An 1848 for the Americas: Cuban Exile Newspaper Advocates Racial Equality

An 1848 for the Americas: The Black Atlantic, "El negro mrtir," and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New
York City
David Luis-Brown
American Literary History, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 431-463 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press
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An 1848 for the Americas: The Black Atlantic, El negro martir, and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City
David Luis-Brown
In the wake of the European revolutions of 1848 and the convulsions of independence and abolition sweeping across the Caribbean and Latin America, scores of political refugees arrived in New York City. Many of these exiles contributed to republican periodicals like the French Le Republicain, the Italian LEco dItalia, and the Cuban El Eco de Cuba, El Filibustero, El Horizonte, El Mulato, El Pueblo, La Revolucion, and La Verdad (Catania 2:14 15; Ortiz).1 In the early 1850s, New York City was an incubator of republican nationalism for both Europe and the Americas, linking Young America to Giovane Italia and Joven Cuba, the anticolonial Cuban exile movement.2 New York reacted more to celebrity than to ethics when it gave a heros welcome to both the antislavery Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian nationalist, and the proslavery Jose Antonio Paez, the Venezuelan caudillo and president, when they arrived in July 1850.3 Two years later, Francisco Aguero y Estrada, an obscure white exile from Cuba, sailed into New York harbor without any fanfare. But Aguero, a veteran of an ill-fated anticolonial guerilla war in Cuba, would soon usher republicanism into an innovative reckoning with its contradictions of race and slavery, which dened the position of the Americas in the modern world system.4 As the intellectual architect of El Mulatos intervention in republicanism, Aguero dismantled the Negrophobic logic of Cuban exile nationalism as pro-slavery annexationism when he boldly declared that if the
David Luis-Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (2008).
doi:10.1093/alh/ajp026 Advance Access publication July 8, 2009 # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
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Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City
Cuban anticolonial movement hoped to succeed, it must recognize and celebrate Cubans as a racially mixed people.5 El negro martir: novela cubana (The Black Martyr: a Cuban Novel), an anonymous novella serialized in 1854 in El Mulato, eshed out Agueros breakthrough, exposing the contradiction that white Cuban creoles viewed their nation as enslaved by colonialism even as they sought to unseat Spain by perpetuating slavery in an alliance with US annexationists. Young America and Joven Cuba sought to rid Cuba of Spanish colonialism by forging an alliance among proslavery white Southerners, white northern proponents of Manifest Destiny, and Cuban exile nationalists.6 This alliance could hold only so long as Cuban exiles excluded Afro-Cubans from their imagined national community. In contrast, in a literalization of the gure of the enslaved, El negro martir focused on the martyrdom of a slave in the anticolonial La Escalera (Ladder) slave rebellion of 1844 to foreground how an emphasis on slave insurrection could propel republican nationalism closer to its stated ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. El Mulato was the rst Cuban exile publication to foreground Afro-Cuban culture and history as the foundation for Cuban nationalism, and El negro martir was one of two Cuban antislavery texts to endorse slave rebellion as the basis for republican freedom. By using the story of a slave rebel to capture the plight of Cuba, El negro martir stakes claim to an 1848 for the Americas. To untangle the meanings of an 1848 for the Americas involves dening republicanism and revisiting scholarly accounts of the American and European 1848. Republicanism is a twofold theory of freedom and of government (Pettit, Republicanism).7 Classical republican theorists, ranging from Niccolo Machiavelli and Charles de Secondat Montesquieu to William Blackstone, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, subscribed to a belief in freedom as non-domination. The very notion of liberty posited an opposition between liber and servus, citizen and slave (Pettit, Republicanism 31). Machiavelli, for instance, characterized tyranny and colonization as forms of slavery, as would Cuban exiles centuries later (Republicanism 32). In the extended debates over republicanism in the American and European 1848, it was a matter of contention how the non-domination of freedom would be dened. Since an inuential vein of republican thought had justied inequality and empire through a states pursuit of what Machiavelli called grandezza (greatness), a particular nation could invoke republican freedom only to deny it to others, as did the proponents of US expansionism and slavery.8
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If the metaphor of slavery had been crucial to classical republicanisms descriptions of the suppression of liberty, by the 1850s, discussions on the promises and limitations of republican conceptions of freedom revolved around the question of chattel slavery.9 Following the European revolutions of 1848, it was impossible to think of the ideals of republican nationalism apart from their contradictions. Many New York exiles had lived through the European revolutions of 1848, which had ousted monarchs from Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, and the Pope from Rome. However, in France, the erstwhile democratic state swiftly transmuted into a dictatorship in June 1848 when General Louis Cavaignac, the former governor of colonial Algeria, declared martial law.10 Young America and Joven Cuba failed to learn from this betrayal of the revolutions of 1848. They violated the principles of equality and liberty by endorsing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and by applauding the US annexation of 55% of Mexican territory at the conclusion of the Mexican War (1846 48).11 Race and empire, then, constituted the central contradictions in the claims of Young America and Young Cuba to uphold republican ideals. Focusing exclusively on Young America, Michael Rogin has named this historical conjuncture, one dened by the suppression of the revolutions in Europe and by the ascendancy of US imperialism and slavery, the American 1848: By the American 1848, I have meant the moment when the [US] continental expansion of freedom foundered on the conict between slave and free labor (Herman 80). Departing from Karl Marxs analysis of the betrayal of the European revolutions of 1848, Rogin shows how Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851) chronicled [the] defeat of the principles of the European revolutions of 1848 through representations of controversies over slavery, US expansionism, and dictatorial rule (Subversive 22). Rogins insights on the American 1848 have inspired other scholars to investigate how workingclass, African-American, and Mexican-American writers joined canonical gures of the American Renaissance in intervening within debates on the legacy of the French and American revolutions in the wake of 1848.12 I seek to contribute to scholarship on the American 1848 by focusing on how El Mulato and its serialized novella El negro martir staked claim to an 1848 for the Americas, one built on the perspectives of pro-democracy groups in Latin America as well as on the insight that black diasporic groups were central to the future of republicanism in the Americas. Following the ratication of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and conservative retrenchment in Europe in late 1848, the Caribbean and Latin America offered models of more egalitarian republics. Abolition was sweeping
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El Mulato . . . expos[ed] the contradiction that while slavery was ascendant in the US, it was increasingly embattled in the Caribbean and Latin America.
across the British colonies (1833), Paraguay (1842), Martinique (1848), Guadeloupe (1848), St. Croix (1848), Venezuela (1850), Colombia (1851), Panama (1852), Argentina (1853), and Peru (1854) (Benot 360 361; Gil-Blanco 293; McGuiness 93). Moreover, a series of major slave revolts shook the Americas, demonstrating slaves commitment to securing their own freedom. These slave revolts took place in Saint Domingue (1791 1804), Barbados (1816), South Carolina (1822), Virginia (1831), Demerara (1832), Jamaica (1831 32), Brazil (1835), and Cuba (1844). By staking claim to an 1848 of the Americas that endorsed antislavery politics and slave revolts, El Mulato pried apart the Young America/Joven Cuba proslavery annexationist alliance, exposing the contradiction that while slavery was ascendant in the US, it was increasingly embattled in the Caribbean and Latin America. Moreover, bringing together discussions of republican freedom with debates over slavery and the legitimacy of colonialism allowed the writers in El Mulato to reject imperialist notions of grandezza and extend the principle of non-domination to all peoples, thereby radicalizing republicanism. Building on the antislavery challenge posed by Latin America, and further sharpening El Mulatos construction of an 1848 for the Americas, El negro martir intervenes in Cuban nationalismand in the Americas 1848by representing the racially egalitarian promise of Latin American republics. Rather than putting its faith in the republican state, which Cavaignac had rendered treacherous to democratic ideals, El negro martir focused on subaltern insurgency as a model for democracy, as represented through the martyrdom of an African-born bozal slave. It represents this subaltern agency as growing out of the black Atlantic, conceived as a culturally, ethnically, and politically heterogeneous network of contestation along the routes of the slave trade (Fischer 22; Gilroy).13 By constructing the interracial Ladder Rebellion as a corrective to the limitations of the French Revolution of 1848 and the Haitian Revolution as offering a fuller egalitarianism than the French Revolution of 1794, El negro martir emphasizes the challenges that the black Atlantic issued to the putative universalism of the French Enlightenment. In sum, in their references to republican struggles on three continents, El Mulato and El negro martir point to the high political stakes of their project of interracial and antislavery republicanism. France, one of the primary political reference points for El negro martir, had repeatedly balked at granting liberty and full citizenship rights to Afro-Caribbean people.14 Cuban nationalists of the early 1850s similarly had forged a contradictory, negrophobic republicanism in alliance with proslavery Democrats to
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annex Cuba, the worlds wealthiest colony, to the US. But the developments that dene the 1848 of the Americasthe failure of attempts to annex Cuba, a wave of abolition sweeping through the Caribbean and Latin America, mounting critiques of US slavery, and unabated trans-Atlantic republican enthusiasmcombined to fracture the Young American/Joven Cuba alliance. In response to this ideological crisis of republicanism, a dissenting wing of Cuban exiles began to construct a broader social ideology for their revolution by characterizing the struggles of Afro-Cubans as central to Cuban nationalism. These renegade Cuban exiles sought to create a more inclusive republicanism by likening Cuban exile to the African diaspora, by invoking interlinked French and Latin American traditions of antislavery republicanism as alternatives to US slaveholding republicanism, and by condemning government repression following La Escalera and the Fugitive Slave Act. This interventionist narrative of history radicalized the Cuban independence movement by harnessing the energies of the antislavery republicanisms of the Americas 1848. I examine this struggle among racial nationalisms, black Atlantic antislavery uprisings, and republicanisms in three sections that explain how El Mulato broke away from the Cuban exiles narrow racial nationalism and imagined an antislavery and racially egalitarian republicanism rooted in the history of the black Atlantic.
1. Exile Republicanisms in New York City: LEco dItalia and La Verdad on 1848 Comparing perspectives on the revolutions of 1848, the question of Cuban independence, and the black republic of Haiti in the Italian-language LEco dItalia and the Spanish-language La Verdad can clarify the extent to which the various exile groups produced a shared discourse on race and republicanism. The story of the founding of La Verdad, the organ of New Yorks Cuban exile council, exposes the alliance between Cuban exiles and pro-slavery US expansionists that set it at odds with the more radical versions of republicanism in circulation. In 1846, Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, a Cuban cattle rancher and writer, moved to New York, where he gained the support of Moses Yale Beach, the editor of the New York Sun, an advocate of the purchase of Cuba and the Latin American adviser to President James Polk (Allahar 289).15 With Beachs nancial backing, Betancourt and Cora Montgomery (Beachs daughter) began publishing La Verdad in 1848. The paper advocated the US annexation of Cuba and gained the support of John OSullivan, the former editor of the
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expansionist Democratic Review who had coined the term Manifest Destiny in 1845 (Poyo 9; Widmer 3).16 During this period, most Cuban exile tabaqueros (tobacco workers) worked in New Orleans, some lending support to La Verdad (Portel Vila 1:59). La Verdad maintained this uneasyor unholyalliance among southern slaveholders, northern Democrats, and Cuban exiles even as it expressed its own version of post-1848 enthusiasm for republicanism. Cuban exile newspapers in New York extended nation-based conceptions of fraternity by proclaiming solidarity with post-1848 republican movements. In The French Revolution of 1848, a contributor to La Verdad writes that all countries will see in Republican France, their ally (1). Just as Cuban exiles closely followed the European 1848, the Italian-language LEco dItalia, located a few doors down from Magnascos Trattoria, where exiles mingled over maccheroni, kept close tabs on the Americas in Notizie dAmerica (News from America). LEco dItalia advocated Cuban independence: come potremo, noi gli della ` democrazia, tolerare piu oltre un potere cos vicino che tiene in ` ` schiavitu migliaia denostri fratelli? No, giammai! (how can we, sons of democracy, possibly tolerate such a nearby power to hold in slavery thousands of our brothers? No, never!).17 Garibaldi had set the precedent for Italians republican solidarity with the Americas by leading forces ghting for republican causes in South America.18 Could we have in these various declarations and practices of cross-Atlantic republicanism evidence of that ever-elusive ideal of fraternite? Marx warned that the intoxication created by the revolutions of 1848 was a victory . . . already forfeited, questioning the republican doctrine of fraternity in two ways. First, he pointed out that republics turned on one another, as in 1849, with the assassination of the Roman republic by the French republic, which resulted in Garibaldis exile in New York (85). Second, Marx reported that in France the bourgeoisie broke a workers strike by murdering 3,000 in a civil war. Marx argued that nationalists had to address such class conict: The Hungarian, the Pole, the Italian shall not be free as long as the worker remains a slave! (59, 61).19 Marx helps us to understand the volatile, contradictory character of republicanism as a political system, whether in Europe or the Americas. While LEco dItalia uses slavery as a metaphor for colonialism, Marx uses slavery to refer to what he regarded as the key contradiction of the national form, the class struggle. Both of these uses of slavery as a metaphor violated the ideal of fraternity by not explicitly addressing the issue of republicanisms lack of concern with racial inequality, an especially pressing concern in
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the Americas. However, my account of an 1848 for the Americas follows Rogins lead by modifying Marxs analysis of republican contradiction to make it relevant to the analysis of race and empire in the Americas.20 In the context of the Americas, to use slavery as a metaphor for the thwarting of republicanism was to invoke and sidestep the relationship between republicanism and slavery in slaveholding republics and the question as to what extent republicanism would extend to nonwhites. Ironically, the article in LEco dItalia decry ing the political enslavement of Cuba celebrates Narciso Lopez, who was employed by slaveholders. These conicts between pro and antislavery republicanisms peaked in 1850, when Lopez and his secretary, the novelist Cirilo Villaverde, asked Garibaldi to head an annexationist expedition to the island (Catania 1:329; 2:298; Ortiz 130 135). Although it is not clear why Garibaldi declined their offer, evidence suggests that antislavery convictions guided his decision.21 Both LEco dItalia and La Verdad referred to Haitian history as a cautionary tale of the woes of multiracial nations. LEco dItalia ridiculed the coronation of Haitian President Faustin Solouque colle labbra grosse e la pelle nera (with big lips and black skin), distorting his African facial characteristics to portray him as unqualied for rule (Le Notizie dHaiti 195). Moreover, the newspaper defended its pro-slavery stance by arguing that slave emancipation would result in a massacre of whites and economic disaster, as allegedly had occurred in Haiti (Cronaca Americana 175). Similarly, Cuban exile publications frequently invoked the specter that el segundo acto del sangriento drama de Hayt (the second act of the bloody drama of Haiti), a second black-led revolution in the Americas, could install an imperio negro (black empire) in Cuba (Montgomery 17; Valente 4; Cuba. Aprendizaje Africano 1).22 They feared the Haitian Revolution, which they knew had served as a model for the Aponte Conspiracy (1812) and the Ladder Rebellion. However, from a different perspective, the Haitian Revolution could be viewed as contesting the incomplete universalism of the Age of Revolution: in 1801 Toussaint LOuverture wrote the most racially inclusive constitution ever.23 The Haitian Revolutions challenge to the racism of republics points to a different black empire not one allegedly commandeered by savages, but one that challenges existing republicanism by outlawing racial inequality. Thus, prior to El Mulatos intervention in 1854, New York exile papers constructed a transatlantic republicanism at the expense of denying the black Atlantics contributions to the Age of Revolution and rejecting racially egalitarian models of republicanism. Colonial
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conceptions of race overwhelmed the ideals of republican solidarity when it came to Haiti, the black republic. Indeed, Cuban exiles developed an antiblack and anticolonial republicanism that constructed the Cuban nation as white, a republicanism whose contradictions I will explore further in the next section.
2. The Implosive Nationalism of Enslaved Cuba The contradictory imperialist anticolonialism of La Verdad relied upon a narrow denition of Cuban national identity as white.24 Despite their opposing positions on the question of annexation, both Betancourt and Jose Antonio Saco, the most prominent Cuban exile intellectual, excluded Afro-Cubans from their conceptions of cubanidad (Cubanness). Saco, who had inherited slaves from his father, warned that the horrors of San Domingo could repeat themselves in Cuba (45).25 Similarly, in a letter written in 1848 to Saco, Betancourt writes, Give me Turks, Arabs, Russians; give me devils, but dont give me the product of Spaniards, Congos, Mandingas and now . . . Malays to complete the mosaic of population (el mosaico de poblacion) (Cartas 13 14).26 Although at rst blush the Cuban exiles fear of the Haitian Revolution and of racial mixing would seem to endear them to Young America, I argue that Joven Cubas racial views actually conicted with the ultimate aims of its exile nationalism. These implosive racial views help explain why El Mulato suddenly commanded attention with its dissenting racial egalitarianism in 1854. Although doctrines of racial inferiority were common to both Young America and Young Cuba, Anglo North Americans often viewed light-skinned Cuban creoles not as whites, as they conceived of themselves, but instead as members of a third, Iberian race, as De Bows Review claimed: Cuba is now . . . in the hands of the Spanish race, which can never be assimilated to our own (Cuba and the United States 65).27 Cuban nationalisms racial logic contradicted North American opinion that the whiteness of all Cubans was suspect; thus the rst way in which Cuban exiles constructed an implosive nationalism was that its racial logic didnt effectively transfer to the US. The speeches at a ceremony in New Orleans in 1854 com memorating the death of Lopez point to tensions of race, gender, and empire that made the Young America Joven Cuba alliance vulnerable to the new vision of El Mulato. The white US annexationist John S. Thrasher responded to the racial arguments of antiannexationists by downplaying differences between Saxon and the Iberian, instead emphasizing their shared devotion to
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freedom (Betancourt and Thrasher 3 4). Thrasher leaves intact the anti-annexationists notion of the Iberian as a third race in order to claim that the struggle for Cuban freedom can effect a Union of the Races, bringing together Iberian and Saxon. At the same meeting, in a shift toward a more skeptical attitude on annexationism, Betancourt says that Spain is the thief that robs and despoils Cuba, . . . but the Government of the United States is the ravisher that violates and dishonors her (Betancourt and Thrasher 6). Here Betancourt introduces a gendered and imperial rift in the racial harmony that Thrasher imagines: If the idea of the annexation of Cuba to the United States has ever had the slightest consideration . . . it has always been with the understanding that [it] should be the result of the sovereign will of the Cuban people, without stain or dishonor to Cuba; that, as a beautiful and rich maiden emancipated from the paternal authority, she may select from her admirers the bridegroom that best pleases her, and thus ll the station of a lady, and not that of a sad, redeemed slave (Betancourt and Thrasher 6). This opposition between white lady and slave, a latter-day, gendered incarnation of the citizen slave opposition in republican thought, ignores the irony that Cuban exiles were excluding Afro-Cubans. It conjures up an anxious vision of racial mixture that imagines Cuba as a sad, redeemed slave, deprived of all choiceand of the privileged status of a white ladyby the US imperial bridegroom. This language suggests that Cubas redemption from colonialism would be incomplete if US annexation were ultimately to deprive Cuba of agency. Ironically, Betancourts newly skeptical attitude toward annexationism nds Cuba in danger of falling into what US annexation was designed to perpetuateslavery. Betancourts metaphor of Cuba as a sad, redeemed slave perpetuates a long tradition of using slavery as a metaphor for various oppressions within the metropole while maintaining silence on actually existing slavery in the colonies, as in Locke and Rousseau (Buck-Morss 826 31). This parasitic reliance on slavery as a metaphor for colonialism implicitly used slave rebellion as a model for anticolonial struggle. In what David Lloyd has called the intercontamination of logics within nationalism, the racist anticolonialism of Cuban exiles suggests the implosive force of slave rebellion as a potential rival model for its goals (74).28 This is the second way in which Cuban nationalism was implosive: La Verdads reliance on the metaphor of slavery for colonialism anticipated the subsequent move towards a more ethnically inclusive nationalism, such as that proposed by El Mulato. To return to Betancourts pessimistic scenario of annexation, one could argue that the only way to give Cuba full choice in its post-colonial form
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of government would be to do away with the opposition between white lady and slave on the island and abolish slavery so that all Cubans might exercise choice in founding the republic. The use of slavery as a metaphor for colonial oppression without reference to actually existing slavery implied that freedom could be split into two separate components, the rst political and the second social, as Saco argued in 1848: In our present circumstances, a political revolution will be necessarily accompanied by a social revolution, and a social revolution [would be] the complete destruction of the Cuban race (raza cubana) (46 7). In Sacos view, a political revolution against Spanish colonialism would necessitate a social revolution enfranchising blacks, as in Haiti, thereby undoing all racial hierarchies. Reading Sacos statement against the grain makes it possible to argue that even as Cuban exile writers hoped to exclude blacks from citizenship rights they acknowledgedhowever begrudginglythe importance of the Haitian revolution as a precedent for the necessarily interethnic character of a Cuban independence movement. As if to corroborate Sacos acknowledgement of the need for Afro-Cubans to participate in the revolution, Cuban exiles conceded that Cuban popular culture was a product of interethnic collaboration: Que horror! Nadie se ocupa de lo futuro, todos corren, van al baile, a los juegos, a la humillacion, a la tumba (How terrible! No one occupies himself with the future, all run to dances, to gambling, to humiliation, to the tumba) (La Revolucion 47).29 Ironically, the nationalism proposed by La Revolucion admitted that it was out of step with Cuban popular culturethe writer expressed horror over the fact that everyone consorted with Afro-Cubans.30 This statement, along with Betancourts construction of the ideal Cuba as a white maiden, was symptomatic of an unwillingness among Cuban nationalists to construct a broad popular base for their revolution, which had disastrous effects for their attempts to annex the island. In 1849, when Lopez landed in Cardenas he remained alone without any contact with the local population (Opatrny 172). A nal reason why Cuban nationalism was implosive, then, was that it required a broad social base to succeed, but despised most of that base. Aguero perceived this paradox in 1853 when he criticized those who excluded Afro-Cubans from the independence movement: quisieran para s . . . todas las garantas, el presente y el porvenir de Cuba, y nada quieren para la infortunada raza africana. . . . En fuerza de ese funesto principio . . . Cuba no hara mas que cambiar de despotismo y no tendra sino un fantasma de libertad (they want for themselves . . . all the rights and guarantees and the present and future of Cuba, and want nothing for the unfortunate
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African race. . . . As a result of this ruinous principle . . . Cuba will only exchange despotisms, resulting in a phantasm of liberty) (21n3). Agueros exposure of the racial contradictions of Cuban nationalism would serve as the starting point for El Mulatos expansion of the social base of the revolution. These three aspects of Cuban exiles implosive nationalism paved the way for the novel, interracial Cuban nationalism of El Mulato, which the newspaper framed as an 1848 for the Americas.
3. Words of Liberty: El Mulato and El negro martir In 1854 a rift within the Cuban exile community developed, creating two Cuban nationalisms. The rst, expressed by La Verdad, constituted national identity through an expulsion of the racialized other. The second, articulated by El Mulatos title, constructed national identity as racially and culturally mixed. While La Verdad attempted to achieve a racially pure national unity, El Mulato asserted the impossibility of purity in its very name. El Mulato parted ways with La Verdad by opposing slavery and annexationism and by broadening the social base for Cuban nationalism (20 February 1854, 1). It arguably did so, however, by implicitly lightening the black populace, in keeping with various schemes that had proposed whitening Cuba through the immigration of white Europeans.31 Therefore, any analysis of El Mulatos racial politics must address the extent to which it endorsed the agency of specically black Cubans (not just mulattoes), recognized their contributions to national culture, and indicated a willingness to share the responsibilities of governing a future republic with them. Although at times El Mulato exemplied as much as it resolved conicts over the racial contours of the future Cuban republic, it did provide a forum for expressions of a more egalitarian nationalism. El Mulato exposed the racism of its competitor: La Verdad assumed que la humanidad para con los africanos (nada de las clases de color) (that humanity does not include Africans [they do not mention free people of color]) (M, 17 April 1854, 1). Agueros plea for racial harmony explains the signicance of the renegade newspapers title: Hijos de Cuba! . . . El verdadero patriota, y verdadero hombre libre, deben ser los amigos del pueblo, y el pueblo de Cuba es un pueblo misto. . . . Depongamos jenerosamente las pretensiones inveteradas de nuestro orgullo, nuestras preocupaciones de razas (Sons of Cuba! . . . The true patriot, and true free man, must be the friends of the people, and the people of Cuba are a mixed people. . . . We must generously remove the inveterate pretensions of our pride,
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our preoccupations with races) (Pobres Cubanos! 23). Here, a generation prior to Jose Marts advocacy of a race-neutral Cuba, a Cuban exile insists that universal fraternity must be racially uni versal. Agueros assertion that Cuba was a pueblo misto (mixed people) was the most radical statement of racial egalitarianism by Cuban exiles because it came accompanied by an attack on white Cubans racial pride. Such a recognition of the racially hybrid character of Cuban culture was emboldened at that historical moment by Cubas Captain-General Juan de la Pezuela, who in his brief rule precipitated the Africanization of Cuba scare in early 1854 by asserting the superiority of free to slave labor, liberating all slaves imported after 1835, and rescinding the prohibition of black-white marriages.32 Despite its bold challenge to the prevailing racial views of the Cuban exile movement, at times, El Mulatos egalitarianism struggled to rise above fears of blacks and slave rebellion. Its rst editor, Carlos de Colins, feared that Cuba . . . [could] follow the fate of Haiti in a massacre of whites by blacks and claimed that Cuba had two enemies: the Spanish government and the blacks (M, 8 April 1854, 1; 6 March 1854, 1).33 However, rather than concluding that colonialism should persist, Colins argued that independence for Cuba and gradual emancipation for slaves were the only ways to avert a bloodbath: Es un error creer que los afri canos esperan tranquilos el termino de nuestra revolucion; . . . como entes racionales tienen el instinto de la independencia, y ay, de nosotros si reclaman con cuchillo en mano sus usurpados derechos! (It is a mistake to believe that the Africans will tranquilly await the end of our revolution; . . . as rational beings they possess the instinct of independence, and woe to us if they reclaim their usurped rights with knives in their hands!) (M, 27 February 1854). Colins hoped that black slaves would become anticolonial revolutionaries rather than slave rebels. If Colins made concessions to the Haitiphobia of Saco and other exiles, he transformed that discourse by using it to promote the inclusion of Afro-Cubans in the revolution. In subsequent issues of the newspaper, Aguero expressed more unequivocal support of equal rights for Afro-Cubans. El negro martir, serialized in El Mulato during the ten-year anniversary of the Ladder Rebellion, constructed an 1848 for the Americas by placing Afro-Cuban rights and the black Atlantics story of diasporic scattering, loss, and rebellion at the center of Cubas identity and quest for national liberation.34 It sought to undermine white Cuban exiles deep commitment to racial hierarchy by establishing a parallel between the longings of those swept into the black and Jewish diasporas and the pervasive sense of loss
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experienced by the Cuban exile community. The title character, Francisco, comes to Cuba as a black slave from Loango.35 He tells the story of his life to his fellow slaves at a cafetal (coffee plantation) in Matanzas in 1844, the year of the Ladder Rebellion. The novella is conversant with the tradition of Cuban antislavery writing developed in Domingo Del Montes literary circle: the Autobiography (1840) by the slave poet Francisco Manzano and the novel Francisco (1839) by Anselmo Suarez y Romero, as suggested by the name of the main character that it shares with these texts.36 In these and other nineteenth-century Cuban antislavery novels, the possibility of Cuban autonomy and independence depends on the suppression of black insurrection, as Sibylle Fischer has argued (117). El negro martir differs from this antislavery literary tradition by joining Martin R. Delanys Blake, or the Huts of America (1859, 1861 2) in guring slave insurrection as a necessary correction to the French and American Revolutions, linking the Ladder Conspiracy to the Haitian Revolution.37 In a pivotal moment, Margarita, the young wife of Don Pedro, the owner of the cafetal where Francisco works, sends a letter to her lover stating her opposition to the colonial regime via Francisco, who serves as a messenger. Senor Gonzalez, a frustrated suitor of Margarita, intercepts the letter, bringing it to the attention of Leopoldo ODonnell, the Captain General of Cuba who presided over the reign of terror following La Escalera. To prevent ODonnell from imprisoning Margarita, Senor Gonzalez blames Francisco for inciting rebellion and the lover of Margarita for corrupting her. The lover of Margarita is sentenced to ten years of prison and Francisco dies after suffering six days of lashes on la escalera (the ladder). El Mulato and El negro martir rooted their transformation of Cuban nationalism in citations of racially egalitarian strains of transatlantic republicanisms. El Mulato invoked French republicanism by quoting Montesquieus dictum, A Republic that desires to be free, ought not to possess slaves (Ought a free Republic to possess slaves? 4). In El negro martir, Margarita, the wife of a slaveholder, writes a letter to her lover thanking him for exposing her to the ideas of liberty developed in the books that he sent her by Antoine Claude Destutt de Tracy, Juan Jacobo (Jean Jacques Rousseau), Constantin-Francois Volney, and Felicite Robert de Lamennais, intellectuals associated with the French Revolutions of 1794 and 1848 (26 March 1854, 3). El Mulatos readers would have known that Tracy, Rousseau, Volney, and Lamennais served as mentors and models for prominent antislavery Latin American intellectuals.38 Through Margaritas readings, El negro martir invokes three sets of composite gures linking specic French
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intellectuals to their Latin American counterparts who popularized their ideas, setting in parallel the French Revolutions of 1794 and 1848 and Cuban and Latin American antislavery struggles. These composite gures include: (1) Montesquieu Rousseau Tracy Felix Varela, (2) Montesquieu Volney Jose de la Luz y Caballero, and (3) Lamennais Francisco Bilbao. In 1822, while a delegate to the Spanish Cortes, Varela, who readily acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Tracy, insisted that republicanism was utterly incompatible with slavery and with racial inequality, in a close paraphrase of Rousseau (Memoria).39 Luz y Caballero, a student of Varela who translated Constantin-Francois Volneys Travels, was also known for his antislavery position and was accused of being a conspirator in La Escalera (Cotta 16 17).40 The Chilean Francisco Bilbao, who translated several books by Lamennais as a young man and then met Lamennais while exiled in France in 1848, applied the French republicans radicalism in Latin America. Returning to Chile in late 1849, Bilbaos mass mobilization of workers resulted in his exile to Peru, where he helped to achieve the abolition of slavery in 1854 (Varona 122).41 One historian has described Bilbao as a central gure in the cycle of revolts of 1848 in Latin America (Bao 52). These transatlantic composite gures of democratic reform, working-class mobilization, and abolition cast Latin American republics as at the vanguard of democracy in the Americas, shining an unattering light on a US democracy undermined by empire and slavery. Thus El negro martir links antislavery republicanisms on both sides of the black Atlantic. The articles included in El Mulato provided its readers with ways of understanding the novellas particular interventions within the racial politics of Cuban nationalism. In the same issue in which El negro martir gures Franciscos love for his querida and his longing for Africa as universal sentiments, an editorial expresses horror at the live burning of a slave in Mississippi and condemns US racial hierarchies (M, 27 February 1854, 3). Thus, El Mulato attacks white racism in theory and practice in both Cuba and the US. El negro martir simultaneously celebrates the centrality of Afro-Cuban culture to Cuba through three related moves: (1) by valuing the contributions of black African and Afro-Cuban culture; (2) by aligning exile discourses of liberty with antislavery discourses; and (3) by refusing to view slavery as only a metaphor for colonialism, instead guring it as the master trope for a wide range of oppressions, including chattel slavery itself. El negro martir respectfully represents slave culture in Cuba in a passage on slave songs: aquellas notas vibraban largo
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rato con esa tristeza que espresa la musica de los que habitan en la soledad, y se prolongaban tranquilamente como jemidos que salian de corazones enfermos (those notes vibrated for a long time with that sadness which the music of those who live in solitude express, and prolonged itself tranquilly like moans that come from sick hearts) (M, 20 February 1854, 2). At a time when African music sounded like unmeaning noise to white European and American observers, the narration emphasizes the sorrow of the slave songs, as did the ex-slave Frederick Douglass in the US context.42 The novellas respect for slave culture is matched by an appreciation for the contribution of Afro-Cubans to distinctively Cuban cultural practices, such as the decima, a popular form of poetry put to song: Se divertia Francisco entonando algunas de esas alegres decimas que resuenan perennemente en nuestros campos, y en las que si se maltratan los dulces acentos de la rica lengua de Castilla, no por eso dejan de llegar en ondas sonoras a los oidos del transeunte meditabundo. Yo he escuchado muchas veces en los labios de estos cantorres algunos versos de nues tros mas celebres poetas. (M, 1 April 1854, 2). Francisco entertained himself singing some of those happy decimas that perennially resound in our elds, and if they mistreat the sweet accents of the rich language of Spain, that does not prevent their sonorous waves from reaching the ears of the meditative traveler. I have heard many times from the lips of these singers some verses of our most celebrated poets. The narrator notes that a variety of Cuban cultural groupsranging from African and creole slaves to the putatively white campesino solitario (solitary peasant)participate in making the decima what the contemporary Cuban poet Jose Fornaris called la estrofa del pueblo cubano (the verse of the Cuban people) (Lopez Lemus 22). This recognition of Afro-Cuban contributions to the decima is a surprising representational move, because as a scholar of the decima has written, They [white Cuban creoles of the 1850s] still had not recognized the role of the black in the national culture (Lopez Lemus 86). By recognizing Afro-Cuban contributions to the performance of the decima, the novella departs from the dominant tendency in the mid nineteenth century to erase the role of Afro-Cubans in national culture, instead implying that the decima is one of the prime examples of its mulatto character. The novella extends its focus on the cross-ethnic composition of Cuban culture by deploying sentimentalisms tropes of shared sorrow to demonstrate common humanity.43 When Francisco tells
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his fellow slaves of his nal meeting with his lover just prior to his departure from Africa, the narration directly addresses the readers: Expreso con melancola la aiccion repentina de su querida, que lloraba temiendo separarse de el para siempre. Quien no conoce estos pesares? (He expressed with melancholy the swift afiction of his loved one, who cried, fearing to be forever separated from him. Who does not know such sorrows?) (M, 27 February 1854, 2). This passage resembles a crucial moment in Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) when Uncle Tom cries upon learning that he is to be sold away from his family: Just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the cofn where lay your rst-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For . . . ye feel but one sorrow! (91). As I have argued elsewhere, the problem with this sentimentalist universalism is that the move to concede the humanity of slaves through a discourse of sameness threatens to deprive them of the right to be different, collapsing disparate affective experiences: the sorrows of the slave and of the white mother of the deceased newborn are quite distinct.44 El negro martir goes beyond such stock sentimental appeals, establishing a commonality in the sentiments of whites and diasporic Africans by appealing to an issue specic to Cuban nationaliststhe emotionally charged issue of exile. In narrating the middle passage of Africans to the Americas, the text focuses on the pain of being torn away from ones country: Aquellas vctimas jan los ojos empapados con lagrimas sobre la tierra que abandonan, y en su estado de barbarie conocen cuanto vale el esplendor del cielo de la patria (Those victims x their eyes soaked with tears on the land that they abandon, and in their state of barbarism they know how much the splendor of their countrys sky is worth) (M, 27 February 1854, 3). This passage blurs the otherwise pernicious distinction between barbarism and civilization with tearsthose of the Africans and the Cuban exile readers of the texthereby aligning the gure of the African stolen into slavery and the Cuban exile. El negro martir refuses to privilege the anticolonial struggle, contending instead that Spanish colonialism and slavery in the Americas are equally odious. The novella extends the alignment between Cuban exile and the African diaspora through the mediating gure of the wandering Jew, here the embodiment of geographical displacement as a result of persecution. After Francisco tells the other slaves of his impending sale to a new owner, the narration comments, Ved ese grupo de vctimas y confesad si no hay en el interior de vuestra alma una bra que se estremece al escuchar los
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lugubres lamentos con que pretenden distraer su desventura. Adonde dirijes tus pasos oh! raza perseguida por tantos despotas? Tu eres el judo errante del siglo XIX, y la ignor ancia haciendose arbitra de tu destino, es la maldicion que te grita: anda! anda! (M, 6 March 1854, 3) Look at that group of victims and confess whether there is in your soul one ber that trembles when hearing the lugubrious laments with which they attempt to distract themselves from their misfortunes. Where are you directing your steps, oh race persecuted by so many despots? You are the wandering Jew of the nineteenth century, and the ignorance that makes itself the arbiter of your destiny, is the curse that shouts: Move! Move! This passage establishes a connection among exiles that most white Cubans wanted to deny, aligning Cuban exiles with Jewish and African diasporas against Spanish colonialism. Encapsulated in the slaveholders order Anda! (Move!) and in Franciscos sale to a new owner, geographical displacement is a curse that links the plight of the Wandering Jew to that of Cuban exiles and slaves. The race persecuted by so many despots could refer to Jews, black slaves, or Cuban exiles. By invoking diaspora through the gure of the Wandering Jew, El negro martir critiques colonial, racial, and religious oppression and offers a model of nationalism that links peoples and lands . . . not naturally and organically connected (Boyarin and Boyarin 723). Discourses of diaspora offer a national identity capacious enough to allow sameness and difference to coexist, thereby avoiding the key pitfall of sentimental universalism.45 El Mulato deploys intertwined representations of diaspora and exile to suggest that Cuban exiles and Afro-Cubans could claim the same national identity based on analogous yet distinct historical experiences. Like the gure of the Wandering Jew, the representation of La Escalera in El negro martir also links exile and diaspora: Si el lector conoce la conspiracion que tuvo efecto en la isla de Cuba el ano de 1844, no estranara ver tan barbaros pensa mientos en boca de los mandarines que ocupaban entonces los asientos del gobierno. Los esclavos morian en los casti gos, los propietarios perdan gruesas cantidades para salvar a sus siervos de injustas persecuciones y el espiritu del pueblo se acongojaba al aspecto de tan crueles como impoliticos sucesos. . . . llenaronse las carceles, los castillos; multiplicaronse las conscaciones, los destierros, todo era horror en la reina de las Antillas. (M, 17 April 1854, 4)
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If the reader knows the conspiracy that took place on the island of Cuba in the year of 1844, he will not be surprised to see such barbarous thoughts spoken by the mandarins who then occupied the seats of the government. Slaves died from their punishments, property owners lost great quantities to save their slaves from unjust persecutions and the spirit of the people grieved at the sight of such cruel and ill-advised events. . . . [T]he jails and the castles were lled; conscations and banishments were mounting, everything was horror in the Queen of the Antilles. This passage works against the common perception that blacks were the enemy of the Cuban people, instead characterizing the enemy as the colonial functionaries, or mandarins, in a reference to the history of another empire, that of China. Here slaves, slave owners, and exiles, somewhat improbably brought together in anticolonial resistance, can lay equal claim to the sympathy of el epiritu del pueblo (the spirit of the people). In El negro martir, the representation of La Escalera constitutes a discourse of liberty that grows out of the specic histories of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean. El negro martir becomes a martyr because he leads his fellow slaves into insurrection with words of liberty: Casi al mismo tiempo fue encarcelado Francisco por con spirar contra los blancos insureccionando a los negros del cafetal de D. Pedro con palabras de libertad, y se le condeno a sufrir cincuenta azotes por dia hasta que descubriese a todas las personas que estuviesen mezcladas en el asunto de que se trataba. (M, 25 April 1854, 5)46 At nearly the same time Francisco was imprisoned for conspiring against the whites, inciting the blacks of the coffee plantation . . . with words of liberty, and he was condemned to suffer 50 lashings a day until he would reveal the names of all the people who had been mixed up in the affair. Franciscos participation in La Escalera makes the interracial revolt a touchstone for Cuban exile nationalism, whereas in other Cuba journals it presented the threat of the nations dissolution in a Haiti-like rebellion. If La Escalera could be characterized as the most traumatic event in Cuba during the rst half of the nineteenth century, one that demonstrated that the colonial regime was willing to terrorize the population in order to protect the livelihood of slaveholders, in the pages of El negro martir, La Escalera underscores the potential for Afro-Cubans and white Cubans to
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join together in a struggle for independence. El negro martir suggests that the terms of such cooperation would not be dictated by whites; instead, Franciscos words of liberty collapse republicanisms opposition between liber and servus, turning the slave into a theorist of liberty, rather than a foil for its denition. El negro martir thus suggests that slaves and the descendants of slaves would have to play a central role in future liberation struggleswhether for Cuban independence or over the meaning of liberty. According to Fischer, at a time when all antislavery narratives written by white creoles from the 1830s onward [were] stories of romantic love and sexual desire that focused on docile slaves, El negro martir eschewed the love plot for multiethnic revolt and exchanged the docile slave for the intellectually and politically rebellious slave (121). Readers of El negro martir must have felt frustrated when the narrator reported in its last episode that he or she had hoped to write seven or eight more chapters but had to abruptly bring the narrative to a close almost midway into the story, just when Francisco was about to share his words of freedom with his fellow slaves (M, 25 April 1854, 5). But the narratives inability or reticence to represent Franciscos words of freedom has the advantage of bypassing the tendency of discourses of national unity to subsume difference. This representational reticence respects the agency of Afro-Cubans, who expressed their aspirations for freedom through their participation in the conspiracy of 1844 and would later play a central role in the Ten Years War (1868 78).47 The issues of El Mulato that followed the publication of El negro martir reected further on the discourse of liberty via a critique of US slavery. While La Verdad celebrated the US as the cradle of liberty, El Mulato gured the US as Cubas persecutor and as a slaveholder: En el pas de los libres, la libertad esclaviza, atormenta, oprime, castiga, hiere y quema a algunos de nuestros semejantes. . . . Bajo instituciones bienhechoras, un desgraciado fujitivo que rompe las cadenas para buscar alivio en sociedades bien morljeradas, lo entrega a sus verdugos. . . . Humanidad! Humanidad! a donde habeis ido? Sera que enojada en la tierra libre de Washington, habeis resuelto buscar mejor morada en otras rejiones, donde la libertad tenga su verdadero culto y los hombres rmes y lejtimas garantas? (Esclavitud 3) In the land of the free, liberty enslaves, torments, oppresses, punishes, wounds and burns our fellow men. . . .
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Under benevolent institutions, a wretched fugitive who breaks his chains to search for relief in corrupt societies, is delivered to his tormenters. . . . Humanity! Humanity! Where have you gone? Could it be that enraged with the free land of Washington, you have resolved to search for a better home in other regions, where liberty has a true following and men have rm and legitimate rights? By portraying the US as a awed land of the free that paradoxically enslaves and oppresses our fellow men, and by comparing true liberty to a fugitive slave seeking liberty, this passage constructs the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a contradiction of republican ideals. Condemning the Fugitive Slave Act in itself was nothing unusualDelany, Douglass, Stowe, and many other US writers condemned the Fugitive Slave Act. What made this statement extraordinary was that it broke with the previous orthodoxy of Cuban exiles in its condemnation, rather than embrace, of US slavery and in its expression of solidarity with fugitive slaves. Finally, it calls for a better home for liberty, one that the Cuban exile contributors to El Mulato could no longer nd in the annexation of Cuba to the US, but rather in the wandering paths of exile and diaspora, which guratively linked white Cubans and Afro-Cubans in a shared project of national liberation. El Mulato thus joined the dissenting writings of the American 1848 that insisted on the gap between the power of what Delany termed the ruling element and the disfranchisement of the majority of the people (Political 246 247). This gap captured both the limits of the republican experiment and its ongoing promise of universality. Gayatri Spivak has similarly argued that subaltern groups need to expose how they are withdrawn from lines of social mobility in order to release the possibility of self-abstraction, selfsynecdoche and gain citizenship agency (483).
4. Conclusions: An 1848 for the Americas Like Rogins theory of an American 1848, El Mulatos 1848 for the Americas brings together diverse historical moments and geopolitical strugglesthe Haitian Revolution of 1791 1804, the widespread abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America beginning in the 1830s, the Ladder Rebellion of 1844, the US Mexican War of 1846 48, European revolutions of 1848, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850into a broad gure or spatiotemporal complex, for republicanisms ideals and contradictions.48 In my revision of Rogins American 1848, I have sought
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to show not only that there were many 1848s that spread beyond Europe and the US into Latin America, but also that these 1848s, brought into physical proximity and intellectual exchange in early 1850s New York City, were oftentimes politically incommensurable. But the very incommensurability and non-simultaneity of these 1848s, once brought into the imaginative space of El negro martir, permit the creation of a strikingly utopian vision of democracy produced through the checks and balances of compet ing republicanisms. El negro martir is a rare example of a theory of republican liberty that departs from the standpoint of the servus, the enslaved subject, rather than the free citizen. The novellas transnational vision of various republicanisms and diasporas lays the foundation for a critical sensibility that could construct a more racially inclusive and democratic future republicanism. El negro martir is a text steeped in transnational migrations and cultural ows, from the Loango coast of Africa to Havana and New York, even as it is written with the purpose of founding one nation. The possibility of Cuban independence becomes viable through recognition of the multiethnic character of Cuba and the traumatic histories of displaced peoples from various parts of the globe. Equally important, a broad analogy between Spanish colonialism and the formation of black and Jewish diasporas serves to secure the ethical legitimacy of the nation. The transnationalism of El negro martir functions by setting up a framework that constructs an interdependence among legacies of the black Atlantic, the republicanism of the European 1848, and the specic racial crises of Cuba and the US. But this transnational mapping of an 1848 for the Americas only becomes fully intelligible with the recognition that the slave rebel acts as an ethical and political compass. El Mulato and El negro martir are ideal texts for understanding the crisis of national-language literature departments, as well as the limitations of the critical paradigms and disciplines that have sought to devise new methodologies for the analysis of transnational political formations and cultural ows.49 El Mulato and El negro martir are revealing studies in paradox: they are at once exemplars of nationalist texts that are the products of multiple migrations and purveyors of transnational imaginings; of an American literature that is not solely US American; of Cuban literature published in New York; of an Atlantic paradigm that insists on the intellectual and political primacy of the Americas; of hemispheric Americas literature that refuses to be conned intellectually or geographically to the Americas; of a claim for the centrality of a black Atlantic critique of republicanism that clears the space for interracial dialogue, but does not yet enact it; of a world
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literature that invokes and displaces the presumed European norm.50 El Mulato and El negro martir cannot be adequately described by any single one of these paradigms in isolation; they therefore both serve as a rationale for existing transnational approaches to culture and challenge them to be more agile and protean.
Notes
This essay draws on research in the Biblioteca Nacional of Havana, the Biblioteca Nacional and the Hermeroteca Nacional in Madrid, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the New York Public Library, and the Schomburg Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. My work was supported by a University of California Presidents Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship awarded by the Library Company of Philadelphia, a Lafayette College summer grant, and a University of Miami Orovitz Award. I am grateful to the following institutions for providing me with the opportunity to present earlier versions of this work: the Atlantic Studies research group at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, which hosted me as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow. My thanks go to the following scholars who helped me both conceptually and logistically (in rough chronological order): Susan Gillman, Francine Masiello, Julio Ramos, Sara Johnson, Alessandra Lorini, Marveta Ryan-Sams, Stephanie Carpenter, Diana Pardo, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Lisa Surwillo, Frank Palmeri, Laura Lomas, John Paul Russo, Ashli White, and Tim Watson. 1. See Poyo and Lazo on these periodicals.
2. Cirilo Villaverde refers to Thrasher i su Joven Cuba ([John S.] Thrasher and his Young Cuba) in a letter to Juan Macias, New Orleans, 30 Dec. 1852. Kirsten Gruesz has investigated New Orleans as another center of what she terms the polyglot print culture of USCuban literary exchanges and debates over empire in ch. 4 of Ambassadors of Culture (111). 3. See Catania, 2: 34 36; Convegno italiano in Nuova York, 103; Disposizioni del Ricevimiento del Gen. Garibaldi, 103; and Lynch, 311. For Garibaldis antislavery stance, see Gemme 128. On Paezs support of slavery, see Lynch, 283, 287, 305. 4. On the centrality of race and slavery to modernity, see Fischer; Gilroy; on the centrality of Americas to modernity, see Quijano and Wallerstein. 5. Aguero Estrada edited and contributed to El Pueblo and El Mulato. He had joined his cousin Joaqun Aguero in a Camaguey-based independence movement that was discovered by colonial authorities in 1851; Joaqun Aguero was exe cuted, while Francisco Aguero escaped into exile in New York in 1852. In an ironic twist in his career, he traveled to Nicaragua in 1856 and became editor of El Nicaraguense, the organ of US citizen William Walkers government
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(Calcagno 17 19; Cordova 126; Cano). In 1855, Walker wrested control of Nicaragua, declaring himself president and reinstituting slavery; he was ousted in 1857 (Gonzalez 50). Although for the purposes of brevity I accept contemporary accounts that described Aguero and other contributors to El Mulato as white, since whiteness was more capacious in Cuba than it was in the US, it is possible that some of the contributors to the newspaper may have been part African. 6. In 1836, the Spanish Cortes voted overwhelmingly to exclude Cuban creoles from representation in the Spanish government (Schmidt-Nowara 24). 7. The primary characteristics of a republican form of government include: (1) a constitution, (2) the representation of competing interests in the selection of government ofcials, (3) rule by law, (4) the division of power, and (5) an active citizenry (Pettit Republicanism). Republicanism attempted to secure liberty by devising a political system with effective rules, procedures, or goals that are common knowledge to all persons (Lovett). 8. On Machiavellis concept of grandezza, see Armitage 29 35. Senator Lewis Cass from Michigan, the Democratic candidate in 1848, was an exemplary US proponent of Machiavellian grandezza: he had led the Polk administrations Mexican War agenda in Congress and viewed territorial expansion as a reward for a people capable of self-government (Roberts 84). 9. Republicanism in New York in the early 1850s was diverse in its positions on race and slavery: the antislavery republicanism of Garibaldi circulated along side and in tension with the slaveholding nationalism of Paez and the contradic tory legacy of Simon Bolvar, the liberator of Latin America, whose antislavery ideology stood in tension with his fear of the rise of new Haitis. On Bolvars distrust of blacks, see Helg 450 51, 458. 10. As Giorgio Agamben has written, After the fall of the July Monarchy, a decree by the Constituent Assembly, on 24 June 1848, put Paris in a state of siege and assigned General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city. Consequently, an article was included in the new constitution of 4 November 1848, establishing that the occasions, forms, and effects of the state of siege would be rmly set by a law (12). For another account of Cavaignacs role, see Reynolds 44 5. 11. As Lazo notes, US veterans of the Mexican War joined Narciso Lopez in his annexationist expeditions to Cuba, and in 1848 La Verdad characterized the US annexation of Mexico as its redemption (52, 76). 12. Larry Reynolds and Paola Gemme have followed through on Rogins study by showing how American Renaissance writers such as Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Melville, and Walt Whitman rethought their views on democracy by writing on the European revolutions of 1848, at times with the benet of direct observation. Shelley Streeby has shown that sensationalist dime novelists, white working-class intellectuals such as Ned Buntline and George Lippard and white women writers such as Ann Stephens and Metta Victor, infused their gothic narratives on urban class struggles with anxieties over the expanding US empire in the USMexican War and ensuing efforts to annex Cuba in the early 1850s. Jose Saldvar has shifted the geographic focal point from the US northeast to California in his analysis of Mara Amparo
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Ruiz de Burtons critique of US imperialism following the Mexican War in The Squatter and the Don (1885). 13. Sibylle Fischer has criticized Paul Gilroys conception of the black Atlantic as the counterculture of modernity on the grounds that it opposes the African diaspora to a Eurocentric conception of modernity (Gilroy 37). Rejecting analyses of modernity that claim primacy for its European face, she calls for a different approach that focuses on the multiple productions of modernity: If we read modernity from the perspective of the Caribbean colonies, the opposite view seems more plausible: that heterogeneity is a congenital condition of modernity (22). 14. In the 1790s, France had failed to apply its republican principles of selfdetermination to its Caribbean colonies. Two generations later, the French bourgeoisie betrayed the radical potential of Victor Schoelchers abolition decree of 1848, refusing to ratify Schoelchers proposal to provide land grants to the former slaves in the French colonies, who could now vote, but soon found their freedom sharply curtailed by harsh labor regulations and repressed political rights (Schmidt 310). On Cuba as the worlds wealthiest colony, see Paquette 29. 15. This veteran of Cuban anticolonial movements had traveled with other Cuban exiles in 1823 to meet with Bolvar in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him to lead the Cuban independence struggle (Paz Sanchez 618). 16. The Young Americans, advocates of US expansionism who collaborated with OSullivan, wielded great inuence in the Democratic Partythey tried to persuade President Polk to purchase Cuba in 1848 (May 23). 17. Supplemento dellEco dItalia 25 May 1850, n. pag. 18. In 1835, long before joining the battle to defend the Roman Republic, Garibaldi had joined forces with a revolutionary leader in Brazil who had declared an independent republic of the Rio Grande do Sul. Later, Garibaldi formed the Italian Legion in Montevideo in 1843 to defend the city against the forces of Juan Manuel Rosas, the Argentine dictator (Hibbert 1617, 21, 23; McLean). Clara Lida argues that the struggle against Rosas was one of the key events leading up to the 1848 Revolutions in Latin America. 19. Historians have argued that Marx exaggerated the role of class in the civil war of June (Ellis 42). 20. For a somewhat similar move in relation to the work of Antonio Gramsci, see Hall. 21. Garibaldi would later refuse to join the Union Army in the Civil War because it would not advocate slave emancipation (Gemme 12829). 22. Such fears of a repeat of the Haitian Revolution led to a series of efforts to whiten Cuba. The rst major blanqueamiento (whitening) program in Cuba brought white colonos from Europe in the 1790s as a result of anxieties over the incipient revolution in Haiti (Naranjo Orovio 47). 23. As Susan Buck-Morss has written, For almost a decade, . . . the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the
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Enlightenment goal of human liberty (835 6). For an extended analysis of the Jean-Jacques Dessaliness Constitution of 1805, which declared all Haitians black, see Fischer, ch. 11. 24. Cuban exiles reinforced their sense of whiteness through their personal and political ties to slaveholders. OSullivan, a supporter of La Verdad, was the brother-in-law of Cristobal Madan, one of the leaders of the Club de la Habana, an organization of Cuban slaveholders that funded the libustering expeditions of Lopez. 25. On Sacos inheritance of slaves, see Moreno Fraginals, Saco 39. 26. Cuba began importing Chinese men to work as peons in 1847, which explains the mention of Malays (Moreno Fraginals, Sugarmill 141). 27. Similarly, in his inaugural address of 1852, President Pierce argued that the annexation of Cuba would be a very hazardous measure. It would bring into the Confederacy a population of different national stock, . . . not likely to harmonize (Opatrny 212). 28. Cuban exile periodicals commonly used the metaphor of slavery to describe colonialism. See, for instance, A los patriotas Cubanos El Cubano 1.1 (5 de Marzo de 1853): 23. 29. The tumba is a typical Afro-Cuban dance accompanied by drumming. 30. El Pueblo noted, In almost exclusively relying on the rich, what has been missing is . . . that revolutions must be made not only for the people, but by the people (20 July 1855, 2). 31. For an account of these themes of whitening through European immigration in Cuba, see Naranjo Orovio and Garca Gonzalez. I am indebted to Laura Lomas for suggesting that I emphasize the ambiguity of the term mulato in Cuban racial politics. 32. These efforts were short-lived. See Martnez-Fernandez 34 35; Thrasher 53; Urban. 33. I assume, but cannot conrm, that Carlos de Colins, the editor of El Mulato, is the author of the unattributed lead editorials on the rst page of each issue. One way of interpreting the racial ambivalence of El Mulato is suggested by Martin R. Delany, a prominent black emigrationist. Delany wrote a letter criticizing El Mulato in the black abolitionist journal the Aliened American (El Mulato, 25 Apr. 1854, 6). Although that issue of the Aliened American has been lost, Delany certainly would have objected to El Mulatos provisional claim that blacks were enemies of Cuba. El Mulato briey mentions Delanys letter in a note that was written in English: We read a letter of one Mr. R Delany in the Aliened American, dated march [sic] the 8th, 1854. The letter contains a tissue of invectives, directed against Mr. Colins the Editor of this journal. We may be permitted to say that the reputation of Mr. Colins reposes on too rm a pedastal [sic] to be affected by Delany; and that he, Delany, and his remarks, Mr. Colins can treat with the most sovereign contempt. . . . [T]he statements contained in
456
Delanys letter are false (6). Subsequent references to El Mulato are cited parenthetically in the text as M. 34. For readings of El negro martir, see Brickhouse, Manzano; Lazo 164 67. 35. The Loango coast extended from present-day Gabon to the city of Luanda in Angola. The Cuban-bound slave trade from Loango began in the early 1830s (Eltis 420). 36. Although Suarez y Romeros character Francisco is African-born, unlike the main character of El negro martir, he is characterized by resignation (54). On the literary predecessors of El negro martir, see Brickhouse, Manzano 225 26; Fischer 107 28; Lazo 16566; Luis. My attempt to situate El negro martir within debates over race and republicanism builds on what Brickhouses analysis of the storys cartographic revision of Cuban antislavery writings, in which it stakes claim to a broader transatlantic, antislavery politics (Manzano 228). 37. Although some would read Blake as simply endorsing a bloody uprising against slaveholders, both Gofer Gondolier and Blake invoke what Gondolier calls the natural rights of man as the basis for more democratic form of rule that insists on equal rights for all peoples (Delany, Blake 273, 293). 38. In El negro martir, Margarita specically mentions Lamennais Dogma of Free Men, rst translated into Spanish in 1836, in which Lamennais calls for brotherly love rather than conict among peoples. As a member of the French Constituent Assembly, Lamennais proposed a radically democratic constitution (Nisbet 782). 39. Varela, an inuential educator and the most popular writer of early nineteenth-century Cuba, worked to adapt Tracys concept of ideology in his own philosophical writings (Fornet 73 74). Varela was a towering gure in Cuban culture: he taught a generation of Cuban intellectuals as a professor in the Colegio de San Carlos from 1811 to 1821. In 1821 Varela traveled to Madrid to serve as one of three Cuban delegates to the Cortes. When the royalists regained power in 1823, Varela ed to New York. Condemned to death by Spain, Varela would spend thirty yearsthe rest of his lifein exile in the US. In 1824, Varela moved to Philadelphia, where he edited the journal, El Habanero. Subsequently Varela moved back to New York and co-edited El Mensajero Semanal (18281831), along with Saco (Torres Cuevas). 40. Luz y Caballero (180062) was a prominent Cuban educator and philosopher who worked in Havana. In 1848 he founded El Colegio del Salvador and, contrary to the laws of the colonial regime, admitted poor students to his school and provided them with free instruction (Cotta 34 5). 41. On Bilbao, see also Alba; Spindler; Wood. 42. On the widespread perception of slave music as noise, see Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 43 50. 43. The aim of sentimental literature was to nurture the moral sense by arousing sympathy (Halttunen 47).
457
44. On this problem see Boyarin and Boyarin 707; also see my own critique of sentimentalist discourse in chapter one of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. 45. I hope that my use of diaspora here is compatible with Brent Hayes Edwardss call for anti-abstractionist uses of diaspora that emphasize the terms foregrounding of differences within and among various diasporas: diaspora forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor (12 13). 46. Manzano was similarly imprisoned during the repression of the Ladder Conspiracy (Paquette 228). 47. Here I concur with Brickhouse, who has argued that this narrative silence indicates that Francisco is an agent of his own potential freedom (Manzano 232). 48. On the need for a spatiotemporal analysis, see Gillman 330. Gillman has called for a more self-critical version of hemispheric Americas studies that would seek to balance its obsession with a geographical extension of American studies with an attention to temporal questions. 49. See Spivak, Death of a Discipline. Spivak argues, If a responsible comparativism can be of the remotest possible use in the training of the imagination, it must approach culturally diversied ethical systems diachronically, through the history of multicultural empires (Death 1213). 50. Caroline Levander and Robert Levine have reminded us that nation-based paradigms of study remain central to American studies: much current Americanist scholarship continues to take the nation as the key organizing unit for literary and cultural studies (2). Ironically, a similar provincialism has plagued comparative literatures efforts to construct a world literature. As David Damrosch has noted, Until recently, world literature has often been dened in North America all too specically as Western European literature (110). Similarly, Peter Coclanis has argued that historical studies of the so-called Atlantic World have led to the relative neglect of hemispheric approaches ( para. 29). For ringing endorsements of hemispheric Americas studies, see Shukla and Tinsman and Culler. Culler argues, perhaps over-optimistically, that American literature is now in the process of reconguring itself as comparative American literatures (237 8).
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Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

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Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

American Literary History

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