Cuba's Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750–2000 by Karen Y. Morrison (review)

Karen Y. Morrison's Cuba's Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750–2000 argues for the centrality of the family in the longue durée of race making in Cuba. Morrison's ambitious project tackles a long chronological scope, starting in the eighteenth century, moving through the illegal slave trade, the Wars of Independence, and emancipation in the nineteenth century, and concluding with the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution. Morrison argues against an explanation of interracial family formation in Cuba, as being a simple matter of blanqueamiento, or a shared and straightforward project of whitening. Instead, she argues that "this study highlights the inextricable links between 'family,' 'race,' and 'nation' in the competing nationalist visions of Cuba that have existed since the eighteenth century" (xvi).

To bridge so many eras and examples, Morrison develops an analytical concept that she refers to as "the sexual economy of race." Rather than focusing on the discourses of race and nation as articulated by intellectuals and politicians, she grounds her study in baptismal, marriage, and census records to examine how family formations shaped Cuban racial norms and, in turn, how Cuban women and men's reproductive choices shaped race. She argues that "the emergence of Cuba's current multi-racial nationalism was not solely a product of twentieth century revolutionary agendas; nor did it emerge exclusively from political acts[;] … it was also born out of Cuba's reproductive and familial past, Cuba's uniquely evolving sexual economy of race" (xx). This "on-the-ground" approach adds significantly to the historiography on race and race making in Cuba, which has often privileged (the disproportionately male) political and military experiences.

Morrison begins her analysis in the eighteenth century, and she illustrates how the practices of the Catholic Church, the military, and the increasingly capitalist-oriented economy reshaped family relationships for Cubans of color in the wake of the Bourbon Reforms. During this era, Morrison identifies that white men could and did recognize their children with women of color, and that legitimacy rates for baptized children were quite high. She concludes that despite the changing norms and limited opportunities for Cubans of color, their rates of marriage and legitimate births generally matched those of families the church identified as white (72).

The book then moves into the nineteenth century, for which Morrison notes multiple strategies by which women could control the sexual and racial implications of their reproductive lives. She demonstrates the mutability of race through a close reading of church records. For example, by examining baptismal records, she demonstrates how some white women might have "become" women of color to legitimate their relationships with Cuban men of color, or how women of color might have abandoned their children (even temporarily), allowing the church to claim them and baptize the babies as white (115–116). In addition, she rejects the classic literary icon of the tragic mulata, as represented in the Cuban classic Cecelia Valdés. In this vein, it might be valuable to read these chapters alongside Emily Clark's The Strange History of the American Quadroon, which also argues against taking this fictional female character as representative of women of color in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Morrison's chapters on the twentieth century move away from a close reading of baptismal, marriage, and census data, and instead rely more on literary and intellectual texts on the politics of afrocubanismo. She concludes the book with fascinating interviews with elderly Cubans who speak freely about their families and racial identities, providing vivid detail and tantalizing possibilities for rich lives that are often only hinted at in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century census and clerical archives.

Morrison's work is best when she plums the archival and oral history sources to reveal race making on an individual and family level. For example, she mines the nineteenth-century baptism records from the Espíritu Santo Parish in Havana, noting...