Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

By Bonnie Blair O'toole

Louis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration.

Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469631318

Bonnie Blair O'toole

Marthe Reed (1959-2018) was the author of five books, including Nights Reading, (em)bodied bliss and the collaborative Pleth with j hastain. She was co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books, and her poems have appeared in Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky and New American Writing, among other publications.

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Introduction

The character of the history of Cuba was fixed early in the nineteenth century, at the about moment that Cubans imagined the need for a proper history of their own. From that time forward, historical knowledge of Cuba has hewed to a well-defined narrative arc, one shaped discursively around the formation of nation, something of a chronicle of national liberation given principally to the celebration of collective resolve and commemoration of individual valor. Much of the historical literature has been given to the heroic, an account of a people to whom is ascribed indomitable will confronting adversaries possessed of unyielding determination, from which are derived two principal narrative subsets of struggle: against colonialism (Spain) and against imperialism (the United States).

The history of Cuba in the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth, has been fashioned around the problem of the nation and its principal corollary attributes of national sovereignty and self-determination. The pursuit of sovereign nationhood—as a nineteenth-century popular project and a twentieth-century political program—has defined the purpose to which much of the creative energy of historians of Cuba has been given. The primacy of nation has become so deeply inscribed into the very fabric of historical knowledge that it often tends to pass unrecognized, thereupon to serve as the assumptions into which successive generations of scholars have been socialized. The history of the Cuban people has been understood principally as a process contingent on and contained within a paradigm of liberation, organized around historical narratives that have privileged the pursuit of nation almost to the exclusion of everything else.

A cursory review of much of the rich historical literature of Cuba invites the inference that the principal determinant of the worthiness of subjects of historical significance has been derived largely from and in function of the nation. Women, for example, have obtained historiographical presence principally in the role of actors engaged in the project of patria.¹ So too with much of the history of slavery and race relations, as well as biography and the history of ideas, and much of the history of art, music, and literature: sometimes more, sometimes less, to be sure, but almost all genres of historical knowledge configured as subtexts of the master narrative of nation, if through other means. Readers coming for the first time to the historical literature of nineteenth-century Cuba—written in Cuba and out—could easily be forgiven for concluding that there was no history outside the manigua (the fields of insurgent Cuba).

The bias is itself possessed of a proper history, of course: the result of the very history from which it emerged, something of a history within a history. That Cuban pretensions to national sovereignty and self-determination have historically been contested, periodically from within but most menacingly from without, has served to introduce the specter of indeterminacy into the very proposition of nation, an uneasy sense of the nation as unfinished and unrealized, as something pending and in peril, the very continuity of which seemed always to remain in doubt. Much of the historiography thus developed as something of a self-legitimizing body of knowledge, bearing the discernible traces of an unresolved disquiet, a refusal to take the existence of the nation as a given but as a problem. Cubans have lived within a circumstance of angst as a national condition, a people formed by a commitment to a project that seemed often elusive and always inconclusive.

The historical literature of nineteenth-century Cuba has tended to fix on the many facets of politico-military mobilization against Spanish colonial rule. The view of the nineteenth century as a political time is, to be sure, compelling: in a time of deep drama, a people are summoned to high purpose and disposed to endure frightful privation for the sake of exalted ideals as a means of collective self-fulfillment associated with the pursuit of a new nationality. It is the stuff of patriotic pride and source of national myths: history as the moral sustenance of a people.

To cast the nineteenth century as a time given to national formation as a matter of political purpose, however, has tended to preempt awareness of historical knowledge of other kinds and to preclude an appreciation of a past possessed of other possibilities.² In fact, the character of change in nineteenth-century Cuba was a far more complex process, and within the furrows of complexity dwell subtlety and nuance, the awareness of which cannot but deepen an understanding of the circumstances by which a people cohered around shared value systems as a means of self-definition and self-justification. This is to direct attention to a different Cuban experience, one that had consequences as far-reaching and as long-lasting as the political project of Cuba Libre. While vast numbers of Cubans outside the body politic challenged the legitimacy of colonialism as a political system, other Cubans inside the body social challenged the condition of colonialism as a moral system: in a complex process, an emerging market economy by which vast numbers of women and men were transformed into agents—often unwittingly—of far-ranging cultural and social change.

Cubans embraced the promise of modernity as a source of self-fulfillment and means of self-knowledge, a seemingly endless influx of new values that in the course of events and over the course of time contributed to the collapse of the moral infrastructure upon which the colonial system rested. They arrived at terms of collective self-awareness through many forms, not all—and perhaps not even the most important—of which were political. Important facets of this process developed as a function of daily life: change in the form of increments, registered slowly, often by way of ordinary and indeed commonplace routines, perhaps unrecognized at the time, but nevertheless change taking place, taking hold, and taking effect. Some of the most significant transformations were experienced not as a matter of political circumstance but as a cultural condition, of moral structures being dissembled and reassembled in function of changing social needs, change that served to suggest what lo cubano might look like, although without necessarily intending to and certainly without thought to consequences.

The colonial system in Cuba did not collapse all at once. Rather, it was a process over time, one in which confidence in the prevailing moral order wavered in the face of new value systems, and where time-honored cultural practices strained to accommodate changing material conditions, where men and women struggled to reconcile old expectations with new experiences: in sum, circumstances in which custom and convention faltered and floundered as an organic process. A dying colonialism—to borrow from Frantz Fanon—implies demise in turns and increments of a broad array of social structures and moral systems, a process during which—observed Fanon—a new society comes to birth.³ Almost all facets of received value systems experienced a prolonged state of disarray and disruption, as a social system collapsed in on itself, beset with deepening internal contradictions, unable to accommodate new demands associated with changing cultural norms attending changing material conditions and expanding market forces. By the late nineteenth century, the moral logic of colonialism was no longer tenable, thereby rendering the political rationale of colonialism no longer plausible.

Before the political moment arrived, however, much had already transpired. The character of disaffection with the status quo was a far more complicated condition than political discontent. It was at once cause and consequence of cultural forces that had wrought havoc on the very moral systems upon which the existing social order depended for its stability—and indeed required for its very continuity. This was a system that could reproduce itself only as long as it possessed the means to command credibility and sustain the capacity to inspire confidence. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century it was failing at both.

The process of cultural differentiation—that is, the ways Cubans set in place the normative markers from which an actionable collective identity assumed form—derived meaning from many sources, and not all the ways that Cubans arrived at an understanding of self-awareness and an appreciation of self-worth fit exactly into paradigms of the national liberation. There is more than ample evidence to suggest that the political mobilizations of the nineteenth century were consequences—and not causes—of larger moral transformations by which the logic of the status quo could no longer sustain the claim to credibility.

Cubans in the nineteenth century lived with and within circumstances of change as a condition of daily life. They carried out the tasks of daily life as a matter of course, largely absorbed with private and personal matters, seeking to negotiate the demands of received wisdom as best they could, doing what they had to do to make do and get by. Vast numbers acquiesced routinely to the dictates of everyday life, making a living and planning for life. They went to work; they played and danced; they commemorated birthdays and observed anniversaries; they adhered to the conventions of courtship and marriage, engaged in sexual conduct, and enjoyed the pleasures of friendships; they celebrated the birth of babies and mourned the death of loved ones: life continued to be lived quite the way it had always been.

Almost . . .

In fact, change was under way almost everywhere, relentlessly, burrowing deeply into the premises and practices through which the patterns of everyday life were experienced. Cuba was in a state of flux, undergoing change through demographic shifts, travel, trade and commerce, the development of print culture, and the expansion of market forces. New ideas and new knowledge, new moral conduct and new social practices, transmitted through new communication networks and technologies, found increasingly receptive new publics. A new civil culture was in the making, fostering a sense of collective solidarity and individual agency, a people imbued with the conviction of destiny.

In fact, change was underway almost everywhere, relentlessly burrowing deep into the premises and practices through which the patterns of everyday life were modified. Across the island, women and men seemed to go about their lives in ordinary ways, unaware that they were themselves changing, and in the process were themselves being transformed into agents of change: making many little decisions from one moment to the next, affecting a change of appearance here and there, using a new materialist vocabulary to articulate new needs, imagining new choices and engaging in new leisure forms, reading new books and learning new dances, all of which in the fullness of time combined to change a way of life. A closer look at the lives of men and women in the nineteenth century reveals that the process of change had settled into something of a permanent condition. Within seemingly ordinary routines and commonplace practices, within patterns of daily habits and the appearance of what passed for normal, the lives of men and women were changing as a facet of life as lived, as a consequence of the way they made personal decisions and exercised private choices, and in the process—and in the course of time—more than adequately prepared the way for the great transformations that followed.

To suggest that identities were in transition is correct, to be sure, but the situation was more complicated. It also involved new forms of associations and new sources of affinities, new strategies through which to adapt to a changing material environment that in turn affected the sensibilities and susceptibilities through which identities of gender, race, and class were enacted: women and men sought to live their lives in ordinary ways during extraordinary times, overtaken by a growing realization that old ways did not meet the needs created by new times. These developments implied far-reaching adaptations, as men and women engaged in processes of collective self-interrogation as a facet of changing material conditions and moral circumstances: change seemed to gather momentum, sustained through new knowledge obtained through new communication systems, by way of new travel experiences, and through new ways to engage the world at large.

Sugar catapulted Cuba into the swell of global capitalism. The reach of market forces extended across the island, relentlessly, almost everywhere, overtaking and overturning the established normative systems upon which the pattern of daily life was enacted. The perception of the Cuban economy taking a decisive plunge into export production—principally sugar—through the early decades of the nineteenth century, inexorably and irrevocably, is generally correct. An economy previously languishing within a system of eighteenth-century colonial mercantilism expanded in form and function around nineteenth-century market capitalism, with far-flung international trade linkages, organized around an emerging agro-industrial production system driven by the logic of new technologies, new markets, new distribution networks, and new modes of transportation. Market forces arrived accompanied by multiple and multi-faceted paradigms of progress and modernity, having to do with science and technology, trade and commerce, industry and manufacturing, credit and finance, transportation and communication, reaching into a host of long-established cultural forms and social practices, thereby calling into question the relevance of the moral systems upon which they were based. A new society was in formation, a new social class was forming, a new moral order was emerging—bearing to varying degrees discernible traces of powerful market-driven transformations that were acting to reshape the physiognomy of the material environment of everyday life.

This book examines the emergence of an urban creole middle class, the women and men who early passed under the sway of transformations wrought by market forces, not only—perhaps not even principally—as a mode of production but also as a moral system: far-reaching and all-encompassing change that acted decisively to reconfigure the normative framework through which Cuban society was transformed. This book’s intent is to examine the culture of capitalism as a quotidian phenomenon, to explore the way that market forces insinuated themselves into the multiple facets of the daily lives of the men and women of the emerging middle class as moral systems and cultural practices. An expanding market culture served as something of an environment into which successive generations were socialized as a circumstance of normal, from which vast numbers of middle-class Cubans derived their bearings and—often without fully appreciating the subversive character of new demeanor and disposition—contributed to undermining the very premises from which a social system derived its moral logic. This implied the emergence of a way of life dominated by a belief in commodity consumption as the source of well-being, as Richard Robbins has characterized generally the emergence of a culture of capitalism.⁴

Change was registered often in the most routine of ways, through commonplace individual acts and personal decisions made—or not—but occurring with sufficient frequency and by ever-larger numbers of women and men so as to suggest something of a pattern, and eventually the pattern served to reveal the possibility of new social solidarities. That is, a people acting collectively, exerting themselves to widen the scope of usable personal space and in the process of expanding from within the capacity of existing normative structures to accommodate new value systems, to set in motion the forces that enabled almost all the change that followed. All in all, developments pointing to those behaviors associated with a people discerning—if at times only vaguely—the need to resolve the contradictions between old ways of living and new ideas about life, and in the process acting to push history forward, for indeed, as Joanildo Burity has written of Brazil in a different context: Culture counts, because there is no social process without symbolic signifying practices, and because many of the contemporary points of political antagonisms turn around cultural differences.⁵

The larger implications of these developments were not readily discerned at the time, of course, for men and women in the throes of deeply personal change often lack the vantage point from which to bring cognizance to the forces by which their lives are being transformed. These are complex issues that pose a unique challenge to the historian: to chronicle the experience of a people who act as agents of change—by deed and by disposition—but are often themselves unable to articulate the nature of change or appreciate their role as agents of change. People who live through times of cultural dislocation are most assuredly changed, and often transact change as a personal experience to which they tend to attribute little social significance. Unlike the great collective political projects that tend to expand outward with the intent to change the world, individual moral transformations tend to turn inward content to change the personal—up to a point. It is possible that no more than a handful were alive to the larger implications of their actions.

Vast numbers of Cubans experienced the nineteenth century as a time of far-reaching cultural realignment. They crossed over into thresholds of modernity, there to pursue the promise inscribed in the paradigm of progress, a point of view with which to contemplate new prospects for personal fulfillment and new possibilities for collective well-being. To be cosmopolitan implied a new way of seeing the world, to be comfortable with the ways of the world at large, to be at home with the cultural forms of progress and the moral systems of modernity, and most of all disposed to take up new ways as a means to articulate the purpose to which new social values would be given. Each successive generation was more familiar with the outside world than its predecessor, more comfortable with—and more self-conscious of—a cosmopolitan condition that could not be readily contained within old value systems. Cubans had situated themselves at the cusp of progress, to engage the wider world as a means of ascendancy in the world of their home. Indeed, many of the mounting structural tensions of the nineteenth century had to do with the demeanor of the nativos, as Spaniards were wont to say, who embraced modes of modernity as a way of being comfortable—purposefully as a way being Cuban—with a cosmopolitan identity that was, in the end, precisely the point, for it was also meant as a way through which to exclude the presence of Spain.

A new creole sensibility was in the making, in large part the result of market forces acting on cultural practices, thereby disrupting the premise of established social arrangements. Old ways were in disarray; received moral systems passed into discredit from without and desuetude from within. Portents of change were everywhere visible. While it may have been impossible for people at the time to discern a trend to everyday change as a matter of a social process, few failed to detect the signs of change as a lived experience. Patterns of dislocation often revealed themselves through the use of culturally charged metaphors, themselves indicative of a deepening anxiety, articulated in the press and in poetry, in the novel and onstage: such developments, theater critic Rine Leal noted, revealed the tension in which our society lived.⁶ It is not certain that defenders of the status quo understood larger implications of the disarray in which they lived, but they were most certainly alive to the changes by which the disruptions of daily life were experienced. They could see the change simply by looking about—in demeanor, in deportment, in dispositions; they could see how new conditions foreshadowed new conduct. The consequences were perhaps predictable: a vague presentiment of impending doom settling over vast numbers who lived comfortably within the moral order of the established order of things. And inevitably uncertainty turned into fear and fear gave way to resentment.

Indications of change were often revealed through spontaneous acts of private defiance of established conventions, at times perhaps hardly more than an impulse to act as a matter of conviction—impetuously perhaps—but with the understanding that convictions were themselves often outcomes of new possibilities offered by shifting normative structures: something of a historical development of dispositions that contributed to the possibility of new realities. These were the commonplace adaptations occasioned by new material circumstances and new moral systems, and they served to shape those personal inclinations that acted to challenge existing social arrangements, often without necessarily meaning to, thereby forging the collective temperament by which a people set in place the logic for more change.

New fissures appeared within an already deeply fractured social system, riven by tensions produced between those pushing forward to advance modernity and those pushing back to defend tradition. Nor were all proponents of one side of the divide or the other always pushing for the same the same version of things, of course. The nineteenth century was a time of transformation, as Cubans across the island were swept up by market forces and drawn to contemplate realms of modernity into which an expanding export economy had thrust them. These were decisive decades, fixing the trajectory of the history that followed on its definitive course. Knowledge of the world at large expanded and served as a means to inform the perspectives from which to take measure of the moral and material circumstances of daily life. New knowledge, and especially firsthand new knowledge (by way of travel abroad, for example), made the temptation of invidious comparison almost impossible to resist—and almost unbearable to suffer. Increasing numbers of men and women came to view their own society as outsiders, and many did not like what they saw. Many were profoundly transformed as a result of access to new sources of knowledge and new ways of knowing, and their relationship to their society, or their community, or their family—or all three—was never the same. More people were reading more things from more different places, a powerful means of transport into worlds previously unimagined: by way of newspapers, periodicals, plays, novels, and poetry. In sum, they experienced new and multiple vantage points from which to contemplate possibilities of new modes of living life.

Old value systems floundered, exposed as inadequate if not incompatible with the ethos by which Cubans were being transformed, which in turn implied the necessity to interrogate received truths. Well-defined boundaries between propriety and impropriety seemed increasingly unable to contain either. The premise of privilege—whether as presumption of racial authority, or the claim of social entitlement, or hierarchies of gender—no longer obtained routine compliance. These were complex times, noteworthy for a susceptibility to distrust and dispositions to doubt; belief systems no longer inspired unconditional faith, authority no longer commanded uncritical acquiescence. This was a time in which it was possible to admit doubt and acknowledge skepticism, to look askance at received knowledge and act in defiance of conventional wisdom, a time too when old truths lost their power to comfort and their capacity to convince. More men and more women were more disposed to dispute what they were taught, distrust what they were told, and doubt what they heard.

The pages that follow examine facets of Cuban society in the throes of structural change, during decades of far-reaching cultural adaptations and momentous moral transformations, at a time of deepening civil unrest and widening political discontent. An urban creole middle class was in the making, imbued with a new internal confidence and a well-defined conviction of self-worth, acquiring at decisive moments of its formation moral dispositions very much influenced by expanding market forces. How utterly incongruous: a people imbued with modern sensibilities tethered to a colonial system with origins in the sixteenth century, over which presided a distant hereditary monarch identified with the cult of la madre patria, where ancient ties of blood and history demanded fealty as a matter of duty, so well consecrated in the proposition of Cuba as the "ever-faithful isle [la siempre fidelísima Isla de Cuba]."⁷ Raimundo Cabrera no doubt expressed the sentiment of many when he insisted that Cubans aspired to live and work for the common good and not [for] the support of a royal family.⁸

While not law exactly, such received truths, time-honored tenets of custom, had served to hold society together. Custom is law, someone said, Ramón J. de Palacios observed in 1885, and in this country it is much more so. And to breach custom, Palacios understood, implied to break the law.⁹ Social stability depended in large measure on the efficacy of customs and the effect of tradition, much of which had to do with norms of deference and submission. Normative systems were in varying conditions of disarray, implying a process of what Cabrera characterized in 1887 as social demoralization.¹⁰ By the late decades of the nineteenth century, these systems no longer worked, that is, they seemed unable to adapt to the changing cultural conditions occasioned by market forces, and thereby revealed themselves to be of diminishing relevance, or worse: perceived by Cubans to be obstacles to the attainment of everything that seemed to have acquired a new importance, so much of which was associated with and attributed to the colonial system. The normative structures charged with the task of reproducing the values upon which the social arrangements relied faltered, and indeed failed to keep pace with the market-induced transformations of the nineteenth century. That these tensions were often experienced beyond plain sight did not make disaffection with the anomaly of the colonial condition any less onerous to bear. They were occurring at the precise moment that Cubans were contemplating alternative moral determinants of self-interest, assembling the terms of an all-encompassing cosmology of Cuban, the attributes of what made for lo cubano: a paradigm of modernity as the source of a culturally coherent middle class, with the affirmation of progress as the representation of a national temperament.

New moral systems were in formation, occasioned by transitions from colonial mercantilism to market capitalism, informed by an expanding affinity with modernity, and driven by the ideological vogue of Manichean allegories by which humanity was divided into the civilized Us and the uncivilized Other. Cubans were fully persuaded that they were among the former, a conviction that implied the need to enact those normative practices by which a people could plausibly claim inclusion in cultural systems associated with civilization, as women and men very much given to the celebration of the propriety of their own presence in the world at large. Modern civilization advances in gigantic steps, observed Benjamín Vallín in 1862, adding: Those who link their fate to the interests of an impotent past in the face of a future brimming with promise, in all times and everywhere, are doomed to perish.¹¹ To be susceptible to cosmopolitan impulses could not but propel Cubans into realms of emulation of other civilized societies, as a matter of model conduct and moral imperative, as a means of self-representation and a mode of self-fulfillment.

The presence of women in this process was central, and speaks to the insights offered by Rita Felski into the blurring of public/private distinctions as middle-class women moved out into public spaces to engage the promise of modernity.¹² Middle-class criollas in possession of means and privilege—and especially because they possessed means and privilege— could not but respond to restrictions of freedom of action in realms of the personal with an injured sense of entitlement. People who set the rules often see no reason to abide by them; imbued with a sense of privilege, they often serve as a powerful force for change when moral practice acts to thwart the exercise of social prerogative. Criollas who simply by looking about took note of anomalies inscribed in prevailing gender norms chafed under the obvious contradictions between social privilege and moral prohibition. To enter the moral universe of the market was to emerge transformed, sometimes more, sometimes less, but almost always sufficiently changed to discern contradictions between old prohibitions and new possibilities.

The conventional wisdom concerning the nineteenth-century criolla cloistered behind gated windows and surrounded by a phalanx of protective chaperones, as prisoners of patriarchy and circumscribed on all sides by conventions and customs designed to limit freedom of action if not of thought, may indeed possess some measure of verisimilitude. The evidence speaks to another reality, however: an expanding presence of women in public places and within ever-widening circles of acquaintances, as actors and agents, in discharge of voice and the exercise of volition. The middle-class criolla experienced the nineteenth century as a time of far-reaching change by which she was changed. Certainly the presence and participation of women in the process of national liberation—many from among the most prominent creole families of Cuba—has been splendidly chronicled. Indeed, the historical literature on the mambisa has developed into something of a genre of the historiography of Cuba.¹³ The prominence of women in almost every facet of the liberation project offers compelling evidence that the criolla hardly remained sequestered within the confines of domesticity. No gated recluses were they.

But it was more complex still, for developments of other kinds in the nineteenth century point to Felski’s notion of women playing a central role in prevailing anxieties, fears, and hopeful imaginings about the distinctive features of the ‘modern age,’ crystalliz[ing] the ambivalent responses to capitalism and technology.¹⁴ Market forces transformed the material basis and inevitably the moral bias of daily life. Change begat change—inexorably—for it was all but impossible to arrest and reverse aspirations of personal autonomy released by the promise of the market.

Women availed themselves of multifaceted modes of self-representation and forged multiple ways to self-fulfillment. The voice of women acquired salience in the realms of poetry and fiction, in the columns of newspapers and in the pages of periodicals,