Abstract
In Suspect Freedoms, Nancy Mirabal asks how inequalities were created and performed as Cubans imagined and then built their nation across the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book’s primary subjects are Afro-Cuban exiles based in New York City, who struggle to resolve dilemmas of racial and gender inequality both in the homeland and in their migrant community. Mirabal’s narrative spans a volatile 100 years, beginning with the independence movement that preceded the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) and ending in the 1950s, as Cubans continued to argue over questions of inclusion and representation during the lead-up to Cuba’s second revolution in the 1950s. Mirabal analyzes nation-making before there was a Cuban nation-state and then the creative reimagining of the nation after its official founding at the beginning of the 20th century. Unlike most academic histories of Cuban nation-building, this book steers our gaze away from the moments of intensive action (the 19th century wars with Spain, the dramatic push for political reform in the 1930s, the revolutionary movement of the 1940s and 1950s) and instead examines periods in the exile community when “nothing really happened” (Mirabal, 2017: 10). Like a novel set during the tiempo muerto, this book seeks to sharpen the focus on the hard-to-see but momentous shifts in social and political arrangements that have happened in periods of quiet.
Mirabal invites us to look not so much at origins of inequalities in Cuban society—those are other stories, sketched out in other books and drawn from other archives—but at the maintaining of unequal social power and how the stability of inequality gets challenged. She also asks how inequalities were both inscribed in and erased from the archive (more on that below). Rather than tracking a chronology of nation-making, Mirabal offers a series of interconnected vignettes to build an answer to her central question: What happens when people who have been treated as objects of history turn themselves into subjects?
Nationalist inventions
Today’s triumphant story of the Cuban nation born in the 19th century is that it was multiracial and aspirationally egalitarian in its origins. First there was the liberal-minded creole, José Martí, whose patrician bust still graces the entrance to nearly every official or institutional space in Cuba; then came the charismatic Afro-Cuban war hero, Antonio Maceo, both representing a nation-in-the-making that insisted on racial equality. But that is the simplistic and romantic version of the story. Mirabal explores a far more nuanced history, introducing us to a heterogeneous collection of leaders and interlocutors that includes more than a few white nationalists. Mirabal’s origins story of multiracial Cuba is actually cross-national and includes African Americans who participated in shaping the questions surrounding race and national identity in the Caribbean. Mirabal takes us back to the 1840s, tracing in detail how Afro-Cubans challenged the blanqueamiento (“whitening”) goals of the Cuban elite while African Americans in the United States worked against plans for a slavery-driven annexation of Cuba by pro-slavery leaders in the United States.
Woven through Mirabal’s backstory of 19th-century Cuban nationalism are details of the rehearsal for US empire in the Caribbean. She connects the persistent Cuban annexationists to others in the United States who had been working since the early 19th century to grab neighboring territories or whole countries via filibuster. Those who wanted to claim Cuba for the United States were most interested in expanding the reach of US slaveholders. 1 After the Civil War, these US annexationists “refashioned a discourse that positioned fear, blackness, and unreachable modernities as a warning against total independence in Cuba”—arguing that, without Spain in the picture, the island would need the supervision of its northern neighbor (Mirabal, 2017: 77). Although Cubans rejected the most exclusionary visions of the nation in the late 19th century, the hegemonic ideals of whiteness retained magnetic force. Mirabal shows us how racism fragmented Cuban nationalist ideology at its very creation.
Mirabal emphasizes how Cuban exiles, struggling to create and then shape their nation from afar, followed very different visions depending on where they stood—in the class hierarchy, in the labor market, in the gendered gatekeeping of public life, and in the ranking of racial identities in both Cuban society and in the more openly racist United States. The problem of equality was central to political debate among members of the heterogeneous Cuban exile community, and they insisted on explicit discussion of unspoken questions about whose interests would be protected by the nation’s new institutions. The outcomes of these struggles were predictable in certain ways: women’s political work was rarely recorded; workers’ goals were usually marginal compared to the nation-building interests of the elite; Afro-Cubans’ full inclusion was repeatedly and sometimes violently stalled. But Mirabal makes each of these conflicts significant in new ways by demanding a reconsideration of who participated in the writing of the story.
In Mirabal’s telling, the diaspora was not just important but essential in the creation of the Cuban nation in the early 20th century. From the early stages of their nation-making, Cubans collaborated with Puerto Rican independentistas, clustered mostly in Tampa, Florida, and New York City. In a famous speech delivered to Cuban and Puerto Rican cigar workers in Tampa in 1891, José Martí told the group that through their efforts, “here,” in the U.S, “[the island] rises” (Mirabal, 2017: 9). Ninety-nine years later—and surely with some echo of Martí’s speech in mind—Jean-Bertrand Aristide offered another iteration of the same idea at a rally of 20,000 Haitians in Miami as he campaigned to become his country’s first democratically elected president: what Haiti needed was a “deluge” (lavalas) of support from Haiti’s “tenth province”—its US diaspora. Though unable to vote for him, the diaspora flooded Aristide with cash, and he won by a landslide (Richman, 1992: 190).
A few years after that, Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo wrote in The Repeating Islands that “If the Caribbean is perpetually in chaos, maybe the diaspora is the opposite: a place of order, albeit artificial, where exiles and immigrants can conjure the unthinkable,” a sentence Mirabal cited in her book’s introduction (Mirabal, 2017: 10). From the perspective of scholars looking back from the late 20th century, the Caribbean has indeed provided a series of powerfully conjuring diasporas, and each history merits its own careful telling.
Diaspora and working-class politics
What did the Antillean independentista diaspora need after 1898, once the larger of the two imagined nations, Cuba, finally had achieved formal independence? As Mirabal so consistently reminds us, the diaspora’s goals varied according to the social positioning of groups within the diaspora and within the metropole. Most of the Puerto Rican and Cuban revolutionary exile clubs folded after 1898, and the transition into a new historical era—marked by the construction of the United States’ global capitalist empire—would play out very differently for members of the two diasporas that were now politically distinct. Cubans in the United States were now immigrants, no longer exiles, choosing to live in the metropole where they could earn higher wages and still, possibly, have a hand in Cuban politics. Puerto Ricans in the United States were no longer exiles either; they had been made part of the US nation-state, first as US “nationals” and then, after 1917, citizens—marked, though, by their colonial origins.
Mirabal shows us how important the labor movement became to both migrant communities in New York City in this period, a movement influenced heavily by internationalist socialist ideology. New York was still home to several large tobacco firms up through the 1930s, and their core of Spanish-speaking cigar workers began organizing in the mid-1920s to challenge the increasing mechanization of the industry, forming a new union local of the International Cigar Workers. One of its founders, Pedro San Miguel (a Puerto Rican migrant), citing recent labor struggles in Tampa and Puerto Rico, asserted that it was the “obreros latinos” in the industry who could provide the strongest leadership (Thomas, 2010: 32).
Latinos also played central role in the expansion of the International Workers Order (IWO) and its mutual aid societies in the 1930s, and it is here that Mirabal begins her reconstruction of 20th-century Cuban migrant politics. The Spanish-speaking network of IWO mutual aid organizations, the Cervantes Fraternal Society, was described by one of its presidents, Puerto Rican migrant and New York labor activist Jesus Colón, as “a society of various nationalities”: “Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, Spaniards and Cubans; all the multiple types of colorful humanity from the Rio Grande to Patagonia” (Mirabal, 2017: 172). Cervantes lodges soon opened all over the country, founded by cigar makers in Tampa, railroad and dock workers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and factory workers in Chicago and Youngstown (Ohio) who “saw themselves as part of a vast world of progressive working class politics,” according to labor historian Aldo Lauria Santiago (2018). 2 In New York, many of the lodge names reflected a pan-Hispanic identity—Unidad Fraternal Hispana, Centro Claridad, Centro Fraternal del Bronx—but about half of them, while open to any IWO members who wanted to join, represented a specific nationality. Several Cervantes lodges were primarily Puerto Rican (reflecting their demographic dominance in New York by the 1930s), while the Spanish, Chilean, Mexican, and Cuban communities had one each.
The lodge founded by Cuban workers in 1938 was named Club Julio Antonio Mella, honoring a co-founder of the Cuban Communist party who was exiled by Cuba’s President Machado in 1926 and then murdered in Mexico City, probably by Machado’s command, in 1929. Despite the particularly Cuban origins of Club Mella, it was described by a Cuban exile journalist, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, in broadly internationalist terms: “We, the Latin American revolutionaries who have emigrated here, forced out of our countries, persecuted by an imperialism that by its own internal contradictions, tolerates us here, where we agitate in meetings, in the revolutionary press, in the clubs, and in societies” (Mirabal, 2017: 172–174). Like most of the other Cervantes lodges, Club Mella included women, many of whom participated actively in Mella’s auxiliary “Club de Damas.” And like the Cervantes Society as a whole, Club Mella embraced the interracial politics of the 1930s’ left. Although individual members may have resisted this racial progressivism, Afro-Cubans found an inclusive home in Club Mella during a time when their opposition politics at home led many into exile.
Making the archive
In addition to reconstructing the history of the Afro-Cuban diaspora in New York City, Mirabal also reflects on the process of compiling those stories. She traces the path she followed toward finding (or failing to find) the elements from which she built her narrative. Mirabal is interested in how the Cubans she writes about imagined and managed (or failed to manage) the records they left behind. She is also interested in how some of their stories are visible within official archives while others are stricken from or hidden within those archives. Which historical actors have some control over their traces they leave, and which do not?
Certain omissions serve to sustain structural inequalities, and the most efficient mode of erasure is the impersonal bureaucratic hand. Mirabal recounts an incident at the memorial service of Dr. Henry Highland Garnet, a past president of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Society and American Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, who died in 1882. One of his eulogists, Richard T. Greener, who had been a dean of Howard University’s law school, said that in preparing his remarks, he had searched in vain in the Congressional Library for a copy of an important speech delivered by Garnet in the Capitol in 1865. “How can the negro be remembered when such speeches [Garnet’s] are not to be found in the National Library?,” lamented Greener (Mirabel, 89).
A few pages earlier, Mirabal had explored a roughly contemporaneous example of managing the archive by exiled nationalist and abolitionist Emilia Casanova de Villaverde and her husband. In Apuntes biográficos de la ilustre cubana Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (1874/1884), published semi-anonymously by her husband, Casanova de Villaverde was inserted as a central figure “within a male-dominated narrative” of New York’s Cuban nationalist politics, assuring later access to a body of writings that surely would otherwise have disappeared or quickly faded from the historical record. The book “affords visibility and voice to a woman, who, like so many in the exile community, could have been erased had [the] source not been created.” But the real distortion of the record, Mirabal asserts, involved the exclusion from the book of “any concrete discussion of slavery, abolition, and the future of emancipation in Cuba.” Mirabal explains this excision as “a deliberate attempt at creating archive,” wherein “blackness, slavery, and emancipation were for the most part eliminated from the production of a future historical narrative” (Mirabal, 2017: 80–81, 84–85).
A future historical narrative. That phrase illuminates the hidden switchbacks we follow as we track how the past is really made. Creating archives is not a straightforward process of preserving, storing, and organizing the materials of the past; there is the curating and editing of materials in the service of some prospective understanding of the past. Recently, speaking on a panel about memory and place, the poet Simone White explained memory as “a theory of the past … and what you’re actually interested in is the future” (White, 2017). Historians, take note! We tend to fixate on questions of how the past unfolded in the past—while both historical actors and those who create and manage their archives may actually focus as much on a story’s potential as on preserving some presumptively settled version of that story.
So how might this insight shape what we think about archives? In the first pages of her book Dust, a meditation on historians’ relationship to the archive, historian Carolyn Steedman (2001) recounts the surprisingly conventional view of the archive explained by avant-garde French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a public lecture in 1994. Citing the derivation of “archive” (arkhe) from the word arkheion, the residence of the Greek city state’s magistrate where documents were stored, Derrida defined the archive concretely as “a place where things begin, where power originates, its workings inextricably bound up with the authority of beginnings and starting points”—those established by the magistrate, the state, the president, the CEO (Steedman, 2001: 1–2). Decades earlier, Derrida’s contemporary Michel Foucault had defined the archive with an almost opposite absence of controls, as “systems that establish statements as events … and things,” a structure with no defined origin or home or master (Foucault, 1972: 128). 3
Making history
“It is not possible for us to describe our own archive,” Foucault wrote, “ … since [the archive] is that which gives to what we can say … its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance” (Foucault, 1972: 130). Mirabal seems to concur. With most of her subjects and interlocutors, she sees the effort to define one’s own archive primarily as an act not of preservation but of creation, a construction of a history for the future. The apparent impossibility of describing our own archives with any accuracy fascinates Mirabal, and she turns her historian’s gaze repeatedly on her subjects’ interpolation of their own historical narratives into the archives they themselves populate.
Some of the distortions of the historical narrative are accomplished by her subjects before their activities make their way into the archive. Mirabal recounts a story about the Club Cubano Inter-Americano (CCI), a progressive organization founded in 1945 by some former members of Club Mella, which closed its doors in 1940. In the early 1950s, CCI members started a campaign to create a monument in New York to Antonio Maceo, the Afro-Cuban independence leader, which then turned into a collaborative effort with other Cuban groups to erect a pair of monuments to the two fathers of Cuban independence, José Martí and Antonio Maceo, in Central Park. Ultimately, only the statue of Martí, the white-skinned creole leader, was commissioned—possibly because most of the funds for the project came from the Cuban consulate, and the Batista regime, under attack from a broad leftist coalition by the late 1950s, was unwilling to endorse a racially progressive project. Mirabal is not able to determine with any certainty why the monument to Maceo failed. Although the Martí statue was completed in 1959, it sat in a warehouse until it was finally placed on its long-empty pedestal in 1965. “The erasing of Maceo coincided with the Cuban Revolution, the Red Scare, and the ongoing debate over whether the CCI was [a] communist [organization],” Mirabal tells us (p. 224). The result was a cleaner, more tidy version of Cuba’s origins story, a better fit with the cultural and political requirements of cold war America.
Other distortions happened in the more traditional process of archiving. Mirabal recounts her efforts to locate records of Club Mella, which was explicitly interracial during its short life in the 1930s. Mirabal emphasized how hard it was to find material on Club Mella, both in a physical archive and in the few narratives that still circulated about who was part of the pre–World War II Cuban exile community and what they did. Mirabal explains that the history of Cubans in the IWO in New York has been silenced or at least muted because of the organization’s communist connections. Melba Alvarado, who became Mirabal’s primary oral history informant and was deeply involved in Cuban exile politics in the era shortly after Mella folded, was explicit about this silencing. During and after the cold war, former members of the IWO’s Spanish-speaking Cervantes societies would have calculated the cost of their association with a communist-affiliated organization, a cost that most working-class Latinas and Latinos could ill afford. And the erasure of that communist-tinged history became even more politically important for many Cubans in New York after 1960: non-communist Cubans would have gone to great lengths to affirm a historical image of their respectable and unthreatening exile community throughout the century.
Although Mirabal seems most fascinated by her subjects’ motivations and modes of distorting historical narrative, she also includes plentiful examples of people who, aware of the currency of historicity, try to describe their own archives in credible terms. Melba Alvarado falls into the latter category. Her story of participating in the long evolution of Cuban exile community after World War II is central to Mirabal’s framing of the book. (In fact, there are times, such as in Mirabal’s discussion of the demise of the campaign to build Maceo’s statue, when Mirabal seems to rely too heavily on Alvarado’s interpretations alone; Mirabal, 2017: 210–211.) Alvarado, who had known many former members of Club Mella and was twice elected president of its offshoot, the CCI, served as both a recorder and a vault of the somewhat alternative history of Cuban diasporic nationalism that carried Maceo’s vision of racial egalitarianism all the way through the 20th century. We cannot yet know how Alvarado figures in the archive because, at the end of Mirabal’s long story, Melba Alvarado is still there, believing in Cubans’ better past and tinkering with the past’s future.