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CHAPTER FOUR Africa in the Privileged Black Imaginary If Africanist club members struggled to assert complex and dynamic definitions of selfhood and to merge Afro-diasporan sensibilities with Cuban patriotic nationalism, privileged black Cuban leaders, such as Juan Gualberto Gómez, journalist Miguel Gualba, and journalist and politician Rafael Serra, were nearly unanimous in their public disdain of “Africa.” Africa’s legacy in Cuba, they asserted, was an obstacle not only to national progress but to black Cubans’ socioeconomic status in the nation as well. Long a source of conflict and controversy among sectors of the African-descended population, for republican black activists the island’s African legacy seemed to work against rather than help in their struggle for public resources. They believed that embracing “savage” Africanist practices was counter to their interests. In fact, they were generally in tacit if not open agreement with many racialist architects of Cuban nationalism on the need for a modernist intervention among the popular classes. A leadership cadre, they often asserted, would promote among blacks “civilized” behavior and normative values such as self-denial, refinement, civility, and respectability, as well as order, industry, and thrift. As black war veteran, journalist, and progressive Rafael Serra counseled in 1904, by pursuing formal education, professional training, and legal marriage, postindependence blacks could repudiate outmoded “savage practices.”1 The antithesis of their modernity was in part lo Africano (things African), a social force that was, primarily, cultural in its articulation, perpetrated by atavistic blacks, and influential in creating gradations of blackness. That is, “race” registered at the level of behavior. One’s behavior could approximate cultural norms that were either European or African. In this sense, and according to the logic of progressivism, Africanity, and even blackness itself, were choices. Black club members argued that a direct correlation existed between blacks’ aspirations to improve their social and economic status and  126 AFRICA IN THE PRIVILEGED BLACK IMAGINARY their ability to distance themselves from the cultural backwardness embodied by Africanist practices. If, according to the island’s social-racial continuum , Africanity was an articulation of deep blackness (the “black” black), then to the degree that black Cubans embraced Africanity they condemned themselves to social and political marginalization. Many privileged Cubans of African descent felt that “cultural improvement” was the best remedy for racial subordination. Arguably, self-actualized “cultural improvement” was impossible to achieve due to the concept’s amorphousness and imprecision . Rarely was “cultural improvement” tangible. In fact, when black public intellectuals, politicians, and others called for improvement, they were talking about the mainstays of social ordering, engineering, and control— emphasis on marriage and patriarchal unions, participation in industrialized wage labor, compliance with state ordinances and regulations, circumspect social, cultural, sexual, and economic behavior, and formal education. Africanist cultural practices—generally viewed as those that respectable citizens of any color avoided—were vigorously attacked and legislated against at several moments in republican history. Rafael Serra’s strategy for black socioeconomic advancement, like that of many other black public sphere activists and intellectuals, was to adhere to certain cultural norms in order to improve his access to opportunities. In fact, he sparked one of the earliest twentieth-century public sphere debates about black Cubans’ African heritage and its significance for blacks’ socioeconomic advancement. Though he railed against Cuban leaders who failed to support black civil rights and equal access to socioeconomic resources, Serra also condemned Africanist cultural practices, which like most Cubans, he saw as anachronistic and antithetical to national civilization, civic life, and, ultimately, progress. In broad terms, his brand of race and culture mirrors that of other black leaders struggling under the constraints of circumscribed , often racialist, norms in their push to access republican resources. Arguably, his perspective on race, politics, and culture derived from his unusual personal history of travel and journalism, as well as from his political ambition, patriotic nationalism, and high-stakes political ties. Born in Havana to free black parents in March 1858, Serra spent his early years training as a tobacco apprentice. His work as a tabaquero elevated him to the ranks of the black artisan class, a population segment that in the nineteenth century enjoyed relatively lucrative employment as carpenters , barbers, drivers, bricklayers, musicians, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths , among other trades. A tireless advocate of formal education as the principal strategy to win socioeconomic advancement for Cubans of African descent, Serra founded and directed a free school for black children in [18.117.183.150] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 14:02...

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