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Ss Ss “White, Blue, and Emblazoned,” “the Five-Pointed Star,” the Ubiquity of Flags and Signs Proclaiming “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” When the armistice between the United States and Spain brought an end to military actions, the sidewalks and plazas of the island’s cities became the scene of a different kind of war—a war of symbolic skirmishes over how civic rights and Cuban national identity should be taken up and publicly expressed within the transitory new political order. More particularly, the combatants fought over how to politically represent the citizenry and institutionalize patriotic memory. Rivalries thus shifted from the real, material terrain of armed conflict to the vaporous, rhetorical environment of argument and symbols. This “war after the war,” which centered on inventing a national community in the midst of the problematic circumstances of this period “between empires,” was not waged solely by educated groups. Indeed, my interest here is to go beyond the horizon of activities pursued by the intellectual and political class and explore how common people, the majority of them illiterate, took part in this conflict over symbols. Lacking education, social advantage, or wealth, and thus finding closed to them the traditional avenues of making speeches in elite political forums or arguing ideas through written contributions in the press, thousands of unknown Cubans participated in the symbolic construction of the nation on a more visceral level, taking part in rallies, five The Socialization of Symbols Representing the Idea of Country The Socialization of Symbols 101 marches, and impromptu street gatherings where they made their feelings known, collectively, through chants, cries, and gestures. As midday approached on 12 September 1898 in Havana, where the Spanish authorities still exercised power, ten working class Cubans who ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-four were arrested for issuing the “subversive cries” of “¡Viva Cuba Libre! [Long Live a Free Cuba!]” as they rode in a thirdclass coach on the urban train between the Concha station and Marianao. The transgressors were taken by the police to the fortress of La Cabaña, and remanded to the authority of a military judge.1 A month later, on 11 October, a young black prostitute, scarcely seventeen years of age, was dragged off to a police station and later confined to Havana’s Casa de Recogidas (a home-cum-jail for destitute and fallen women) on the strength of another prostitute’s denunciation. The young Habanera was accused of causing “a scandal in public” and of “insulting Spaniards” by unleashing a string of “nationalist abuse” at a Spanish soldier ambling in a drunken state past the doors of one of the many bordellos on Calle Samaritana .2 On the night of that same day, the owner of a small café called La Reina was taken, along with the man who played piano in the café, to the Vivac prison (a civilian jail run by the police) in Havana, on the grounds of upsetting public order. In his declaration, the police warden alleged that he had reproved the owner on numerous occasions for allowing the “Bayamesa” to be played on the café’s piano. Although the owner swore he had ordered “that the anthem not be played in the establishment” and the pianist declared that it was not the anthem that he had played but rather the tune of “a danzón with a very similar-sounding part to it” that a client had been whistling near the café that day, the two were nonetheless assessed a heavy fine.3 On 9 November 1898, a young man, eighteen years of age, was arrested and sentenced to a prison term in the El Morro castle, charged with “using his finger to draw five-pointed stars and letters spelling Viva Cuba Libre on a dusty shopwindow” outside the grounds of a cigarette factory on Paseo de Tacón.4 During the last months of Spanish rule, incidents such as these occurred almost daily on the streets and in the plazas of the capital. Demoralized government officials tried to stop them but were powerless to do so. On the busiest street corners, underground newspapers, bearing names like El Grito de Baire, Cuba Libre, La Estrella Solitaria, and El Machete—names that in themselves stood and propagandized for independence—were hawked by a steadily growing number of vendors.5 One such individual, Nicolás Vald és, a thirty-three year old Havana resident who lived on Calle Monserrate, was imprisoned on 9 December 1898 for “having subversive newspapers...

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