Colonial Reckoning: Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, Louis A Pérez Jr, 2023, Duke University Press
To what extent were US motives for intervening in the Cuban war of independence against Spain influenced by an unspoken urge to forestall a “black” uprising?
This important, and subversive, question has implications even now for the foreign policy perspectives of the hegemon. Racial politics have shaped US history, and Donald Trump demonstrates that they continue to do so.
Cuba’s sugar-producing creole elites were certainly relieved by the successful intervention—the US was overwhelmingly the main market for their product, far greater than Spain and its dominions, and they harboured deep racial terrors.
Disillusioned with Spain yet ultimately too weak to liberate themselves, there was one thing they feared more than the perpetually stunted prospects of living under continued imperial control—the revenge of black slaves.
To what extent this fear was realistic was never tested—the census of 1899 identified a population of 32% of people of colour, one third of all Cubans—but, haunted by the nightmare of race war ever since the revolutionary genocide in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the consequent destruction of the industry upon which white privilege had been built, the Spanish sugar-producers saw US control as a natural source of order.
In this history, then, critically important questions are posed by issues of race, which shaped potentially more than any other factor the outcome of the liberation struggle.
As Louis Pérezwrites: “To interrogate anew the experience of liberation implies the need to situate the matter of race relations at the centre of the colonial reckoning in the nineteenth century as context for almost everything else. The fear of the expanding presence of people of colour—free and enslaved—reached deeply into the cosmology of whites, a presence to keep at bay and hold in check, a colonial status quo sustained by fear, a pervasive disquiet…”
Indeed, US annexationist designs on Cuba since the mid-19th century had been largely an extension of deepening sectional disputes in America itself, with the South seeking to increase the number of slaveholding states and believing that the annexation of Cuba was essential to the survival of slavery as an institution.
Cuban observers noted that any emancipation of slaves on the island would immediately curtail the US appetite for intervention, primarily on economic grounds if the sugar economy was destroyed, but based upon clear racist premises about the black capacity for self-rule and destructive vengeance.
When emancipation eventually occurred under the Spanish in 1886 in a cynical effort by Madrid to create new cannon fodder in its bitter war to protect its sovereignty at any cost against independence forces, it may have changed the US expansionist calculus.
Hardly surprising then that the defeat of Spain and the American victory was a turning point in global history, bringing to an end almost four centuries of Spanish presence in the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific, and marking the definitive ascent of a new empire that today translates into US global hegemonic designs.
Yet many questions remain about the US intervention and the extent to which it was influenced by racial dynamics.
While humanitarian concerns about Spain’s brutal, scorched-earth defence against independence were certainly a powerful discourse in the increasingly powerful American newspaper industry, and fuelled popular support for intervention, important US economic interests were at risk from the prolonged conflict, and stability was a key diplomatic goal. Anti-war sentiment was strongest among the business community.
When the call to arms was made by the US government seeking volunteers for intervention, southern states prevented African American men from volunteering, impeding recruitment. Many black citizens, themselves the subject of continuing segregation, were also sceptical of apparent humanitarian motives.
Pérez examines racial dynamics in Cuba during the struggle for independence, highlighting after the US victory what the new American empire had in common with the old.
The triumphant power welcomed the continued presence of the hated Spanish elite, for example, and guaranteed the security of their property in a racial calculation based on a similar fear of blacks. US figures determined that they needed all the whites they could get.
The author quotes attorney Mayo Hazeltine warning that to allow “a sweeping expulsion” of all Spanish-speaking residents who did not happen to be born in the island would result “in an act of gross barbarity, which, to judge by the Haitian precedent would be the first fatal step toward social convulsion and catastrophe. … The island, therefore, needs all the white men now sojourning there who are willing to remain as law-abiding citizens under the new order of things.”
The great merit of this book is to situate the issue of race at the heart of the independence dynamic throughout Cuba’s troubled 19th century: fear of the black population was by far the strongest card by which the Spanish sovereign had maintained domination over the island.
Moreover, the alignment of social groups with different independentista options during three civil wars in the course of the 19th century was very unclear—there were huge and shifting differences over what freedom meant, under what circumstances it could be achieved, and how to define Cuban nationality.
Annexationist sentiment within Cuba itself, for example, which foresaw US control of the island as a new state of the union, had grown strong in some regions since the 1850s.
Underlying all of these, however, remained the overwhelming priority of the creole elite: to maintain slavery in order to continue sugar production and avoid the inevitable challenge that would come with sovereignty—black emancipation. It was, as Pérez writes, “a history without exit”.
This meant that, regardless of a crisp nationalist historiography that presents independence as the outcome of a linear process in the development of a national sensibility, lo cubano, the truth was very different—and very messy.
Black Cubans fought on both sides of the conflict at various times, natural recruits to the independence cause but also armed by Spain to the consternation of the creoles and as a means of psychological warfare against whites flirting with ideas of freedom.
Spain also knew that a potentially effective way to blunt US interest in the island was to dangle the prospect of emancipation.
Ripples of fear duly crossed the water, and the unthinkable prospect of black emancipation in the cause of the monarchy was being relayed back to officials in Washington with alarm as early as the 1850s.
Colonial Reckoning offers a refreshing new perspective on Cuba’s wars for independence which challenges established and simplistic narratives that present this as a struggle between people of colour and white elites loyal to Spain. History, of course, is never so simple.
Read this and receive articles straight to your inbox by subscribing on Substack
Categories: Caribbean, Cuba, Europe, Haiti, International, North America, Puerto Rico, Spain, United States