The Merchant of Havana: The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive by Stephen Silverstein (review)

In The Merchant of Havana, Stephen Silverstein studies the prevalence of “Jewishness” in nineteenth-century Cuban “abolitionist” writings that treat the Cuban identity crisis and socio-economic reconfiguration. Drawing on texts of different genres and using an informed historical review as context for his argument, he uncovers the different ways that Cuban texts of the period refer to the “notional,” “figurative” or “metaphorical” Jew to represent foreigners who are seen as a threat to Cubans’ socio-economic condition and their identities. Thus, the continental Spanish and English, to name the most significant, are associated with the Jews, who continued to be stereotyped in the nineteenth century and were regarded as participants in Cuba’s socio-economic plight. Due to questions of race and identity, “colored” people are also included in this project.

Beginning with the merchant class, the author argues that they were the ones who have received the lion’s share in the attribution of Jewish traits in texts like Ramiro y Corrales’s “El usurero.” The drastic shift in Cuba’s economic and social structure when the texts circulated sparked the hatred of merchants of foreign origin. Silverstein demonstrates that this hatred is projected on the Jew as a “despised or dreaded Them,” to borrow W. H. Auden’s words. The merchants are condemned for their practice of “usury.” The latter led many Cuban planters to financial upheaval and a decrease in output. Jews are also related to blackness or the black population of Cuba. They are both ‘Otherized’ by the Cubans of European origin or the creoles.

The author uses the notion of the “fictional Jew” to analyze the way the English, the blacks and the Amerindians were “racialized” in Cuban fiction. He does so by focusing on Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), a narrative that he believes to racialize these classes of people in a connected way. In the text, the British are “Judaized” as foreign “businessmen” and “moneylenders” who have an economic impact on Cuba and participate in the transatlantic slave trade. According to Silverstein, the British are also ascribed Jewish physical attributes like wearing “gabardine.” Besides, the author highlights the connection of the Judaization of the British with the racialization of the African slave population. This is explained by the fear of their rebellion and their consequent contribution to the reversal of the white Cuban established status quo. The “mulatto,” or Cubans of mixed African-European descent, are also racialized mainly because, combined with the blacks, they were feared to be outnumbering the Cuban population of European descent. White Cubans had a white colonial project in Cuba. The most obvious mark of Cuba’s non-whiteness was its Amerindian past, so it needed to be erased. Therefore, the novel, according to Silverstein, does not swerve from its erasure by dismissing “anyone claiming such ancestry… [as] insane” (55).

Quite differently from Sab, the author examines Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s La cuarterona (1867) as a dramatization of the racialization of the merchant and the “the mulatto’s deracialization” (67). According to Silver-stein, Rivera sets his play in Cuba so as to use the Cuban racial experience to foster reforms in his own country, Puerto Rico. Rivera applies Western stereotypes of Jewish “foreignness, economic parasitism, and pursuit of social advancement” (62) in order to demonize the European merchants who made their wealth on the slave trade and usury and advanced socially by paying for titles of nobility instead of inheriting them. According to the author, these practices impoverished the ‘true’ Cubans and helped to spread the practice of slavery. Silverstein also underlines the author’s appropriation of the physical markers of ‘redheadedness’ and ‘redbeardedness’ to Judaize the merchants. Second, he puts emphasis on Rivera’s ‘normalization’ of the “mulattos” by ignoring their “blackness” and seeing only “whiteness” transpiring through them (67). However, doing so is not innocent and puts a stigma on the black persons or those of black pedigree. Therefore...