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

4. The “Decolonization” of Names: National Identity and the Selection of Patriotic Place Names

Ss Ss Devising New Place Names As if they were palimpsests stretched over immense distances, countries that once were colonial territories still carry with them—like a second layer of skin—signs and traces of names from earlier epochs. During the initial years of conquest, the “virgin lands” of Spanish America were relieved of their aboriginal names and rebaptized. Across what became Spain’s New World empire, the physical features of the land and places of habitation were renamed to mirror the system of political and religious beliefs of its latest occupants. Even today, centuries later, the numerous “Santiagos,” “San Juanes,” “Santas Cruces,” and “Trinidades,” the “Córdobas,” “Valencias,” and “Geronas,” evoke memories of Spanish colonization. Just as with colonial censuses, the maps on which these places appear are not and never were innocuous and “objective” descriptions, devoid of ideological and political content and purpose. On the contrary, such cartographic and demographic formulations aided the colonizer ’s task in several respects: they helped spearhead and legitimize territorial conquest; they represented a way of controlling the physical, environmental, and human context they denoted, and they were an inseparable element of the “technology” of imperial domination.1 The (symbolic) appropriation of a territory or expanse of land through the simple expedient of “naming it” differently has not, however, been exclusively the property of the colonizing power. The reverse process, decolonization, four The “Decolonization” of Names National Identity and the Selection of Patriotic Place Names 88 The “Decolonization” of Names has often been accompanied by a wave of toponymic redescription, with the intention of fulfilling two interconnected purposes; first, “blotting out” all memory embedded in the former names and, second, endowing the landscape and built environment with new “marks of identity.” As the antithesis of their corresponding marks in the colonial system—the new set of names would convey, in semiotic terms, a sense of “the national,” or of “what is native to us.” During the last days of 1898 (hence prior to the official lowering of the Spanish flag and transfer of power at El Morro on 1 January 1899) and the first months of 1899, a singular, dramatic process of assigning new place names got under way across Cuba. One by one, the emblems of colonial authority were removed: raising the Spanish flag in public was prohibited by official decree; the statue in downtown Havana of Queen Isabel II was detached from its pedestal; and shields and coats of arms associated with the Spanish monarchy disappeared from building facades and from seals, dies, postage stamps, and official paper. Streets, plazas, and avenues were renamed. Old signs and plaques were pried off walls and barricades and replaced with vivid inscriptions denoting the new order. The act of renaming public spaces symbolized, in a visible way, the break with colonial history and the past. At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, struggles in Cuba for political control got hammered out and resolved not only in social and intellectual spheres, through the exchange of ideas in meetings and assemblies, and in newspapers, manifestos, and other printed ephemera, but also in the physical sphere, where municipal streets and buildings, and the fixtures on them, became a medium of partisan dispute and confrontation. In communities across the island, a flag seen atop a building, a cross or an inscription on a tombstone, or a plaque bearing the name of a street or plaza—things which might have remained in those places for decades without drawing much if any notice—soon became the focus of attention and controversy. Two things were broadcast through the process of toponymic “redesignation ”: the dawning of a new era and the institution of a new authority with the power to “name.” Contrary to what might be surmised, however, it was not the U.S. authorities who, by virtue of their new imperial power, arrogated to themselves the right to toponymically “mark” their recently acquired territory. Although the U.S. military occupied a majority of the country’s towns and population centers, streets, parks, and plazas with traditional names linked to persons, events, or dates in colonial history or to the Catholic calendar of saints’ days were rechristened with the names of heroes and martyrs of the The “Decolonization” of Names 89 wars of liberation or given patriotic or allegorical names reflecting the new “republican” order.2 Old Streets, New Names: Patriotic Place Names for the...