- Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895
Blackface Cuba is a specialized book, more appropriate for graduate students in various fields (music, history, Latin American studies, African American studies, theater) than for a general readership or for undergraduates. The author is strongly influenced by performance studies theory. Her primary materials of investigation are nineteenth-century newspapers from Cuba and popular theater pieces, many of which have appeared in reprint anthologies within Cuba over the past thirty years. The central questions addressed by the author are highlighted early: what made Cuban blackface Cuban? How and why was Cubanness imagined through blackface? And how did blackface insinuate itself into "the very center of Cuba's national soul?" (2).
The introduction to Blackface Cuba provides an overview of the history of the negrito character type in Cuban theater, a character that Lane notes [End Page 108] was central to the emergence of distinct local stage genres. She considers the slow transformation of the negrito, initially the subject of ridicule and derision, into a "beloved" national figure (albeit one that still manifested the strong racial biases of the middle classes). Lane is drawn to "the intricate relation between race and nation—mutually exclusive and mutually formative" ideologies (3). She stresses that even during a period in which slavery was legal, white literate Cuba demonstrated a fascination with black underclass expression. Later sections of the introduction discuss the relation of the book's themes to José Martí's famous "Nuestra América" essay and the gradually deepening interest in local cultural forms within colonial and post-colonial nations.
Chapter 1 describes the beginnings of Cuban costumbrismo, the foregrounding of local themes, history, forms of expression and/or characters in art and literature. The author devotes considerable attention to Domingo del Monte and the regular tertulias he established in the 1830s. Members of the tertulia were among the first middle-class authors to take inspiration from Afro-Cuban subject matter. After their flight into exile—the result of pro-independence and pro-abolitionist politics—and the onset the Escalera slave conspiracy, Lane demonstrates how humorist José Bartolomé Crespo y Borbón emerged in the 1840s as one of the only authors who alluded to the population of color. He did this primarily by adopting bozal, a parodical version of a creole slave dialect. Crespo y Borbón's alter ego, a fictitious recently-arrived African known as Creto Gangá, wrote newspaper columns commenting on Cuban society. The gradual emergence of the sainete or one-act comic stage play and the prominence of negritos as their central characters owed much to the popularity of Creto Gangá. This section ends with fascinating commentary about Afro-Cuban author Juan Francisco Manzano, a former slave encouraged to publish his autobiography by del Monte. Editors refused to correct his grammatical errors in an attempt to make his story more "real" and impressionable, and thus he himself was presented in a sort of literary blackface.
Chapter 2 examines how the largely parodical tradition of early and mid-nineteenth-century blackface performance gradually came to be associated with the independence movement. Lane reminds us that the island remained a colony long after most other states had achieved independence because of the white population's fear of a slave uprising and their perceived need of protection by Spanish troops. Yet despite elite fears of slave revolt, the free population came over time to associate Afro-Cuban culture as local, a marker of nation. The author focuses on several representative authors of the teatro bufo or comic theater of this period who demonstrate the trend: José Socorro de León, Juan José Guerrero, and Antonio Enrique de Zafra. Lane notes a gradual shift in prominence on stage from the negro bozal or recently arrived African to the negrocatedrático or upwardly aspiring "educated black" (similar to Zip Coon in the U.S.). The catedrático became wildly popular during the first decades of struggle against Spain [End Page 109] beginning in 1868. This shift in part reflected the migration of...