Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920

CHAPTER THREE: We the Horizontals: Redefining Citizenship and Challenging Colonial Authority, 1886–1890

[85] There is no sadder spectacle in history, than the times when beliefs begin to decompose; [when] the most grotesque corruption extends itself over the entire social body like an oily stain. —Enrique José Varona, prologue to Benjamin de Céspedes, La prostitución en la ciudad de La Habana (1888) Those ominous days of grin-and-bear-it are gone, never to return. —Perfecta la Jorobada, La Cebolla (1888) c h a p t e r t h r e e we the horizontals Redefining Citizenship and Challenging Colonial Authority, 1886–1890 Between 1886 and 1890 Cuba entered a new phase of political, economic, social, and demographic transition. The end of the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) and the Guerra Chiquita (1879–80) spurred massive foreign immigration to the island, primarily from Spain and the Canary Islands. According to historian Joan Casanovas, between 1879 and 1895 nearly 280,000 Spaniards and Canary Islanders migrated to Cuba primarily to seek work in the island’s tobacco industry. Additionally, Spain sent approximately 110,000 imperial troops to Cuba during the same period.1 This surge in European immigration stimulated a marked increase in labor activism at precisely the same moment that Spanish political and moral authority in Cuba was declining most precipitously.2 This was a period of profound changes and profound reflections, as both Cubans and Spanish colonial authorities contemplated the future course of the island. Prevailing questions concerned not only how Cuba could secure its independence , but also if Cuba was ready for independence. These struggles to define what Cuba was, and could become in the future, took place not only on the battlefield, but also discursively within books, newspaper articles, and published reports. The issue of prostitution continued to occupy a key position within these broader national conversations, as both pro-Spain [86] We the Horizontals and pro-Cuba factions referenced the issue as a marker either of Cuban moral and cultural inferiority or of Spanish colonial exploitation and backwardness . Portrayed as either a cause or a symptom of colonial degradation , the Cuban prostitute remained a polemical figure that embodied all of the inherent tensions and anxieties that accompanied Cuba’s political, economic, and social turmoil during this period. No longer was prostitution merely a topic tossed between colonial officials and select members of the medical community; a widening array of groups and individuals in Cuba began to articulate their positions on the issue. Not until decades later when Cubans began to shape the parameters of a postindependence republican status would the topic of prostitution have such widespread salience. The publication in 1888 of Dr. Benjamin de Céspedes’s controversial tome, La prostitución en la ciudad de La Habana—the first large-scale study of its kind—provided a common reference point for Cubans battling over contemporary understandings of race, labor, and modernity as they related to the prostitution question at the end of the nineteenth century. The range of responses elicited by de Céspedes’s work reveals the gravity of the topic for various sectors of Havana society, namely Afro-Cubans and the capital ’s growing population of dependientes (semifree peninsular laborers). The newspaper La Cebolla was also a product of the growing disdain for colonial governance seizing the nation as a whole. Devoted to the plight of the Havana prostitute, the newspaper proved one of the most controversial of the many contemptuous publications to emerge during this period. The newspaper’s anarchist editor, Victorino Reineri, was eventually convicted within the colonial court system for inciting public scandal with his publication, proving that even if the colonial government was relatively less vocal about the prostitution issue during this period, it was still very much invested in censoring the conversations its colonial subjects had on the topic. new freedoms, new conflicts The signing of the Peace Treaty of El Zanjón in February 1878 simultaneously ended the first leg of Cuba’s long march to independence and stoked the fires of discontentment for sectors of Cuban society advocating for social and legislative change. Following ratification of the treaty, creole elites in Cuba eager to assert themselves politically fractured into two main parties, the Liberal (Autonomist) Party and the Conservative Partido Unión Constitucional. The former found a solution to their discontent in We the Horizontals [87] reformism, and the latter upheld integrationism. The two sides, however, shared a total disdain for the insurgent...