Abstract
It is a rare gift and true honor to have my book read and discussed by such brilliant scholars. I am grateful. Their analysis and interpretations have opened intellectual and scholarly spaces ripe for further investigations. I am inspired by their questions, challenges, and encouragement for expansive and greater discussions on so many fronts. In many ways, that was my intention. To open discussion, challenge our understandings of archives, to theoretically play with the unknowing, unthinkable and the impossible, and to find comfort in the crevices where our histories often lie in waiting. As Lorrin Thomas writes, “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 times of quiet” (Thomas: 1).
I wrote Suspect Freedoms for several reasons: to write a history that both examined the early history of Cubans in the United States and position it as an intrinsic and critical part of US history. I wanted to challenge what constitutes US history without resorting to the narrative politics of inclusion, so prevalent in popular historical thinking. This meant theorizing US history, along with territoriality and geographies as fraught and broken. I embraced fragmented chronologies, inconvenient geographies, and wrought archives. How else to excavate unwanted visibilities? How else to tell stories that were never meant to be told?
In her reading of Suspect Freedoms, Guadalupe Garcia rightly deduces that one of the key issues the book grapples with is the relationship among “discourse, space, and nation, territoriality and belonging” (Garcia: 1). For me, there was no other way. During the early 19th century, Cubans migrated to a United States that was in the making. Seen as “unfinished,” the United States government was ruthless in their continual efforts to conquer, confiscate, and illegally take land. Cuba was a long-standing colonial temptation, an unrivaled possibility for extending US slavery.
The obsession with land greatly influenced how Cubans configured themselves and scripted nation within the diaspora. To understand the need to continually narrate diasporic spaces as sites of nation-building, as well as the disparate geographic possibility of annexation and independence, I looked to the idea of rhetorical geographies (the scripting and imagining of space). In questioning such usage, Garcia wonders “whether oppositional discourses and rhetorical geographies can not only be transferred back to the island, but in what form, to what effect, and what their impact is on the physical geographies of new homelands?” (Garcia: 4). Garcia makes an important point. To what extent can diasporic imaginings of nation, independence, and anti-slavery, to name a few, be transferred to the homeland? At the same time, is it possible that transference was not as important as we think? Is it possible that the diaspora was instead, a space of experimentation, longing and reinvention, with no real potential for return?
In regards to theoretical speculations and borders, Garcia is even more incisive. In citing that Suspect Freedoms is “pivoted on a connective and speculative model that blurs geographic borders and names their artificiality,” Garcia responds that “borders are fictive mostly to those who are able to legally cross them” (Garcia: 5). In this case, I was referring to 19th century colonial desires to build borders and illegally confiscate territories. I wanted to name the artificiality of such processes. Yet, Garcia makes a good point. In the end, who does get to cross such borders? Where does fiction operate in such transactions?
In reference to archives, Lorrin Thomas, deftly captured one of the book’s main arguments: a recognition that archives are not always passive remnants that historians interpret and imbue with meaning. At times, they can signal the intentions and desires of the historical figures themselves. In other words, sources can also be a deliberate and calculated attempt by historical figures to will themselves into history, to create a future historical archive and narrative, especially if they know that their race, gender, class, and migrant status will cause them to be written out. To my way of thinking, these sources and texts operate as antidotes to forgetting. Employing my reading of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde’s well-known 19th century biography, Apuntes biográficos de la ilustre cubana Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, as a vehicle for creating archive and a future historical narrative, Thomas writes, A future historical narrative. That phrase illuminates the hidden switchbacks we follow as we track how the past was really made. Creating archives is not a straightforward process of preserving, storing, and organizing materials of the past; there is curating and editing of materials in the service of some prospective understanding of the past. (Thomas: 8)
Thomas goes on to remind historians, “to take note!” We, as she writes, “tend to fixate on questions of how the past unfolded in the past-while both historical actors and those that 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” (Thomas: 8).
Noting that there is a place for excavating historical meaning within the very production of source, Thomas cites Foucault’s meditation that “it is not possible for us to describe our own archive.” And yet, as Thomas argues, “The apparent impossibility of describing our own archives with any accuracy fascinates Mirabal, and she turns her historian’s gaze repeatedly onto her subject’s interpolation of their (sic) own historical narratives into the archives they themselves populate” (Thomas: 9).
There were other authors, who for other reasons, also crafted a future historical narrative. In 1899, the Afro-Cuban journalist and revolutionary, Teófilo Domínguez published Ensayos biográficos: Figuras y Figuritas, a collection of seven biographical sketches of Afro-Cuban men active in the exile separatist movement. The publication year was not random. By 1899, the United States had intervened in the Cuban War for Independence, and signed the Treaty of Paris, which handed Cuba, along with Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam to the United States. For Domínguez, the book was a conscious decision to build archive and ensure Afro-Cuban male visibility and historical relevance during a period that witnessed the end of the Cuban exile movement, the passage of Plessy vs Ferguson, and the beginning of US empire-building on the island: events ripe for inducing forgetting.
Suspect Freedoms has often been categorized as an early history of Afro-Cubans in New York. This is not wrong. But it is also not the whole story. Suspect Freedoms is a hundred year history of how race, masculinity, gender, migration and politics cut across and shaped the entire Cuban migrant community over time. It begins in 1823 and ends in 1957. The periodization is deliberate. Despite evidence to the contrary, Cubans are still positioned as a post-1959 migrant community with little if any history in the United States prior to the Cuban revolution. As a result, they are primarily defined by anti-communism, Miami exile politics, US right-wing alliances, and whiteness.
The archive, however, reveals something else. In researching and writing this book, I learned of a long and varied history rooted in anti-slavery, emancipation, 19th century Afro-Cuban migrations, labor organizing, early 20th century radical politics, and mid-century Afro-diasporic alliances and longings. Blackness was deeply embedded in early Cuban community formations in the United States, so much so, that questions of race, emancipation, revolution and freedom filled the hundreds of Spanish language newspapers published and disseminated in New York.
At the center of such obsessions was the fear that Cuba would become “another Haiti,” and that white Cubans would be racialized if whiteness were not protected at all costs. As the New York based newspaper, La Verdad published in 1848, “We consider a Cuban every person born in Cuba and what we wish is that white people be born by thousands every hour” (Mirabal, 2017: 25). To comprehend the multiple discourses on whiteness I looked to a diasporic blanquimiento (diasporic whitening) to understand the translations of whiteness from Cuba to the United States that while vague, could still do the work of white supremacy and racial hierarchical thinking within the diaspora.
In her analysis, Nicole Guidotti Hernandez’s aptly notes that such diasporic thinking on whiteness can be traced to the rise of sexual economies in Cuba. Citing Karen Morrison and Shirley Thompson’s work, Guidotti-Hernandez makes a powerful intervention concerning the relationship among whiteness, sexuality, power, and control. As she notes, these ideas traveled freely from the island to the exile communities and were often based on the fears of black female reproduction and the potential of black domination. Guidotti-Hernandez’s intervention here is very useful and illustrates the importance of sexual economies in fashioning a diasporic narrative that emphasizes whiteness and controls blackness. As she expertly notes, “[W]hiteness was embedded in territoriality and the institution of slavery, making this legacy an integral part of why Afro-Cubans, and Afro-Cuban women in particular, need to be written back into the narrative” (Guidotti-Hernandez: 9).
The uses of diasporic whiteness did not go unchallenged. In 1854, the editors of the New York based newspaper El Mulato broke rank with conservative forces and used the newspaper to advocate for the gradual abolition of slavery in Cuba, the extension of universal rights to slaves, the complete independence of Cuba, and the rewriting of a nationalist dialogue to include and incorporate all Cubans, regardless of race. One of the first to applaud El Mulato was the Frederick Douglass Paper. This was not surprising. Early on, the black press picked up on the ongoing insurgent and racial tensions, and openly wondered if Cuba, being so close to the United States, could truly be independent once free from Spanish colonial rule. If the United States were to intervene, what would be the fate of millions of free people of color and newly freed slaves on the island?
Over a decade later in 1872, African-American male leaders responded to such queries by organizing the Cuban Anti-Slavery Society in New York. They named the well-respected anti-slavery activist Reverend Henry Highland Garnet president, signed petitions, lobbied politicians in Washington DC and did everything possible to demand the freedom of enslaved Cubans. At the crux, was the future definition of freedom, blackness, and in the case of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Society, masculinity across the Americas. The African-American male founders and members of the society were invested in the possibility of a shared blackness. But this too would prove difficult, if not problematic. Was there only one vision of blackness, of freedom? Could the possibility of pan-Africanism override past colonial desires?
Another deeply understudied part of this history was the role of workers and labor unions in redefining what it meant to be Cuban (i.e. Cubanidad). According to Cuban historian Josefina Toledo: Many of the figures that helped found the Cuban Revolutionary Party remain in darkest anonymity today; relegated there by a bourgeois historiography, which does not find it convenient to highlight the vanguard role of the working class, cigar workers, typographers, and workers from the masses of emigrated revolutionaries from Tampa, Key West, and New York. (Mirabal, 2017: 97)
Toledo is correct in her assertion. Except for the work of a few historians (Toledo, Dechamps Chapeaux, López Mesa, Pérez and Poyo) the bulk of the research has excluded the role of labor organizers in shaping the separatist movements in New York.
During the late 1870s and 1880s, Afro-Cubans migrated to work in the cigar factories. The end of the Ten Years Wars in Cuba left the island destroyed, and few had little choice but to move to New York to work in the cigar industry built and run by white Cuban elites. It was through labor that questions concerning emancipation and the future of waged labor were discussed in conjunction with ending slavery and Spanish colonial rule. For those who migrated to work in the cigar industry, they were inseparable. The issue, was that the majority of those questioning the goals of the separatist movement were working-class men and women of color.
Many of those who questioned the movement were involved in an intellectual diasporic collective, known as la colectiva. On 22 January 1890 Rafael Serra formalized the colectiva when he founded “La Liga Sociedad de instrucción and recreo.” The creation of La Liga was a radical act. Not only was it a place where young men of color took courses, it was a political and intellectual training ground where they were taught the finer points of social justice, equality and labor rights, to establish what José Martí called “una sociedad reparadora,” a restored society (Mirabal, 2017: 112).
Spaces like La Liga are important historical reminders that black Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants had a long-standing intellectual tradition and activism that served them well as they fought to included labor, racial equality, and freedom within the exile nationalist movement. Martín Morúa Delgado and Margarito Gutierrez were fierce supporters of labor and considered the labor movement the rightful place of black Cuban and Puerto Rican workers. In time, and with the assistance of José Martí, the nationalist movement changed its platform to include labor and racial equality as central tenets.
Gender equality, however, was not included in the revised platform. There were no concessions made to the women in the movement or to women’s rights. For the most part, women’s activism was confined to auxiliary clubs and informal networks. Those who struck out on their own, independent of the masculinist demands, were often punished. And yet, there were certain spaces where Afro-Cuban women challenged inequality and mistreatment. The early publication of Minerva: The Biweekly for Women of Color in Cuba was a revelation to Afro-Cuban women in the diaspora, who continued to fight and organize for their rights. Written for and by Afro-Cuban women on the island, Minerva was widely disseminated throughout New York and extremely popular with African-American women, who helped to finance it.
In referencing La Liga and Minerva, Guidotti-Hernandez’s cites and reaffirms my reading that such histories “lead to an impossibility of blackness as official history, memory, and archive” (Guidotti-Hernandez: 6). As Toledo reminds us, there was simply no place for such histories that catapulted blackness within the official and sanctioned re-telling. How does one, to cite Saidiya Hartman, “tell impossible stories” (Hartman, 2008: 10)?
Telling impossible stories, dwelling in the unknowable and unthinkable, was the only way that I could write Suspect Freedoms. What Thomas calls, “distortions of the historical narrative” that make their way into the archive (Thomas: 9). Only through such theoretical approaches was I able to craft a history that spoke to post-war (1898) returns to Cuba, post-US occupation migrations, early 20th century radical politics, and mid-century Afro-Cuban activism, to name a few. Nonetheless, it was still an inconvenient history, one where the archival danger was palatable and the telling resistant. Compared to the 19th century, few sources existed. The most resistant, the most difficult history to research was the history of El Club Julio Antonio Mella founded 1932 in East Harlem. Named after one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party, the club was one of a number of immigrant lodges (logias) organized under the International Worker’s Order (IWO). For years, it remained a narrative impossibility lodged in Melba Alvarado’s memory. But as I write in the introduction, the location of one inscribed photograph changed everything.
In short, El Club Mella was a racially integrated socialist club that consisted mainly of those fleeing President Gerardo Machado’s repressive regime in Cuba. According to a report authored by the National Committee of the Hispanic Section of the IWO, the club attracted “thousands of workers, many of them Cuban,” as well as those who “had been exiled for political reasons” (Mirabal, 2017: 172). Members of El Club Mella fought in the Spanish Civil War and organized an all-women feminist auxiliary club known as El Club de Damas. But what made El Club Mella a fascinating history is that despite my years writing about El Club Cubano Inter-Americano (CCI) and interviewing for decades, one of its presidents and core-members, Melba Alvarado, I knew little of the club that preceded and influenced the CCI. In fact, it is doubtful that the CCI would have existed without El Club Mella. And yet, it was clear from the surviving archives that members of the CCI sought to erase all traces of El Club Mella. After World War II and during the Red Scare, there were few that wanted their involvement with El Club Mella to become public knowledge. As Thomas observed, “[D]uring 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” (Thomas: 10). I couldn’t have said it better.
In 1940, El Club Mella disbanded. Five years later, the CCI was founded in the South Bronx. The primary reason for organizing the CCI was race, a heart-breaking realization. By 1945, there were no clubs for Afro-Cubans in New York, and it was time, as the first president Generoso Pedroso stated, to form a club “for people of color” (Mirabal, 2017: 186).