Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums

1. Cuban Costumbrista Portraits of Slaves in Sugarmills: Essays by Anselmo Suárez y Romero

1 Cuban Costumbrista Portraits of Slaves in Sugarmills Essays by Anselmo Suárez y Romero We would never finish if we were to trace one by one all the old types of our society, contrasting them with those newly created by a century of changes. Man, ultimately, is always the same, although with different disguises in form: the courtier, who formerly flattered royalty, today serves and flatters the masses under the name of tribune; the devout has turned into humanitarian ; the idler and the rake, into agitator and patriot; the historian into man of history; the heir of an entailed estate into pretender, and the working class into free citizens and into sovereign people. Time will pass, hours will mature , and all these types, today brand-new, will, like the others, pass into being old-fashioned and retrograde, and each of our grandchildren will reward us with bursts of laughter for the quips and derision with which we regale our grandparents today . . . Who will have the last laugh? Ramón Mesonero Romanos, “El autor de Bucólica” Slavery in Cuban Costumbrismo Costumbrismo promoted the writers’ goal to highlight acceptable Cuban customs , as part of a national project that became a strong political movement throughout the nineteenth century. Roberto González Echevarría has defined the trend as one with “passionate interest in Cuba’s natural world and in the idiosyncrasies of their homeland” (48). The first of such national self-portrait statements was published in 1792 in Papel de Periódico de Cuba [Periodical newspaper of Cuba]. It stated that the newspaper’s purpose should be “To attack the habits and customs that are detrimental in common and, particularly, to correct the vices, painting them in their true colors, so that they are detested 14 · Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums when viewed with horror, and to picture in contrast the highly prized attraction of virtues” (qtd. in Diccionario de la literatura cubana 711). This declaration set forth strong critical objectives for future Costumbrista articles, which for the most part exhibited rather rigid, ultraconservative opinions on acceptable national customs. The Cuban scholar Salvador Bueno observed that the emergence in Cuba of newspapers and of other serial publications provided readers with plenty of Costumbrista articles designed specifically to document Cuban native folklore.1 Bueno described these essays as “short works, almost always in prose, that in concise form and with satirical intention, or merely for amusement, described common practices, habits, customs, characteristic and representative types of a certain society” (Costumbristas ix–x). Their scope was predetermined to serve as “predominantly of social criticism and in the nature of reform” (Costumbristas x). The initial articles published in Papel de Periódico, according to Roig de Leuchsenring, were geared more to “observations and their indictments and censure of the bad customs and vices of the Cuban population of their time” (Sesquicentenario 35). The themes of these early Costumbrista publications are mainly attacks against general ignorance, lack of knowledge by the people, lack of hospitals in Havana for the homeless, and lack of orphanages for boys and girls (Sesquicentenario 36). Other articles reflect the “character and customs of that epoch, its movement and social development, its needs, fashions, readings” (Roig de Leuchsenring, Los periódicos 49). In his summary of Cuban publications such as Papel de Periódico, the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima explains that their goal was to discuss issues “essentially about [national] health (vaccination), about agriculture, about jobs and about curiosities (a Black who slept for six months)” (El Regañón 17). Such a limited scope, it can be inferred, explains the lack of articles dealing with Black issues. A stern political censorship banned certain subject matter, particularly news or reports about issues related to slavery.2 Other media available for Costumbrista publications, according to Lezama Lima, were El Regañón de La Habana, first published on September 30, 1800, and a year later El Sustituto del Regañón, which published positive commentaries described as being of “essentially good taste” (El Regañón 17). El Regañón’s regulations about the type of articles to be published required that they be “interesting , that is, that they not be trivial or ill chosen” and that, in accordance with the editors’ regulations, “they not use dry precepts” (qtd. in El Regañón 17). Lezama Lima’s collection of articles selected from those published in El Rega ñón de La Habana and El Sustituto del Regañón includes only two articles [3...