The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past

3. Transformation in Times of Transition

TRANSFORMATION IN TIMES OF TRANSITION A Republic organized on the solid basis of morality and justice is the only form of government that promises to guarantee citizens their rights and is at the same time the best safeguard in pursuit of just and legitimate aspirations. — Antonio Maceo to José Martí (January 15, 1888) We demand the Independence of Cuba and of all Cubans. . . . Our mission is to obtain Independence so that the Cuban people can thereupon proceed to establish their political institutions and organize the public administration that best serve the needs of the nation. — Consejo de Gobierno, “Manifiesto” (April 24, 1898) The War was confused with the Revolution: the War was a means, the Revolution was the end. The task was left unfinished. — Antonio Iraizoz y Villar, Lecturas cubanas (1939) Almost from the beginning, from the point at which we began to establish our national identity, the idea of nation was associated with moral duty. — Lisandro Otero, Llover sobre mojado: Memorias de un intelectual cubano (1957–97) (1999) 3 64 | TRANSFORMATION IN TIMES OF TRANSITION T he nineteenth century was a time of deepening discontent, mostly as an incremental condition, to be sure, but an inexorable one. Vast numbers of Cubans experienced daily life in a stateofdisquiet, borne principally as a circumstance to which men and women across the island accommodated themselves as a matter of course, conditions so commonplace as to pass for a normal state of affairs, without apparent recourse to remedy and certainly without immediate means of redress. This was discontent as a facet of daily life, discerned—if at all—as one’s lot, often carried as grievance but borne in compliance, in accordance with the conventions of the natural order of things. Grievances deepened and widened and seemed never to get resolved. So they multiplied. But these were also years of change, and what was changing most was the Cuban capacity to articulate discontent, accompanied with—or perhaps because of—a growing awareness of the possibility of agency—consciousness, in a word: that the condition of injustice was neither immutable nor unassailable and with the deepening conviction that the collective power of proponents of change was at least equal to the institutional strength of defenders of the status quo.The capacity to arrange consciousness of discontent into a coherent narrative implied cognizanceofdisaffection not as a personal and individual situation but as a social and political condition, itself a source of solidarity , where a grievance changed from the particular to the general, thereby drawing a people together to act in concert to seek remedy through collective means. More Cubans had more knowledge about more things, especially as it involved the circumstances in which they lived their lives.This too was part of national formation: all occurring in the ordinary course of events, sometimes as a matter of slow realization, other times in the form of sudden revelation, whereby the discontent with which men and women across the island lived everyday life was revealed as an untenable circumstance, and suddenly a system of oppression was exposed in full view and its vulnerability was revealed. It was often a matterof people simply sensing that things were not quite right, men and women living uneasily with theirdiscontent, perhaps oblivious to the adaptations they had made because it was normal to adapt and because it was probably easier that way, in any case. Changes of other kinds were under way, those types of changes that often release the great “forces” of history but whose consequences were neither readily apparent nor immediately experienced. Old allegiances were in tran- TRANSFORMATION IN TIMES OF TRANSITION | 65 sition and new attachments were in formation; loyalties were reordered and thereupon reconfigured around new categories of self-definition and selfinterest . On all counts, and all at once, Spanish colonial rule was straining to contain the social forces transforming Cuban society—and increasingly revealing itself as incapable of doing so.That Cuban aspirations could no longer be accommodated within existing colonial structures was apparent, at least among Cubans; so too was the need for change—a powerful consensus indeed .To contemplate the need for change was itself a source of change, a way to induce thinking about how to “do” change: where the liabilities of colonialism became an ever-more-intolerable condition and where even the most fundamental assumptions of colonial relationships were called into question and increasingly lost credibility—all of which created...