Origenes and the Poetics of History

There you have it, Cuba lacks the poetry of remembrance;
its echoes only repeat the poetry of hope.
Its buildings lack history.

—Condesa de Merlin

Tradition and Futurity

During the eighteenth century, Latin civilization, unfolding in its European and American spaces, underwent a decisive change in its forms of cultural and political sociability. The state system of the ancien régime, which referred back to the absolutist descendit of St. Thomas Aquinas—God-Monarch-Kingdom-City—was inverted according to the logic of representative citizenship. Other ascendant bonds such as patriotic societies, Jacobin clubs, parliamentary alliances, and enlightened salons, which Emile Coiran has described as "gardens of doubts," overflowed the monarchical corpus. These transformations gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas has called the public space: a kind of neutral ground between society and State where the discourses and the institutions of civil opinion and political representation are articulated. ¹ The enlightened public sphere thus completed the transition from the holistic order, in which the citizens were integrated into the whole of the State by means of the modern order of corporations; that great assembly of free and egalitarian individuals organized in a horizontal civility. ²

In Spanish America, the European ancien régime had been tightly secured. A complex system of castes was added to military and ecclesiastic corporations that increasingly reinforced the stratified bonds of the state. The fragmentation of the social whole extended the closed spaces of culture to the point that they became predominant. The Church, the market, and liturgical festivities constituted the narrow public sphere, while the family and the body were the locus of the essential practices of civil and religious life. The shared piety, rosary prayer, veneration of the relic, imploration manuscripts, and heraldic identity floated over a domestic image of the world. ³ The field of the private was subject not only to these institutions, but also to the actual political and cultural imaginary of the ancien régime. ⁴ Accordingly, with the Enlightenment, the displacement of the holistic order by the modern order also was an expression of the conflict between the public and the private. This new civility presumed the dismantling of those social formations that converted knowledge into mystery.

Cuba did not experience a holistic order like that of the other zones of the Spanish American colonial world. The transition from Creole alterity to National identity did not take place until the middle of the nineteenth century, and its Independence arrived when Europe and the Americas had already been experimenting with various forms of modernization. The Cuban ancien régime—the colonial society of the nineteenth century—was partially secularized by the Spanish Liberalism of that era. The Church, the Army, the Inquisition, the Courts, the High Courts, the Town Councils, and Religious Orders were corporally weak. (It is true that slavery was not abolished until 1886, but even so, the inexistence of a legal metanarrative concerning castes made possible an intense mixture of races and an accelerated cultural cohesion of nationality). The insular colony was neither free enough to be modern nor corporatist enough to be traditional. Both insufficiencies, those of modernity and tradition, contributed to the mixture that has always marked the exceptional casuistry of the island. Therefore, it seems that more than just a history of transitions, abrupt or smooth, into the modern world, as in Europe and other parts of the Americas, Cuba has lived a series of tensions between modernity and its utopic resistance.

The lack of a corporatist past, of a true ancien régime, left Cuban conservatism without historical references. In Cuba it is difficult to find an intellectual like the Mexicans Lucas Alamán and José María Gutiérrez de Estrada; the Peruvians Felipe Pardo and Benito Laso; the Ecuadorian Gabriel García Moreno, or the Central American...