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

2. Policies Governing Celebrations: Catholic, North American, and Patriotic Fiestas

Ss Ss Innovation and Tradition as Glimpsed through Almanacs Over the course of the nineteenth century, in Cuba as in Latin America generally , almanacs, or calendars as they were also called, marked the rhythms of social life by specifying all of the festivals, holidays, and special occasions of the civil and religious year—an array of days for rejoicing, fasting and mourning, celebrating saints’ days and other anniversaries, observing “patriotic” dates of the mother country, and honoring the members of Spain’s royal family.1 Almanacs formed a multifaceted genre. Compendia of the mundane, they were consulted by travelers, merchants, ranchers, planters, and others for their abundance of useful information—interspersed with tables and illustrations— about commerce, agriculture, politics, mining, geography, and other topics. On a less obvious, less self-conscious level, however, these quaint little books, with their mixture of predictions to be borne out (or not) and precepts to be followed on the basis of accepted, long-established practice, articulated and reconciled representations of the past and ideological constructs regarding the future. By listing natural phenomena (such as the spring and winter equinoxes and other changes affecting the seasons), religious festivals, and civic occasions in the same chronological sequence, the almanacs “placed” events in historical time and made recently created political commemorations seem as ineluctable as changes in the phases of the moon, the approach of an eclipse, or the recurring celebration of a popular religious festival. two Policies Governing Celebrations Catholic, North American, and Patriotic Fiestas 30 Policies Governing Celebrations Equally the field of the sacred and the worldly, of popular culture and official convention, the calendars grounded both the consolidation of what society records and remembers and the mediation of its ongoing political demands. Similarly, when calendars registered new commemorative occasions or removed old anniversaries and celebrations, they bore witness to the outcome of struggles over the power to organize social life, whether this power was wielded by ecclesiastical authorities, the state, or institutions of civil society.2 The almanacs which appeared in the aftermath of the war of 1895–98, during the initial years of the U.S. intervention, reflected—with their amalgam of Catholic, U.S., and nationalist anniversaries—the complicated symbolic interactions characteristic of the period. Three intersecting interests, each complemented by its own set of symbols and associations, competed for ascendancy: the traditions inherited from the colonial past, the problematic representations of an unsettled present marked by a foreign military occupation, and the assertions of a simmering nationalist will, expressed in the desire of Cubans to take their place as an independent nation in the near future. Some chance observations written on the blank pages of a copy of an 1899 almanac evoke the heady, turbulent atmosphere of the last days of Spain’s four hundred years of rule over its island colony. As the almanac’s unknown owner traveled by train from Santa Clara to Cienfuegos on 1 January 1899, passing through various communities, he or she recorded the extraordinary events then unfolding: 1 January. I’ve gone on to Cienfuegos, the train carried very few passengers , and of these, fifty were revolutionary soldiers sent as detachments to Esperanza and Ranchuelo, both of which had been evacuated the day before. The train flew several U.S. and Cuban flags, in La Esperanza a huge crowd, holding flags, met us at the station, raising cheers to a free Cuba, independence, and the soldiers of the insurrection. In Ranchuelo the same demonstration . . . ; Cruces y Camarones the same thing, these pueblos are all decked out.3 A short distance from its destination, the train stopped to pick up a company of U.S. soldiers marching from their encampment on the outskirts of Cienfuegos into the heart of the city “in order to preside over the raising of the American flag and take possession of the main square for the United States.” Even before this event, however, in the cafés and corner groceries of the seaside town, groups of Spanish soldiers shared drinks and traded toasts with their U.S. counterparts, and also exchanged souvenirs, in the form of badges and other items of military issue, while they waited for their ships to embark. Policies Governing Celebrations 31 “Lots of houses were decorated with flags and with curtains in the colors of Cuba and the United States and across the city’s neighborhoods many little Cuban flags, not being posted very high...