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3 mambises in wHitefaCe Whether in war, politics, trade, or popular-culture history, the United States has always required an image of Cuba constructed 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. Nowhere was this more apparent than when it mattered the most historically, in the crucial moment of US-Cuban military collaboration concluding the 1895–98 Cuban War of Independence. In popular culture representations, including photography, illustration, and journalistic report, it was a political moment that would require a distinct “whitening” of the war both in racially inflected images of US military liberators on one hand and of their Cuban revolutionary counterparts on the other. In wartime images of American forces, much downplayed would be the significant combat roles of major African American units; with regard to their Cuban counterparts, even more pronounced would be the attempt to create for US consumption racially sanitized depictions of a revolutionary army with highly visible black and mulato leaders and a soldiery in many units heavily and proudly Afro-Cuban. In fact, as far back as 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 lay a fear, pervasive among supporters and opponents alike, that the Cuban Revolution —reimaging 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—would be in large measure racially “black.” This 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 fil- Chapter Three 38 ibustero Narciso López, finally garroted in Havana after a third ill-fated try. As to post–Civil War and postemancipation attempts by US leaders to manipulate official perceptions of and policy toward the revolutionary patriots, negotiating a racial politics of whiteness versus blackness seems to have been from the outset a primary consideration, with whiteness always figured most visibly 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.” These were the words of 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, D.C. 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 United States 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.” Popular culture representations of US-Cuban relations of the era—as Louis Pérez has shown, working their way through prewar, wartime, and postwar evolutions—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 percent Afro-Cuban and by the time of direct US military involvement was 60 percent—with the latter figure, by no surprise , corresponding exactly to the late nineteenth-century racial demographics of the island itself. (As will be seen, in some individual units, according to Cuban sources, the percentage may indeed have run as high as 85.) This was done mainly by focusing on mediagenic leadership figures in the traditional Western (read...

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