A Cultural History of Cuba during the U.S. Occupation, 1898-1902

6. Public Culture and Nationalism

Ss Ss The “Production” of the Nation: Ceremonies and Monuments The patriotic demonstrations that constantly occurred during this period opened a privileged space for the public expression of Cubans’ feeling that they constituted and were members of a national community. The diffusion through the press of a symbolic nationalist patrimony was accompanied by its public representation in marches, meetings, acts of homage, celebrations, and funerals. These ceremonies enabled the symbolic codes I noted in chapter 5 to be fleshed out and consummated on public occasions in which music, flags, triumphal arches, dress featuring the national colors, and banners featuring portraits and allegorical depictions were dynamically intermixed. The debates over patriotic memory, national tradition, and what was most authentic in each also took place through the more limited channel of written texts. Yet this source, too, reached a wider audience, with its arguments advanced via the programs of public spectacles which often drew large numbers of people. Although historical accounts of the period of U.S. occupation have traditionally represented Cubans as the victims of systematic humiliation and marginalization , forced to witness the U.S. flag flying everywhere on the island, in reality these years saw a prodigious number of nationalist ceremonies and demonstrations, events that were critical in creating a shared body of national symbols. Nonetheless, the symbolic “production” of the nation was not realized without discord and violence. Even as the nation’s existence was made six Public Culture and Nationalism 128 Public Culture and Nationalism explicit in a wealth of rituals, practices, and emblems, a complex maneuvering took place in which patriotic memory and the national tradition, the Spanish colonial legacy and the “modernizing” element tied to the U.S. presence, were each verbalized, written about, and acted out in widely varying ways. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the role of print culture, the periodical press especially, in the development of the bonds of solidarity which constitute the imagined community of the nation.1 Nevertheless, my emphasis here on patriotic ceremonies, with their elements of speechmaking , celebration, and performance, and on marches or public gatherings, with their myriad flags, salutes of gunfire, triumphal arches, portraits, and music, all intended to be seen and heard rather than read, is justified in virtue of the fact that nearly 70 percent of the Cuban population was illiterate at this time. This kind of public “production” of the nation thus furnished both the social space and the type of occasion in which thousands of Cubans lacking formal instruction could participate in collective affirmations of the existence of a national community and in the creation of the symbolic languages through which this community took shape. In this period, therefore, the unlettered majority was not reduced to being mere spectators at events orchestrated from above by an intellectual elite. On the contrary, the years of the intervention were marked by the proliferation of small-scale ceremonies, conducted in pueblos and other locales, rich in both popular creativity and the spontaneous expression of a sense of national identity. Furthermore, these ceremonies, with their visual and auditory props and movement, combine an aesthetic expressiveness and an emotional power absent from the simple written formulation of ideas and values. The participation of large numbers of people in patriotic celebrations throughout the island also indicates that a public consensus had formed around a particular set of national values and emblems. This level and degree of attachment by the populace would be far more difficult to ascertain, much less verify, in the case of a written text and its contents.2 Through their displays of cubanía in the midst of patriotic celebrations, people from all walks of life not only marked the break with the Spanish colonial past but also—in publicly reaffirming the existence of the nation—called into question the legitimacy of the U.S. imperial presence. When men and women, holding flags and singing anthems, took part in a patriotic march, they effectively put themselves in the category of “citizens” of a future independent republic, rather than one of “natives” or “inhabitants” of a conquered territory, as the U.S. authorities persisted in calling them. Moreover, the official status of “patriot” conferred by having joined in the independence struggles and Public Culture and Nationalism 129 proudly exhibited during these celebrations gave hundreds of people of humble origin the social prestige and consideration needed to demand unequivocally the recognition of their civic rights...