
[00:50:56.200]to the specificity of black struggle in the Americas.
[00:50:59.160]Yet his account of the earlier 19th-century uprisings
[00:51:02.520]of enslaved Africans is remarkable,
[00:51:04.260]among other reasons, because it draws a subliminal line
[00:51:06.760]from the free workers' movements
[00:51:07.960]that began to emerge in the 1860s to Placido and Aponte.
[00:51:12.670]I wanna end this topic
[00:51:13.503]on what is perhaps the inevitable topic, Jose Marti,
[00:51:16.330]the father of the Cuban nation.
[00:51:17.990]Marti had innumerable links to the writers
[00:51:20.000]and their milieu that I have been discussing.
[00:51:21.870]Most of them contributed
[00:51:26.408]to La Aurora,
[00:51:27.480]which also frequently featured Marti's teacher,
[00:51:30.760]Rafael Maria de Mendive.
[00:51:32.798]Mendive, by the way, was the one
[00:51:35.040]who initiated the adolescent Marti into Cuban nationalism.
[00:51:39.130]In exile in the 1870s in the Yucatan,
[00:51:41.290]Marti became intimate friends
[00:51:42.570]with the playwright Alfredo Torruella,
[00:51:44.480]another member of that circle.
[00:51:45.860]In 1879 when Torruella died at a young age,
[00:51:48.930]Marti eulogized him at the Liceo de Guanabacoa
[00:51:51.910]in eastern Havana.
[00:51:53.340]At that moment, Marti was the secretary of the liceo,
[00:51:55.970]a post once held by La Aurora's founder, Saturnino Martinez.
[00:52:00.150]Marti also knew Morua Delgado personally
[00:52:02.560]in New York in the 1880s.
[00:52:03.890]We have documentation of this.
[00:52:05.900]So Marti, I think we can say, is in many ways
[00:52:08.900]a product of this environment
[00:52:10.850]of worker's intellectual culture.
[00:52:13.940]I could really drone on about all the ways
[00:52:16.880]in which you can kind of show similarities
[00:52:18.860]between what he writes
[00:52:19.920]and what a lot of these other people write.
[00:52:21.990]So there's something really weird
[00:52:23.110]that happens when we represent Marti
[00:52:24.860]as this self-fashioned genius who's the father of Cuba,
[00:52:28.960]whether of Cuban literature or of Cuban nationalism,
[00:52:32.300]because when we do that,
[00:52:33.260]we erase the actual Cuba that Marti came from.
[00:52:36.500]Thus there's the tricky paradox in representing Marti,
[00:52:38.630]the symbolic king of democracy
[00:52:40.730]to whom all rhetorical tribute must be rendered.
[00:52:45.210]However, in some literary essays published in La Aurora,
[00:52:49.470]Martinez, the newspaper's founder, Saturnino Martinez,
[00:52:52.880]provides a corrective counter-vision.
[00:52:55.200]Martinez calls himself a hack writer,
[00:52:57.963](Daniel speaking in foreign language)
[00:52:59.966]who has succumbed to a mania for lobbing compliments
[00:53:02.270]at every nobody that felt like squawking
[00:53:04.180]around the scabrous edges of Parnassus
[00:53:06.540]with the ridiculous pretension of occupying a place
[00:53:08.810]on that sacred mount.
[00:53:10.530]Here, Martinez refers to his own strategy as a cigar roller
[00:53:15.000]of flattering the literary types of the Havana of his moment
[00:53:19.220]in order to ingratiate himself into their world.
[00:53:21.970]But even as Martinez longs for literary acceptance
[00:53:24.800]in 1860s Havana, he harbors no illusions
[00:53:27.430]about the ultimate marginality of that milieu.
[00:53:30.470]The image of these hobby poets,
[00:53:32.050]quote, "squawking around the scabrous edges of Parnassus,"
[00:53:35.480]represents a clear-eyed assessment
[00:53:36.870]of their literary standing
[00:53:38.310]within the greater scheme of universal literature.
[00:53:41.140]This assessment also squares with the low opinion held
[00:53:43.880]of Cuban literature by other Cubans in the 19th century
[00:53:46.700]up to and including Marti.
[00:53:48.700]To valorize Martinez' picture of Cuban literature
[00:53:51.200]is not quite to assert any kind of incipient universality
[00:53:55.410]in this colonial slave society
[00:53:56.990]where few meaningful approximations
[00:53:58.600]of democratic politics could have existed.
[00:54:00.830]Nevertheless, there is something admirable
[00:54:03.130]in Martinez' championing of the quidam,
[00:54:06.430]the nobody, the everyman.
[00:54:08.410]His praise is entirely disconnected
[00:54:10.100]from any idea of prestige.
[00:54:12.250]Despite being inconsequential,
[00:54:13.720]Martinez' literary Havana is not saddened
[00:54:15.870]by its uncompromising literary future.
[00:54:18.170]This world of loud squawkers parading as poets is convivial.
[00:54:21.670]Not one has ascended Parnassus as Marti will go on to do,
[00:54:25.080]so as of this moment, there is no hierarchy among them.
[00:54:28.480]The form that Marti is slotted into now
[00:54:30.430]as the self-fashioned genius stands
[00:54:32.120]in uncomfortable relation to the democratic
[00:54:34.150]and righteous love of country
[00:54:35.240]that he has taken to represent.
[00:54:37.320]However, using Martinez as a springboard,
[00:54:39.490]it may be possible to cultivate a different understanding
[00:54:42.010]of Marti as the product of a squawking multiplicity
[00:54:44.980]that labored for the conditions
[00:54:46.320]which might one day give rise to someone like him.
[00:54:49.310]For even after Marti, the quidam, the nobody,
[00:54:52.170]is always the most essential stuff
[00:54:55.010]of which any nation is made.
[00:54:57.650]That's it.
[00:54:58.553](audience applauds)
[00:55:08.015]There was the massacre in 1912.
[00:55:11.323](man speaking faintly)
[00:55:13.392](woman speaking faintly)
[00:55:14.468]Right, right.
[00:55:15.690]Right, so that's actually,
[00:55:17.150]so people actually try to blame that on,
[00:55:21.520]I'm sorry, the massacre in 1912, on Morua Delgado
[00:55:25.480]because of the law, the Ley de Morua.
[00:55:30.120]So the massacre, which 3,000 black
[00:55:34.540]men, women, and children in Cuba were,
[00:55:36.300]at least 3,000 were massacred in 1912.
[00:55:41.210]It's sometimes referred to as a race war
[00:55:44.840]or the War of Color, but in fact it wasn't a war.
[00:55:45.920]It was a massacre, right?
[00:55:48.920]So people try to blame that on Morua
[00:55:50.330]because he had some hand in the law
[00:55:52.150]that was used as a pretext for the actions
[00:55:55.150]that led to the massacre,
[00:55:56.540]but, I mean, he had actually died
[00:55:58.330]shortly before it happened so...
[00:56:02.242]I don't know, I guess I'm inclined to see it
[00:56:04.330]as he had some misguided ideas
[00:56:06.887]that then were taken to an extreme by a white government
[00:56:11.500]that he actually didn't have a role in.
[00:56:15.120](woman speaking faintly)
[00:56:16.633]Well, I mean, the truth is
[00:56:17.610]I'm pretty unimpressed with racial radicalism
[00:56:20.920]that comes out of Havana,
[00:56:21.940]so I honestly don't know a lot about the Oriente case.
[00:56:25.460]In a sense, it wouldn't surprise me
[00:56:26.920]because in the late 19th century,
[00:56:29.090]at least what I know of as being documented,
[00:56:32.860]I mean, my question is...
[00:56:36.170]Sorry, I'm not gonna say I'm unimpressed.
[00:56:37.380]I'm just gonna say that it's not, it seems like the things
[00:56:40.900]that we can document are mostly things
[00:56:43.500]that fit in with a very flattering picture
[00:56:47.790]of Cuban racial democracy,
[00:56:50.420]people like Juan Gualberto Gomez
[00:56:51.780]who was of course a tireless champion
[00:56:55.280]of black civil liberties in the late 19th century,
[00:56:59.830]but who you wouldn't call a searing radical, right?
[00:57:04.680]He really thought
[00:57:05.550]that he really wanted racial reconciliation
[00:57:07.720]and thought that it was gonna happen.
[00:57:09.900]So, I mean, if you do have
[00:57:11.220]kind of more racially radical movements coming
[00:57:14.160]out of the East, I honestly don't know a lot about them,
[00:57:16.840]but it wouldn't surprise me
[00:57:18.160]that it would be relatively unconnected
[00:57:21.110]to what's going on in Havana.
[00:57:23.590]Oh, the reception of Marti.
[00:57:25.330]I don't think you can necessarily say that,
[00:57:29.180]I don't know, Marti is responsible
[00:57:31.900]for the inflated place that he has.
[00:57:34.680]I mean, all canons, I guess, produce these figures
[00:57:37.230]that just receive this kind of endless attention.
[00:57:41.110]It's just, for me, I guess I specifically wanna think
[00:57:43.810]through what we do when we say he is,
[00:57:47.400]I don't know, like he stands in for Cuba,
[00:57:49.200]but we when we do that,
[00:57:51.420]we often use rhetoric
[00:57:54.640]that very unambiguously erases the people around him.
[00:58:01.080]It's really interesting,
[00:58:01.913]because Marti of course is the great figure
[00:58:03.950]that the divided Cuba and Cuban-American populations
[00:58:07.260]always liked fighting over, right?
[00:58:08.980]But people from all places
[00:58:11.340]within that political spectrum
[00:58:12.530]all do the same thing with him, right?
[00:58:14.250]Like you see like Carlos Ripoll,
[00:58:16.140]who's an anti-communist
[00:58:17.370]who says he literally existed
[00:58:19.310]outside of his time and place,
[00:58:20.390]but then you see Juan Marinelo, who's like a communist,
[00:58:22.510]who says the exact same thing.
[00:58:25.960]I just wanna deflate that rhetoric because,
[00:58:29.380]it's really also not to say
[00:58:30.610]that Marti was not way more sophisticated
[00:58:33.350]than these other people, because he definitely was,
[00:58:34.960]but he just doesn't come from nowhere.
[00:58:37.789](woman speaking faintly) Like this guy?
[00:58:42.268]In 1930, I don't know.
[00:58:45.050]Kind of the classic thing is that
[00:58:47.500]in the morning they read the newspaper,
[00:58:49.430]and then in the afternoon they read a novel,
[00:58:51.970]but I think there were different permutations
[00:58:54.720]on exactly what it was.
[00:58:56.570]Sometimes they would read...
[00:59:00.900]There was a relatively kind of conservative
[00:59:04.810]Spanish economics textbook written
[00:59:06.710]by a guy, Flores something, that they like,
[00:59:08.550]I know was one that circulated in the cigar factories,
[00:59:10.560]so they read all kinds of things.
[00:59:12.050]Yeah, but there was a lot of newspapers and also,
[00:59:14.840]and just a lot of literature like novels.
[00:59:17.771]Because I--
[00:59:19.910]Do you want me to go back to the beginning?
[00:59:21.005]Yes.
[00:59:21.930]There's more cigar factory stuff,
[00:59:23.270]and then they have the despaliadoras, the women strippers,
[00:59:27.900]who, it's like another stage prior,
[00:59:31.500]who also, I mean, that occurs later in this.
[00:59:33.782]Yes, because this is all male.
[00:59:35.730]Right, right, right, yeah.
[00:59:36.680]So they would segregate men from--
[00:59:38.660]Yeah, I mean, again, I'm really,
[00:59:40.460]I know my little corner of this well
[00:59:43.740]and I don't know kind of the full geography
[00:59:45.810]of how all of this worked, but I do know
[00:59:47.080]that I do think it tended to be gender-segregated,
[00:59:49.430]like I know in Tampa for a lot of time
[00:59:51.950]it was gender segregated.
[00:59:53.210]I know that in the 19th century
[00:59:58.080]in Havana, it was,
[00:59:59.960]there were women who would do piecework at home
[01:00:02.680]and then the factories themselves were male,
[01:00:04.500]even though it's like, so I mean,
[01:00:05.450]it's an interesting dynamic,
[01:00:06.290]'cause the men could be enslaved.
[01:00:08.120]It was like a multiracial working class,
[01:00:14.170]but women were not in the factories.
[01:00:15.600]But sometimes in smaller areas around Havana,
[01:00:20.210]you would have women who were in the factories.
[01:00:21.960]So like in Bejucal,
[01:00:22.793]I know they had women who were in the factories.
[01:00:25.190]This movie.
[01:00:26.780]Oh, sorry, I didn't introduce it, did I?
[01:00:28.500]It's the South Carolina, what is it?
[01:00:31.140]Sorry, the South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections,
[01:00:34.680]and I'm gonna be honest,
[01:00:35.570]I only know it because, like I said,
[01:00:36.670]I saw this on kind of Cuban studies Twitter.
[01:00:40.968]Can you put it on?
[01:00:42.300]Oh yeah, of course, sorry.
[01:00:43.836](audience laughs)
[01:00:47.597]They have loads and loads of this archival stuff.
[01:00:49.612]I think they have, I searched Cuba, and I think it was like
[01:00:51.750]I got something like a hundred results,
[01:00:53.650]and I was myopically interested in the lecturas,
[01:00:57.130]but there's a lot more.
[01:00:58.986](man shouting faintly)
[01:01:02.897](men laughing faintly)
[01:01:42.640]It's interesting
[01:01:43.473]because they also shared that jug of water.
[01:01:48.010]I'm thinking sanitation. (laughs)
[01:01:52.540]Yeah.
[01:01:54.140]They also had the cafetero
[01:01:55.380]who came with the coffee for everyone.
[01:01:59.270]Crucial to industrialism.
[01:02:04.520]Oh, I see. Yeah, he's, yeah.
[01:02:07.516]Bueno. Bueno.
[01:02:08.652](audience laughs)
[01:02:10.615]Bueno. (laughs)
[01:02:21.430]This was so exciting
[01:02:22.263]for me the first time I saw it.
[01:02:23.430]This is like such a precious kind of resource.
[01:02:28.710]'Cause I had spent so much time
[01:02:29.820]like really abstractly trying to imagine what this was.
[01:02:32.070]These are despaliadoras, yeah.
[01:02:33.814]In Tinajero's book, they print stills of this.
[01:02:37.200]Oh, does it?
[01:02:38.190]Yes, I think the cover,
[01:02:40.680]we just saw it in much of the--
[01:02:42.842]Right.
[01:02:43.675]You know what?
[01:02:44.508]I feel like I've always looked at a library book
[01:02:45.480]where you don't actually like see the cover. (laughs)
[01:02:47.724](laughs) Yes, there's a cover in which one of,
[01:02:50.390]there's one in which one of the workers
[01:02:52.226]is looking at the camera.
[01:02:53.643]That's the--
[01:02:54.476]Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. cover of Tinajero.
[01:02:57.680]And this is something also that...
[01:03:02.030]Whenever Stephan Palmie's book came out,
[01:03:03.987]"The Wizards," whatever it was,
[01:03:06.610]he argues like we don't, like we try to put too much
[01:03:10.040]of a political program on Aponte.
[01:03:11.360]We know very little about him, and then Matt Childs
[01:03:13.360]of course then later has a very strong rejoinder to that
[01:03:15.980]where he says we actually do know quite a lot about Aponte.
[01:03:18.410]We know that he protagonized the rebellion.
[01:03:21.160]We know that he had like
[01:03:23.420]a very kind of articulated black politics.
[01:03:26.640]And Ada Ferrer actually then
[01:03:28.680]in her recent study of Aponte vindicates Matt Childs
[01:03:33.030]on everything except the point
[01:03:35.240]of nationalism and anti-colonialism,
[01:03:38.460]because Matt Childs does say that Aponte was anti-colonial,
[01:03:41.300]and Ada Ferrer, I discovered this
[01:03:43.320]after I had been kind of researching this,
[01:03:45.000]she goes up to and stopped short
[01:03:47.240]of saying he was anti-colonial, because she's,
[01:03:49.770]I mean, I've talked to her about this and she says like,
[01:03:51.637]"I don't see that in the archives at all," right?
[01:03:53.830]And I think that it's like a lot of times
[01:03:55.170]when you look in a very granular way at people's arguments
[01:03:57.600]that either Aponte or Placido were anti-colonial,
[01:04:00.980]something about the logic doesn't work to me.
[01:04:02.800]It's something like they'll say
[01:04:04.430]the plantation systems were colonial,
[01:04:06.700]and so you see people who decry the plantation systems,
[01:04:10.010]therefore they were anti-colonial,
[01:04:11.480]and I'm like, well, I'm really not sure that like,
[01:04:16.390]I think that argument emerges in especially the 1890s
[01:04:21.660]to kind of rewrite 19th-century Cuba
[01:04:27.060]in a way that serves the nationalist project,
[01:04:29.320]and that it's been kind of like uncritically perpetuated.
[01:04:32.060]I really think that,
[01:04:37.040]I'm not an expert in this stuff,
[01:04:38.370]but I think that Marquez has a point at least.
[01:04:40.660]I think that there's maybe where, anyway.
[01:04:43.780]Thank you so much for coming.
[01:04:44.938]Thank you to the university again.
[01:04:46.671](audience applauds)

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To Die for the Fatherland!

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