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  • State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic ed. by Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sánchez Cobos
  • Alexis Baldacci
Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sánchez Cobos, eds. State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 376 pp.

Cuba’s first republic has been largely understudied, typically understood in relation to the revolutions that preceded and followed it as the betrayal of the promise of the independence struggle or a period of laying the groundwork to the “true” revolution of 1959. With essays on diverse topics from the “social life” of the USS Maine to provincial Rotary clubs, this edited volume makes [End Page 409] significant strides toward redressing the weaknesses of the historiography. The contributions are united in their commitment to taking the early republican era seriously, as a significant and authentic period in Cuban history. In this vein, the authors seek to revisit the republican era “on its own terms” (19), without the distorting lenses of failure or teleology that have so often been applied to the period. In the introduction, the editors make a strong case that Cuban exceptionalism has prevented scholars from noting the similarities between the Cuban Republic and the institutions and processes at work in other Latin American nations during the Liberal era (1870–1930), many of which were less democratic and representative than the Cuban system, despite its shortcomings. From this vantage point, the contributors approach the era as a period of continuity in terms of liberal state- and nation-building processes, with an eye toward the participation of Cubans at all levels in defining emerging notions of “democratic modernity” (7).

This volume offers an impressively broad look at republican Cuba, with chapters that extend beyond Havana and cover a wide variety of topics. A number of themes run throughout, with labor history and the history of science particularly well represented. Defying a simplistic chronology, several chapters point to links between the colonial and republican eras, as a result of economic continuities, the influx of Spanish immigration, and the goals of modernity and order pursued by the creole elite. José Antonio Piqueras’s study of Havana’s architecture reveals modernity to be the elusive aim of construction and urban design from 1835, with aesthetic forms often associated with the U.S. occupation actually rooted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the island’s elites increasingly looked toward the United States as a model of progress and modernity. Steven Palmer reveals the central role of science at the heart of creole politics in both the colonial and republican eras, as well as the continuities in Cuban scientific leadership, which remained largely unchanged from the 1870s through the 1920s. Reinaldo Funes’s contribution aligns with Palmer’s in identifying the crucial interplay between science and politics. Both Palmer and Funes argue that scientists became protagonists in Cuba’s social transformation following independence, with political legitimacy in the eyes of both foreign and domestic audiences linked to advances in sanitation and hygiene. As Funes reveals, this link carried through the late 1910s and early 1920s, as widespread optimism waned in the face of corruption, bad administration, and economic crisis. With the emergence of “the allegory of the polity as sick organism,” Havana’s “sanitary regression” (121–122) became a symbol of republican decadence in the political arena as well.

The focus on local actors, but with an eye toward international circumstances, is a crucial strength of the volume. Rich contributions by Rebecca Scott, Imilcy Balboa Navarro, and Robert Whitney analyze labor relations on the ground, with an eye toward race, citizenship, and degrees of inclusion [End Page 410] and participation in republican Cuba. In her analysis of ¡Tierra!, a weekly paper published in Cuba but distributed internationally, Amparo Sánchez Cobo reveals the role of anarchists in creating a vibrant radical labor community committed to inclusion, regardless of nationality, race, occupation, or gender. This chapter, too, reveals the continuities across independence, as ¡Tierra! is representative of a period of “Spanification” of Cuban working-class politics that extended beyond the paper’s relatively...

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