The Merchant of Havana: The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive

By Stephen Silverstein

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association

As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9780826521118

Stephen Silverstein

Stephen Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Baylor University.

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THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA

THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA

The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive

STEPHEN SILVERSTEIN

Vanderbilt University Press

NASHVILLE

© 2016 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2016

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Frontispiece: Lithograph showing a sugar refinery plant in Cuba.

Title: Ingenio Acana propriedad del Señor Dn. J. Eusebio Alfonso // dibujado y litogrdo. por Edo. Laplante; litografia de L. Marquier. Illustration from Los ingenios : coleccion de vistas de los principales ingenios de azucar . . . de Cuba . . . / por Justo G. Cantero (Habana: Impreso en la litografia de L. Marquier, 1857)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number   2016030960

LC classification number   HT1078 .S55 2016

Dewey class number   306.3/6209729109/034—dc23

LC record available at   lccn.loc.gov/2016030960

ISBN 978-0-8265-2109-5   (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2111-8   (ebook)

For Alla and for my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Notional Jew: Judaizing the Merchant

2. Racial Prescriptions and Inscriptions in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841)

3. Racial Alchemy and Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s La cuarterona (1867)

4. The Jewish Escape Hatch from Cuba Impossible: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882)

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

The Merchant of Havana began and, over several years, developed under the intelligent, patient guidance of Ruth Hill. She is the source of anything that may be worthwhile in this book.

I am deeply grateful to my teachers in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Special thanks go to Fernando Operé, Gustavo Pellón, and Alison Weber. I found valuable support in Asher Biemann and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows of Jewish Studies program at the University of Virginia, which he organized. The Public Humanities Fellowship Program in South Atlantic Studies, sponsored jointly by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, provided a venue to calibrate several of my arguments. Research in Havana was made possible by a Charles Gordon Reid Fellowship from the University of Virginia, as well as by the generous assistance of Ana María González Marfud, Carlos Federico Martí Brenes, Ariel Camejo, and José Antonio Baujín Pérez at the University of Havana. I thank Jorge and Nardy León for their friendship and hospitality.

I have exceptionally supportive colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University. Heidi Bostic’s counsel and encouragement have been invaluable, and a chapter of this study has benefitted from her insightful reading. Elizabeth Willingham graciously invited me to present some of my ideas at a conference panel she organized. Marian Ortuño provided smart critique of a portion of this book. My friends in the Spanish Division have been generous and kind: Frieda Blackwell, Rafa Climent Espino, Jan Evans, Guillermo García Corales, Baudelio Garza, Karol Hardin, Paul Larson, Fred Loa, Linda McManness, Alex McNair, Janet Norden, Manuel Ortuño, Marian Ortuño, Lilly Souza Fuertes, Mike Thomas, and Beth Willingham. Adrienne Harris and Andy Wisely are real-life superheroes. Roberto Pesce and Serena Dal Pont have made life in the heart of Texas delightful and delicious, as has Stephen Pluháček. Robyn Driskell has advocated for me and supported my research. Two summer sabbaticals and a semester of research leave provided by Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences afforded me the time to complete this book.

The Latin American Jewish Studies Association has granted me several opportunities to develop my ideas in dialogue with a community of thoughtful peers. I am especially indebted to my tremendous colleagues Alan Astro, Naomi Lindstrom, and Darrell Lockhart. Rosa Perelmuter has hospitably encouraged my participation on two LAJSA conference panels that she organized. I am very fortunate to have David Foster as a mentor. During the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer program Jewish Buenos Aires (which has sadly been eliminated along with all overseas NEH summer seminars) that Foster led, this project benefitted from his consultation and from that of Charles Heath II, Yitzhak Lewis, Matt Losada, and Yovanna Pineda.

It has been a pleasure to work with Eli Bortz on this book. I am grateful to him and to the editorial staff at Vanderbilt University Press. I wish to express my thanks to the anonymous readers; this is a better study thanks to their critiques.

Karen Stolley is an excellent colleague and considerate supporter of my work. I adjusted several of the ideas in this book thanks to a stimulating conference panel organized by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz. Tom Finnegan is an especially skilled editor. Tony Cella, Ashley Kerr, Andrea Meador Smith, Faith Harden, David Luis-Brown, and Gillian Price provided incisive readings of portions of this study. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Zach Ludington for his enthusiastic willingness to read the manuscript in its entirety and for his smart commentary.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara passed away during the completion of this book. While our relationship was limited to the exchange of e-mail, this did not prevent him from responding to my queries with enthusiasm and humility.

A prior version of Chapter 3 was published in Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, and parts of Chapter 4 were published in "The Cuban Anti-Antislavery Genre: Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s Colección de artículos and the Policy of Buen Tratamiento" in Revista Hispánica Moderna. I thank the editors of these journals for permitting me to reproduce those arguments here.

Lastly, my family has been essential to the writing of this book. Jack, Cayman, Eshu, Grandpa, Lee, How, Jess, Miles, and Skylar—thank you. This book is dedicated to my parents for their enduring support and to Алла, Благодарю тебя за то, что следуешь нашему плану.

THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA

Introduction

IN HIS TRAVEL MEMOIR Notes on Cuba (1844), John George F. Wurdemann, a South Carolina physician convalescing from tuberculosis on the island in the winter of 1843, discusses how "many [Cubans] would linger to look at the Inglesis, as they called us to our faces—when we were absent the term Judios (hudeos), Jews, was applied to us, a generic appellation given to all foreigners."¹ Later, Wurdemann specifies further: "The term judio, jew, is also applied to foreigners, including Spaniards."² Before we move to dismiss Wurdemann’s testimony as nothing but the product of his own paranoid imagination, even a cursory review of texts reveals that an anti-Semitic tropology was indeed pervasive in nineteenth-century Cuba. One highly significant example that goes a long way toward making this point is Esteban Pichardo y Tapia’s Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas (Provincial dictionary of Cuban words and expressions), the first American dictionary, published in 1836 and reissued throughout the century, which recommends this definition for Judío: The demoralized or irreligious, impious person. The common people also demean foreigners by calling them Jews.³

The Judaized foreigners who invaded the creole imaginary did so in the wake of the island’s first sugar boom, which coincided with the rise of and contest over the framework of Spanish imperial liberalism and was stimulated by what Dale Tomich has described as a new social-economic form on which an accelerated rhythm was imposed with the introduction of the railroad, the integration of the island’s sugar economy into the world-scale circuits of capital, and the expansion and intensification of slave labor.⁴ The forceful transfigurations occasioned by these and other historical circumstances exacerbated the antagonisms and contradictions of a society structured in racial, class-based, and colonial dominance.⁵ Although certain segments benefited from the revolutionary realignment of Cuban political, commercial, and social organization, others experienced these processes with profound dread.⁶ Notions regarding the emblem of society’s new order, the foreign-born merchant, dovetailed with the well-worn lexicon of Jewishness. Owing to the correspondence of these conceits, the figurative Jew emerged as an especially adaptable instrument in a series of racial projects, as sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant define them, produced by creoles in the face of modernity’s threatening forces and novel values.⁷ In broad terms, the notoriously incongruous Jew personified the acute cognitive dissonance experienced by nineteenth-century creoles.⁸ Further, the Jew was an unwilling textual surrogate for the licentious Spanish Catholic who had fathered children with black female slaves. Transracial sex, or mestizaje, was looked on with deep apprehension by many creoles because, like industrial capitalism and the global rebalancing of trade, it threatened to overturn the established order. To be sure, the discursive practice that looked to restore stability to colonial society and subjectivity through the metaphorical Jew was operative on multiple fronts.

At this point, a short proviso is in order. It must be recognized that actual religious convictions are irrelevant to the vitality of the tropes that aligned Cuba’s nineteenth-century merchants with conceptions of Jewishness. The perlocutionary effectiveness of anti-Semitism, as several scholars have indicated, need not have anything to do with whether or not its targets are those who have historically grounded identities in those material signifiers, as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin designate the group of people that for simplicity’s sake, and following Zygmunt Bauman, I will call empirical Jews.⁹ What did bear on the availability and potency of Judaeophobic stereotypes in nineteenth-century Cuba was how creole understandings of the merchant class coincided with Western traditions of represented Jewishness.¹⁰ The consonance of these notions enabled creoles to malign those perceived to be behind societal corrosion via the cypher of anti-Semitic discourse.¹¹ What is more, not only can anti-Semitism exist without Jews but, as Bernd Marin has made clear in his study of post-Holocaust Austria, it can proliferate without anti-Semites too.¹² Therefore, my basic assertion—that the notional Jew, both implied and expressed, functioned as a psychosocial stabilizing device in late colonial Cuba—should not be discarded out of hand on account of the colony’s lack of a significant Jewish population throughout most of that century; nor should it be mistaken for the claim that creoles espoused an anti-Semitic ideology.¹³

This book’s central line of argument begs other questions. How is it that this all-too-apparent phenomenon, so prevalent that it was formally recognized in Pichardo’s dictionary and, as The Merchant of Havana seeks to illustrate, is part and parcel of the well-studied Cuban abolitionist genre, has gone overlooked by Latin American cultural studies? Might this omission have allowed other matters to fall between the cracks? What is at stake when our discussion of Latin American racial formations fails to pursue representations of Jewishness?¹⁴

Scholarship’s inattention to the imaginary Jew’s prominent presence in nineteenth-century Cuba stems in no small measure from the misunderstanding that, as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) put it, one’s racial identity is a separate and unique thing—a notion he abandoned after visiting the Warsaw ghetto in 1949.¹⁵ By no means, then, am I the first to warn that the academy’s tendency to demarcate between the targets of different racisms is not only critically debilitating, but reinforces those same racialized divisions whose deconstruction it purports to undertake.¹⁶ Whether our penchant for particularistic thinking is brought on by the identity politics of separation and the institutional politics of empire-building that Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus signal, or by what Paul Gilroy has termed the ontological essentialist view, or by the model of competitive memory that Michael Rothberg looks to overturn, or by some combination of all the above, is a question beyond the purview of this book.¹⁷ Still, it should be recognized that the pernicious consequences of our continued deference to these boundaries extend well beyond ignoring the notional Jew’s position at the core of Cuban self-fashioning and involves naturalizing, rather than challenging, racial categories.¹⁸

Toward salvaging a history of rhetorical Jewishness in late colonial Cuba, The Merchant of Havana practices a multidirectional consciousness (to combine Rothberg’s and Gilroy’s conceptual frameworks).¹⁹ Following Rothberg, this study seeks to transgress the discourses of separation and uniqueness by making intersecting interrogations: Was there any transfer between creole understandings of Jewish and mulatto racial ambiguity? Is it possible that discussions concerning Afro-Cuban licentiousness were inflected by representations of the Jew’s ostensible sexual immorality? Did these racialized others serve as convoluted foils against which notions of a Cuban self were forged? And more widely, might we find disruptions to exclusionary paradigms in permitting a dialogue between critical approaches to seemingly distinct racial formations?²⁰

To these questions and others, The Merchant of Havana responds affirmatively. Through analyses that cut across disciplines, this book brings a dialectics of Jewish and black racialization and exclusion to the fore. The intertwined discursive practices that racialized these Others should also be understood as playing a major part in mapping the interior frontiers of a white Cuban self.²¹ By analyzing in tandem the regimes of racial surveillance that scrutinized Jewish and African bodies, I also mean to show that critical neglect of the true dimensions of anti-Semitic stereotyping in abolitionist thought and writing has skewed our understanding of the representation of blacks in the abolitionist project. The silent half of the story of Cuban abolitionism dramatically alters the other half of the story, the one we thought we knew: the paternal racism toward black slaves, the much-discussed sexual objectification of the Afro-Cuban female, black or mulata (mulattress) or quadroon, and the tragic mulatto trope. The Merchant of Havana dialogues with that scholarship from a novel viewpoint, contending that the rhetoric and images used to conjure the Jew’s racial qualities crucially informed discussions concerning the Afro-Cuban, male and female, and vice versa. To be sure, the figures that constituted the contrasting background against which the silhouette of cubanía, or Cubanness, was traced did not exist in hermetically sealed historical settings.²² Rather, a Cuban self-definition was given shape through creating slaves and monsters, to borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre, that were thoroughly intertwined with one another.²³

Here, it must be stressed that I am not claiming that antiblack and anti-Jewish racisms are equivalent.²⁴ On the other hand, this book should demonstrate that there are valuable critical insights to be gained by recognizing that the construction of cubanía was a much messier affair than previous thought has acknowledged, in which racial discourses intersected, just as they transacted with other subject positions, including those of nationality, class, and sex. And, adopting Fernando Ortiz’s well-known metaphor, it was in this ajiaco of entangled anxieties, exclusions, and desires that Cuban anti-Semitism and Negrophobia came to flavor one another.²⁵

AS MENTIONED, THE IMAGINARY JEW became a symbolic receptacle for nineteenth-century creole distress about political, economic, and social instability, as well as about racial integrity.²⁶ The tensions at play were especially dynamic with regard to slavery, which helps to account for the rhetorical Jew’s commonplace use as a discursive element of the abolitionist genre. This was not, however, the first time the spectral Jew had been located at the center of debates surrounding slavery; nor would it be the last. More recently, the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991), which claims Jews financed and dominated the slave trade, owned slaves well in excess of any other group, and inflicted cruelty with abandon on slaves.²⁷ Several scholars have debunked the book’s contentions as, in Harold Brackman’s words, an anti-Semitic polemic masquerading as history.²⁸ Still, it was this same canard, rampant in nineteenth-century Cuba, and in combination with the perennial Shylock figure, that made the Jew a category available and ripe for exploitation by creole abolitionists and instrumental in the creation of boundaries, national and other.²⁹

Although less recognizable today than Shakespeare’s perpetually resurrected character, to which I will return in the next chapter, the Judas-as-slaver myth has been around much longer. Its roots can be traced back a thousand years before Diego Velázquez introduced the first African slaves to Cuba in 1511.³⁰ Brackman has persuasively argued that its origins lie in the numerous church statutes enacted between the years 600 and 1200 that banned Jews from purchasing or possessing Christian slaves.³¹ Curiously, it was not Jewish participation in the medieval slave economy that prompted the church to pronounce edicts and decrees, year after year, barring Jews from engaging in the slave trade and holding slaves:

The motive was not to protect the exploited or punish the exploiters. Instead, it was to put into law St. Augustine’s theological doctrine that—for the alleged sin of killing Christ—The Jew is the slave of the Christian. A degraded people collectively guilty of deicide, the Jews according to the Church were perpetual slaves in the eyes of God. They had to be denied the pride as well as profit deriving from the sale or ownership of Christians who could be enslaved by fellow Christians, but not by Jews who might convert them to Judaism.³²

Aspiring to concretize Augustine’s principle of servitus Judaeorum, the church enacted myriad canonical legislations forbidding Jews from participating in slavery. Ironically, the proliferation of these codes led to an exponential increase in the number of Jewish slavers, for anyone looking to interrupt a slaver’s commerce, be they competitor or abolitionist, could make recourse to church law by suggesting that the slave trader or holder in question was a Jew.³³

To wield the statutes enforcing the doctrine of the Servitude of the Jews was a tactic ingrained within the Cuban abolitionist archive since its formation. Some of the earliest antislavery statements in the Cuban context were made by two Capuchin missionaries who made their way to Havana in 1681. There, Francisco de Jaca, a Spaniard, and the Frenchman Epiphane de Moirans were outraged at the iniquity of human bondage. The missionaries preached that slaves should be liberated and denied absolution to slaveholders, for which they were excommunicated, arrested, and jailed.³⁴ During their incarceration, de Jaca and Moirans penned defenses in which they strategically exploited the church’s rulings against Jewish slaveholding.³⁵ In de Jaca’s piece, one reads a lengthy exposition on Judas vendedor y de los judíos compradores de Cristo Jesús (Judas the seller and Jews the buyers of Jesus Christ).³⁶ As the section title forecasts, de Jaca’s circular exegesis of canonical doctrine finds Judas guilty of selling Christ and the Jews guilty of buying him. De Jaca’s fallacious argument that Jews trafficked in Jesus Christ is then put into service by the abolitionist to condemn contemporary slave traders by equating them through analogy with the worst sinners of all.

Epiphane de Moirans’s Siervos libres o la justa defensa de la libertad natural de los esclavos (Free servants or the just defense of the natural liberty of slaves) goes much further than analogy. Moirans claims that contrary to church law Christian slaves are routinely sold to Jews: They are sold to Jews after having received baptism, just as they are to heretics or Christians, Catholics, pagans, and infidels. They do not concern themselves with this at all. From which, then, one concludes that Jews publicly possess Christian slaves against ecclesiastical law, as I saw with my own eyes; and Christian servants presented me with their complaints that their Jewish owners did not permit them to attend Church nor hear Mass.³⁷ Later, Moirans admonishes those Christians who enslave Africans under the pretense of evangelization, for even though this would be an honorable intention according to the friar, the jailed missionary reports that most slaves fall into the hands of Jews.³⁸ In 1685, the two Capuchins pleaded their case in Rome to the cardinals of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda and—proving the efficacy of the Judas-as-slaver trope—won their freedom.

Skip ahead two centuries, and the church’s sanctions against Jews owning or dealing in slaves were still being wielded by abolitionists in Cuba. In De la esclavitud en Cuba (On slavery in Cuba; 1866), for example, Francisco de Armas y Céspedes instructs that the founder of the Jewish people was an owner of slaves, and the Law of Moses informs us of the characteristic circumstances of slavery in that nation. Hebrew slaves were obtained through purchase, a free father being able to sell his children, sometimes to favor the impure designs of the buyer.³⁹ The church, on the other hand, is portrayed by Armas y Céspedes as an abolitionist force, and one that, quite conveniently, foreswore the variety of emancipation that creoles so dreaded: Such was the nearly unanimous opinion among men when Christianity began to spread its philanthropic doctrine everywhere. It is understood of course that it was not in the Catholic Church’s intention to destroy the institution of slavery by rapid and violent means. Only by purely moral influences did it begin to combat slavery.⁴⁰ To prove both points—that slavery, linked to the Jews’ impure designs, was a Jewish activity, and gradual abolition a Christian one—Armas y Céspedes enumerates half a dozen or so medieval church codes that prohibited Jews from owning slaves:

To assure tranquility of conscience, and to put an end to the abuses that Jews were committing in the slave commerce, the Third Council of Orleans, in 538, prohibited returning to Jews slaves that took shelter in the church, either because their owners demanded of them things contrary to religion, or because of bad treatment. The Fourth of Orleans, in 541, did not just order observance of the former, but it punished the Jew that perverted a Christian slave with the loss of all his slaves. The First of Macon, in 581, prohibited Jews from acquiring Christian slaves, and with regard to those that already possessed them, it permitted any Christian to rescue them by paying twelve sueldos to the Jewish owner. The Third of Toledo, in 589, dictated the same prohibition, giving free liberty to the slave that was induced into Judaism or owned by a Jew. The Fourth of Toledo, in 633, prohibited Jews from having Christian slaves entirely. That of Reims, in 625 or 630, prohibited selling Christian slaves to gentiles or Jews, under the penalty of nullity; a prohibition reiterated in a letter from Pope Gregory III in 731, and in the council of Ciptines in 743. That of Chalons, in 650, prohibited selling Christian slaves beyond the territory that spans the kingdom of Clodoveo. And the Tenth of Toledo, in 656, severely reprimanded clerics that sold their slaves to Jews.⁴¹

The Cuban abolitionist enlists these prohibitions and in so doing procures much more than the strength of the church; by associating the slave merchant with Jewishness in the nineteenth century, Armas y Céspedes harnesses the awesome power of anti-Semitism. It should come as little surprise that abolitionists would mobilize the same rhetorical gesture in their fictional writings as well.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF TEXTS that have come to be known as the Cuban antislavery genre were composed by a circle of liberal ideologues that formed around Domingo Del Monte y Aponte (1804–1853), a Venezuelan-born intellectual, in the 1830s in Havana. The critical importance of these works, which constitute the origins of narrative literature in Cuba, has resulted in scholarly interest that can be divided into two main camps, as Sibylle Fischer has outlined.⁴² At one extreme are readings that characterize these pieces as critical and subversive of slavery and of the colonial arrangement that conserved it and that it in turn conserved.⁴³ An opposing strand of criticism signals the nefarious implications of the abolitionists’ gradualist approach. This mode of thinking explores how the writers of Del Monte’s literary salon advanced the concerns of the liberal white elite, were distressed by the island’s demographic transformation produced by the African slave trade, and often went so far as to promote the continuation of slavery in modified form.⁴⁴ In analyzing the intersections of sexual and racial coordinates, Vera Kutzinski takes a distinct tack from the two tendencies mentioned above, and Anna Brickhouse and Fischer also have posed nontraditional questions by inquiring into the hemispheric or trans-American dialogues embedded in the narratives of Cuban abolitionism.⁴⁵ The Merchant of Havana tells an altogether different story.

This book begins with a discussion of the socioeconomic reorganization that took place in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a deliberative analysis of Cuban sugar’s frenzied expansion, which was stimulated by foreign capital, industrialized production methods, and sale in a world market, this first chapter reveals that certain questions were far more central to many of the deliberations and antagonisms of abolitionism than previous studies have allowed. Whereas prior thought has revolved around the debate of whether or not slavery was compatible with a modernizing sugar industry, I aim to demonstrate that this line of inquiry fails to account for the exact mechanism that displaced the creole plantocracy and saw several moneylending merchants become Cuba’s largest planters and its ruling class, which was the relative cost of capital. It was the sugar producers’ dependence on merchants to finance their capital expenditures, moreover, that helps to account for the heightened production of Shylock figures in the Cuban nineteenth century. I will then analyze how through "metonymic displacement and