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Notes Introduction 1. According to Nancy Pérez-Rodríguez, “carnival musicians [in Santiago] had to rehearse and move all around the city. And secretly they would remove the skins of their drums . . . and put guns and machetes inside them. In this way they were able to take weapons from the city to the countryside” (qtd. in Farr 214). 2. In my English-language translations I tend to use “Negro” when the original Spanish -language text hails from the nineteenth century or the early decades of the twentieth, given that the term was more commonly used than “black.” When translating more recent texts I favor the latter term. 3. Moore refers to the events of 1912 as the “Guerrita del doce” [The Little War of 1912](69), but this is a misnomer that is commonly used in Cuba to describe what Helg more appropriately considers a “Racist Massacre.” Helg also takes issue with another common moniker for the 1912 conflict—“The Race War of 1912”—which has been used by leading contemporary scholars such as Louis A. Pérez. According to Helg, those who see the conflict as a “Race War” fail to emphasize that white leaders took advantage of the circumstances to repress a racial group in order to terrify them and keep them out of power (Rightful Share 10, “Afro-Cuban Protest” 56). For more on the events of 1912 see Chapter 7—“The Racist Massacre of 1912”—in Helg’s 1995 book Our Rightful Share. 4. For a complete account of the brawl that broke out between these two comparsas, see Helio Orovio’s El carnaval habanero (31–33). 5. Figures for the number of blacks and mulattoes killed during the race war vary widely. Fermoselle (146) cites sources that put the number of dead Cubans of color at 3,000, but it is not clear if this figure includes the significant number of innocent civilians who lost their lives during the war. According to Helg, “official Cuban sources put the number of dead rebels at more than 2,000,” while “U.S. citizens living in Oriente estimated it at 5,000 to 6,000.” According to Helg, one of Estenoz’s companions similarly guessed that around 5,000 Cuban blacks and mulattoes had perished (225). Pérez avoids citing figures in the main text of his study, but observes in a footnote that some estimates of the death toll “were as high as 35,000” (“Politics, Peasants, and People” 537, nt. 90). 6. “Gómez Sees End of Cuba Revolt.” New York Times. May 23, 1912: 1. On May 25, for example, the New York Times reported that “The War Department received a dispatch from Jennings Cox, manager of mining properties at Juaragua [sic] . . . saying that the reports [of damage] had been much exaggerated and that everything was quiet around his properties, which have not been burned or pillaged” (“Washington Wants Facts.” New York Times. May 25, 1912: 2). The following day another article countered Cuban claims of widespread looting and extensive destruction by reporting that “depurations thus far have been confined to petty pillaging, and no large works have been burned or molested” (“Mobilize Fleet to go to Cuba.” New York Times. May 26, 1912: 1) 7. As Robin Moore has noted, tango is a “generic term for African-derived dance in nineteenth-century Cuba. The term also applied to wandering groups of Afro-Cuban musicians” (286). 8. For a discussion of the history of Afro-Cuban carnival during the early decades of the Cuban Republic, see Robin Moore, (Nationalizing Blackness 62–86); Helio Orovio (El carnaval habanero 7–29); Judith Bettelheim (“Carnival in Santiago de Cuba” 94–127); Alejandra Bronfman (Measures 158–71); Virtudes Feliú Herrera (Fiestas 133–83, Carnaval cubano 7–31). 9. A majá is a large boa constrictor endemic in Cuba. Chapter 1. Felipe Pichardo Moya’s “La comparsa” 1. The first of Vasconcelos’s editorials in La Prensa appeared on August 5, 1915 under the title “Confidencial” (Fernández Robaina, El negro 113). Like the majority of the articles that he published in the following years, it was signed with the pseudonym “Tristán.” 2. A bembé is an “informal festival held for the enjoyment of the Yoruba orishas, to the accompaniment of the bembé drums. A Bantú term, the bembé has its origins in Nigeria, where it was originally performed for Ochún” (Orovio, Cuban Music 26). However, it should be pointed out here that the term was commonly...

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