A Cultural History of Cuba during the U.S. Occupation, 1898-1902

Notes

Notes Abbreviations AHMT Archivo Histórico Municipal de Trinidad AHPC Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cienfuegos AHPS Archivo Histórico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba ANC Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana BCUH Biblioteca Central de la Universidad de La Habana HUA Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass. LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. RG140 Record Group 140, Military Government of Cuba, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. Introduction 1. Pérez, Cuba between Empires. 2. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life. 3. In the sense in which I use the term, popular culture is by nature a complex and changing construct, defined by its fundamental difference from its conceptual and social “other”: elite or high culture. It should therefore be understood that elites and masses, “high” and “low” culture, are examined as entities whose borders are mutually and equally porous, and as a system of demarcating cultural forms in service of different criteria: class, ethnicity, race, gender, the aesthetic, the market-driven, etc., all of which are historically conditioned and subject to constant change and reactualization. 4. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 5. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban. 6. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 30. Chapter 1 1. Martínez Ortiz, Cuba, 1:19. 2. Ibid., 14. 3. El Independiente, New York, no. 5, 29 October 1898, 2. 4. Isaac Carrillo y O’Farrill, “El 24 de febrero,” Cuba y América, Havana, 2, no. 545 (March 1899): 6. 5. See Informe sobre el censo de Cuba, 1899, 102, 107. 6. Geertz, “Después de la revolución.” 7. Emilio Núñez, “El pasado y el presente,” El Fígaro: Número album consagrado a la Revolución Cubana, 1895–1898, nos. 5, 6, 7, 8, February 1899, 79. Following the armistice, 152 notes to pages 13–16 the last Spanish flag to grace an official structure in Cuba was lowered from the building that housed the military headquarters in Cienfuegos. As Arturo Alsina Neto, a Spanish official present at the ceremony, relates, this act signaled “the definitive end of our occupation of the last tiny piece of American territory.” From the deck of the steamship Cataluña, which was carrying the last battalions of Spanish soldiers back to the Iberian Peninsula, the U.S. flag was visible above the military quarters on the port, along with a “multitude of flags, showing the single star,” flying from the buildings that dotted the town. Meanwhile, the Spanish flag “had been ignominiously tucked away in the suitcase of one of the returning soldiers.” The ill fortune suffered by the “repatriated flag,” preserved as a treasured relic by Alsina, changed in 1906 when he donated it to the Museo de Artillería in Madrid, where it was displayed next to the flag Hernán Cortés had carried with him to Mexico in 1518—a conjunction that symbolized “the two epochal events which marked the onset and the conclusion of Spanish domination in America.” See Alsina Neto, Última bandera, 25–26, 52. 8. García Álvarez and Naranjo, “Cubanos y españoles,” 112–13. 9. Leonard Wood to Emilio Barcardí, 4 July 1902, APSC, Fondo Emilio Bacardí, legajo 4, expediente 12. I am indebted to John-Marshall Klein, who informed me of Wood’s letter and kindly provided me with his transcription of it. 10. There are several documents, dating from November 1899, belonging to the Court of First Instance of Havana’s Belén neighborhood which exhibit this treatment—the Spanish stamped paper for 1898–99 has been used but has had the Spanish coat of arms excised. See ANC, Fondo Asuntos Políticos, legajo 173, signatura 3. 11. “Extractos y noticias de las actas del Ayuntamiento,” in Martínez-Fortún y Foyo and Rodríguez Arce, Monografías, 105. Concerning the state of juridical and administrative disorientation which characterized municipal life during the first months of the U.S. occupation, the newspaper El Independiente wrote the following: “There are scarcely two municipalities on the island which are organized in the same way and have the same authority. Some have based themselves on universal suffrage, others on limited suffrage, and in still others the councilors have been named by the district military authority. Some enjoy almost unlimited power and authority and others have virtually none. The right of habeus corpus has been recognized in Santiago de Cuba; Gibara has trial by jury; and here in Havana we are at the mercy of the old system, so signally in contradiction with the supposed...