Mambises in Whiteface: U.S. versus Cuban Depictions of Freedom Fighters in the War of Independence against Spain

Whether in war, politics, trade, or popular-culture history, the U.S. has always constructed an image of Cuba in terms of its own ideological presuppositions. This has been emphatically true of the racial imagination, from the days of the pre–Civil War annexationists through the current half-century of the Communist era. At no time was this more apparent than when it mattered the most, at the crucial moment of U.S.-Cuban military collaboration concluding the 1895–98 Cuban War of Independence. The racially inflected images produced and circulated at that time—of U.S. military liberators on one hand, and of their Cuban revolutionary counterparts on the other—would prefigure the political and cultural history of the two peoples for the next century and beyond.

Indeed, with the first stirrings of an active Cuban revolutionary independence movement against Spain in the mid-nineteenth century, response in the United States was dictated by a distinct racial subtext. From the highest levels of government to the arena of popular myth, pervaded a fear among supporters and opponents alike that the Cuban Revolution would be in large measure racially “black”—a re-imaging of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haitian overthrow of colonial mastery a century earlier, but now in a place ninety miles off the southern tip of Jim Crow America. This, too, was an island, after all, so entrenched in its own institutional history of a white minority’s enslaving of a vast population of African chattel and their descendants that pre–Civil War Southerners had been tempted to several schemes of annexation—most famously those led by the Venezuelan filibustero Narciso López, finally garroted in Havana after a third ill-fated try. As to post–Civil War and post-emancipation attempts by U.S. leaders to manipulate official perceptions of and policy toward the revolutionary patriots, negotiating a racial politics of whiteness versus blackness seems to have been a primary consideration from the outset, with whiteness always visibily figured in the featured role. In this regard, one influential American fresh from the scene felt impelled to assure the American Secretary of State that this was “no nigger rabble.” Thus, asserted Paul Brooks, the American owner of a large sugar plantation near Guantanamo in Oriente Province, Cuba, during an 1895 call on Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland’s new appointee, at Olney’s office in Washington, DC. Brooks, perhaps nervously recalling an earlier anti-Spanish uprising of 1868–78 begun by the patriot Carlos Manuel de Céspedes by freeing his slaves and exhorting them to join him in revolution, was attempting to give an insider’s assessment of the new Cuban military independence movement making its latest renewal of the decades-old war with a recent invasion into western Cuba. At the same time, these were the same bands of rebels Olney had also heard described by Spanish Minister to the U.S. Enrique Dupuy de Lôme as belonging to the lowest social orders. “A rebel victory,” Lôme warned Olney, “would devastate the island; independence would presage only anarchy.” But there was more than that. It would also be black anarchy. “If this were so,” Olney offered in return, “all right-thinking Americans should pray for Spanish success.”¹

Popular culture representations of the era likewise pandered to such racial anxieties, working for a variety of reasons to disguise what might seem to Americans the disquieting racial demographics of a movement that, in fact, from the outset, was never less than 30% Afro-Cuban and by the time of direct U.S. military involvement was 60%—with the latter figure, by no surprise, corresponding exactly to the late nineteenth-century racial demographics of the island itself.² (As will be seen, in some individual units, the percentage may indeed have run as high as 85%, according to Cuban sources.) This was done mainly by focusing on mediagenic leadership figures in the traditional Western (read Anglo-European and American) revolutionary patriot-statesman mold—a Kosciuszko, a Garibaldi, a Higgins, a Bolivar. Early response...