Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums by Rafael Ocasio (review)

Rafael Ocasio’s Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums explores the paradox of the simultaneous presence and absence of Afro-descendants in the nineteenth-century Cuban lettered sphere. While following in the footsteps of William Luis’s Literary Bondage (1990) and Lorna William’s Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction (1994), Ocasio departs from those now-classic texts by focusing not on fiction, but on costumbrismo, an increasingly studied nineteenth-century literary genre that deploys realistic regionalist descriptions of scenes from daily life to grapple with the Hispanic world’s problematic entry into modernity. The book makes extensive use of both literary and archival documents to explain the important omissions that, according to Ocasio, costumbrista texts commit in their unsuccessful effort to forge a Cuban national culture in Eurocentric terms. Uneasily categorized as either literature or history and deliberately dwelling on seldom-analyzed works, this interdisciplinary study will prove interesting to a wide audience.

Ocasio’s preface, “A Mulato Fino in the Twenty-First Century—A Personal Reflection,” anchors the book in the author’s own experience as a light-skinned child of mixed-race in Puerto Rico. Recounting his family’s attempts to assume a white cultural identity despite their Afro-Puerto Rican background and surroundings, Ocasio views the constant dialectic between the desire for whiteness and the inevitability of black cultural identity that such a position implies as a fundamental element of Caribbean identity and returns to the topic repeatedly throughout his book.

The introduction, “Nineteenth-Century Costumbrista Writers on the Slave Trade and on Black Traditions in Cuba,” concentrates on the sugar boom of the 1800s—when slaveocracy was at the height of its power—and presents costumbristas as on the margins of permissible discourse, attempting to describe Cuban slave society without angering colonial censors. The author accepts Luis’s claim that the representation of blacks in nineteenth-century Cuban literature marks the island colony’s distance from the Spanish metropole, but he maintains that costumbrismo served as a technology on the part of the plantation elite for forging a white national culture. For Ocasio, nineteenth-century creole costumbristas, in their role as colonial middlemen, were engaged in the paradoxical project of simultaneously voicing and silencing Afro-Cuban cultural expression. In this way, they contributed to the development of the hybrid cultural identity that, Ocasio notes, would be crucial to independentista discourse at century’s end.

Chapter 1, “Cuban Costumbrista Portraits of Slaves in Sugarmills: Essays by Anselmo Suárez y Romero,” concentrates on the creole writer’s little-studied Colección de artículos (1859). Capturing the nuances and ambiguities of Suárez y Romero’s text, Ocasio argues that, while fear of colonial censorship drastically limited Suárez y Romero’s possibilities for voicing criticism of the island’s slave-holding regime, the plot details of some of his articles serve as an occasion to introduce sympathetic black characters into the discourse, and also to depict Afro-Cuban culture—both of which represented counter-discursive innovations at the time. Yet, as a planter as well as an abolitionist, Suárez y Romero consistently discusses blacks from the point of view of a white observer, rendering slaves the objects of readers’ sympathy—and not subjects in their own right. Ultimately, Ocasio celebrates Suárez y Romero’s opposition to the slave-holding system while criticizing the author for not representing the full horrors of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved.

In the second chapter, “Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo: Self-Characterization of an Urban Mulato Fino Slave,” Ocasio momentarily turns his gaze away from creole writers and towards the only known Latin American slave narrative. Here, too, the author presents a polyvalent reading of a text that, for him, foregrounds an Afro-Cuban subject while upholding Eurocentric cultural values. Acknowledging that the black humanity emphasized in Manzano’s 1840 Autobiography of a Slave subverts conventional racial attitudes in colonial Cuba, Ocasio nonetheless insists on Manzano...