State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic ed. by Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, Amparo Sánchez Cobos (review)

The editors of this wide-ranging collection of eleven incisive chapters have set themselves the task of providing an introduction or, more precisely, a re-introduction, to the history of the Cuban republic. This is no small task. As the editors point out in their opening essay, the years bookended by the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1898 and the revolution of 1959 have often been dismissed, distorted, and misunderstood—when they have not been ignored—by generations of historians in Cuba, North America, and Spain. The editors have turned to historians from these three parts of the world to rescue the republic from facile description and analysis. They succeed in their mission, challenging scholars to re-examine the republican period for what it was, not for what it failed to be.

The collection’s introductory chapter sets the stage by exploring the historiography of the Cuban republic, which, they argue, generally focuses on the republic’s shortcomings (the island of “generals and doctors,” in Carlos Loveira’s famous framing) without acknowledging Cuba’s many attempts to create a new nation. The editors suggest, in a provocative and useful analogy, that the intellectual and cultural currents coursing through the island made it something akin to a “tropical Weimar.” Indeed, many of the chapters highlight the thriving cultural and intellectual milieu of the republic and the ways in which Cubans articulated ideas of nationhood.

The chapter by Steven Palmer about the Havana-based scientific community that centered on scientist Juan Santos Fernández during the late colonial and early republican periods, and that by Reinaldo Funes Monzote’s about food safety, hygiene, and veterinary medicine in Havana, make clear that Cubans were deeply concerned with creating a republic built upon science and the application of modern technological innovations. One such technological innovation was radio. Alejandra Bronfman provides an excellent analysis of the advent of radio culture in republican Cuba and the creation of scores of “listening spaces” that reflected the political and cultural priorities of the island’s “público oyente.”

Two chapters cover the development of Havana as a republican city. Marial Iglesias Utset provides an expert forensic analysis of the remains of the doomed uss Maine and the role that they played within the city’s important public spaces. José Antonio Piqueras recreates the ebbs and flows of diverse architectural styles in Havana and their connection to Cuban elite thinking about class and cosmopolitanism.

The international connections of Cubans during the republican era is at the center of Amparo Sánchez Cobos chapter about the life of the anarchist newspaper Tierra and Maikel Fariñas Borrego’s history of the rise of Rotary clubs. Each of these chapters provides new insights on Cuban participation in transnational social movements.

Three chapters address issues of citizenship and class in the new republic. Rebecca Scott, building in part on her earlier groundbreaking work on post-emancipation Cuba, delves again into the contests about race and citizenship in Cienfuegos. Imilcy Balboa Navarro examines the social costs of republican-era agricultural re-organization on Cuba’s colonos. Robert Whitney considers how the early government of Fulgencio Batista sought to nationalize the Cuban working class. Finally, Ricardo Quizá Moreno provides a fascinating intellectual history of the short-lived Sociedad del Folklore Cubano and the new and decidedly non-elite conception of cubanidad that it inaugurated.

Taken as a whole, this provocative collection reveals that the Cuban republic was a vibrant locus of intellectual ferment ranging from the natural sciences and architecture to medicine and the media. It is proof that the history of the Cuban republic requires much more from historians than simplistic accounts of “doctors and generals.”