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CHAPTER TWO Black Patronage Networks “The issue,” said black political activist Juan Gualberto Gómez in 1902, “is to begin, and begin on the inside.”1 Gómez spoke with satisfaction after Cuba’s new head of state, Tomás Estrada Palma, announced his intention to set aside one hundred public service jobs for “deserving” Cubans of color.2 Government set-asides were far from novel in Cuban politics, particularly when used to cinch political loyalties. In fact, centralization of administrative resources (such as jobs and public works contracts) were long a convention of Cuban politics. Even before independence it was an important mechanism of corruption and control at all levels of Spain’s colonial administration .3 After the end of colonialism in 1898 and due in part to the policies of U.S. occupation officials (who appointed pro-U.S. supporters to key administrative posts and enacted U.S. Military Order 218 instituting a North American–style governance system on the island), similar artful uses of government resources emerged as common practice in “new Cuba.”4 What was without precedent after independence, however, was the new president’s public promise of job distribution—across the races. EstradaPalmahadpledgedtoincreasethenumberofblacksongovernment payrolls (as postal employees, clerks, messengers, inspectors, police officers, and rural guardsmen), a move that Juan Gualberto Gómez—arguably the island’s most influential black voice in the early republic—suggested would bring more blacks into the “inside” of Cuba’s new economic structures and would, in one sense, help to nullify segregationist policies established during U.S. occupation (1898–1902). Gómez and others believed that Estrada Palma’s gesture was potentially important to igniting an egalitarian impetus following national independence in 1898. This promise of jobs, however , had come only after Generoso Campos Marquetti, the black veteran general of the Liberation Army, and several hundred other black veterans and civic activists demanded that the government end discriminatory hiring  64 BLACK PATRONAGE NETWORKS practices. Having fought side by side with whites in the independence wars (1868–98) in numbers disproportionate to the total island population and believing that the Revolution’s triumph should confer on all not just citizenship status but real opportunity, the activists pushed to be included in the lucrative echelons of the emerging republican economy. In fact, the Revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, in practice very few Cubans of color managed to win a public service job in the early republic.5 Many fell short of infiltrating patronage networks at levels that yielded socioeconomic benefits, as was customary practice in the distribution of public resources. As argued here and earlier by historians such as Louis Pérez, Alejandro de la Fuente, and Jorge Ibarra, throughout the republican period ever-expanding bureaucracies and budgets funded patronage sinecures, nepotism, and favoritism at all levels of government.6 Powerful foreign investments in Cuba limited domestic economic activity, relegating a significant amount of Cuban economic transactions to politics and public budgets. As state budgets mushroomed after 1899, administrators ’ power increased. Their capacity to appoint supporters to civil service jobs expanded, and they manipulated jobs and other resources in order to line their own pockets as well as secure political loyalty in the gamey exchange of favors for votes.7 Although the number of state employees expanded in direct relationship to expanding state budgets, it was still difficult to obtain public sector opportunities. Fierce job competition (largely due to a sizable immigrant laboring population and thousands of out-of-work Liberation Army veterans) as well as race, gender, regional, and familial preferences further worked against equitable job distribution.8 Thus, penetrating emerging republican structures and being on the “inside” of them, as Juan Gualberto Gómez described it in 1902, meant insinuating oneself into the dense web of patronage relationships that increasingly determined employment, protections, contracts, and favors in republican Cuba. Aline Helg argues, for example, that one’s political affiliation was a likely source of employment, such as the jobs acquired by prominent blacks in the ruling Moderate Party between 1903 and 1904, including Rafael Serra’s appointment to the post office, General Jesús Rabí’s stint as forest inspector, and Manuel González’s post in Havana’s customhouse.9 Socioeconomic success, even one’s survival, then, forced Cubans of all colors to navigate the complex , arterial networks controlled by elected officials, whose power was safeguarded (at least for their term of office) by manipulating public resources. Black activists in the early republic argued vigorously that despite a few...

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