Inter-subjective and Transnational Racial Effects: The Role of the United States in the Formation and Evolution of the Collective Perception and Racial Relations in Cuba, 1898-1902
OF THE DISSERTATION INTER-SUBJECTIVE AND TRANSNATIONAL RACIAL EFFECTS: THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE FORMATION AND EVOLUTION OF THE COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION AND RACIAL RELATIONS IN CUBA, 1898-1902 by Tiffany Yolanda Jimmece Bryant Florida International University, 2010 Miami, Florida Professor Felix E. Martin, Major Professor Since the arrival of the first African slaves to Cuba in 1524, the issue of race has had a long-lived presence in the Cuban national discourse. However, despite Cuba’s colonial history, it has often been maintained by some historians that race relations in Cuba were congenial with racism and racial discrimination never existing as deep or widespread in Cuba as in the United States (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). In fact, it has been argued that institutionalized racism was introduced into Cuban society with the first U.S. occupation, during 1898–1902 (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). This study of Cuba investigates the influence of the United States on the development of race relations and racial perceptions in post-independent Cuba, specifically from 1898-1902. These years comprise the time period immediately following the final fight for Cuban Independence, culminating with the Cuban-SpanishAmerican War and the first U.S. occupation of Cuba. By this time, the Cuban population comprised Africans as well as descendants of Africans, White Spanish people,
The Origins of the Cuban Revolt
For Cubans and Spaniards the Spanish-American War was neither ‘splendid’ nor ‘little’ but a 350 days’ climax to a war of almost thirty years’ duration which in its savagery and destruction presaged the total wars of the twentieth century. Americans may celebrate 1898 in a mood of self-congratulation at having liberated an oppressed people from corrupt and tyrannical rule at the same time celebrating their own emergence as a world imperial power, but for Spaniards and Cubans there is little to celebrate. The war was el Desastre for Spain, leading to decades of painful adjustment to loss of empire culminating in the bitterest civil conflict in a century and a half of domestic turbulence.1 For Cubans there will be regret that the war destroyed Jose Marti’s vision of Cuba Libre, bequeathing a divided society and a devastated country which instead of becoming the republic of a visionary’s dream became a new field for American endeavour now that the continental frontier of Westward expansion had ‘closed’.2 Any celebration in Cuba in 1998 will have been tempered by awareness that there will be Cuban exiles in Florida planning to overthrow the revolutionary regime in much the same way as earlier generations of exiles had planned to overthrow Spanish rule during the half-century before 1898.
Relaciones de clase e ideologías raciales: acción rural colectiva en Lousiana y Cuba, 1865-1912
Este ensayo investiga las regiones azucareras de Louisiana y Cuba despues de la esclavitud, concretamente la reorganizacion del trabajo en las plantaciones y sus implicaciones para la posibilidad de alianzas transraciales. En ambas zonas hubo instancias de accion colectiva que cruzaron las barreras de color existentes a la sazon, asi como instancias de represion que tendieron a reforzar una marcada dicotomia negro/blanco. De este modo, la huelga azucarera de 1887 en Louisiana incorporo a trabajadores categorizados como negros, blancos y mulatos; sin embargo, la represion que la siguio senalaba a los trabajadores afro-americanos como objetivos. La guerra cubana de independencia unio a los cubanos de multiples categorias socio-raciales bajo una ideologia explicitamente antirracista. Empero, menos de veinte anos mas tarde, la generalizada represion en Cuba oriental resucito la antigua imagen de la iniciatuva afro-cubana como preludio a una "guerra de razas". La autora contrasta la evolucion de una mano de obra mayoritariamente afro-americana en el campo azucarero de Louisiana con el desarrollo de una mano de obra multirracial en Cuba. Argumenta que la actuacion de los lideres politicos tenia crucial importancia en la formacion de los distintos significados politicos de raza, pero que funcionaba dentro de los parametros determinados por la experiencia historica anterior y la economia politica contemporanea.