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

Introduction

Passing through Cuba’s cities and towns a little more than a century ago, a traveler would have noticed bright new street signs that bore the names of the country’s political and military heroes, for this was a time in Cuba when the mambises (Cuban Liberation Army combatants who fought in the nineteenth -century wars against Spain) had yet to be turned into statues in public parks or become characters in comic strips and children’s histories but were still persons of flesh and blood, a time when the War of Independence (1895– 98) was not simply a tale in a school textbook but a vivid reality, when José Martí’s metamorphosis into the “Apostle” had only recently happened, and when General Máximo Gómez still walked bolt upright through the streets of Havana, encountered by its residents as a living man, not just as the figure depicted on a ten-peso note. It was a time in the country’s history when documents were signed with the words “Motherland and Freedom [Patria y Libertad]” rather than “Motherland or Death [Patria o Muerte],” when the anniversaries of 10 October and 24 February, which mark the beginning of the wars of liberation against Spain, were not just “nonwork” days or days denoted on the calendar, but genuinely popular, festive celebrations, complete with street music and dancing in communities across the island; a time when the “Bayamesa” was a fashionable tune, hummed or whistled in streets and public places; when décimas (a form of sung poetry) composed in honor of the Cuban flag filled the pages of popular songbooks, when the Cuban coat of arms was stitched onto the handkerchiefs young men gave their sweethearts, and when belt buckles, or brooches pinned in the hair or on the chest, were decorated with the “single star.” In those days, too, the flag of the United States flew over the fortress of El Morro, and English had replaced Spanish as the official language employed in Cuban government offices. Furthermore, in what seemed like an instantaneous transformation, Havana’s barberías had become “barber shops,” and many of Introduction 2 introduction the stores on Obispo—a principal street in the center of the capital—were suddenly filled with U.S. goods and products. The stores also took care to post signs at their entrance, announcing, in large letters, “English Spoken Here.” At the same time, high society began to celebrate “teas” and “garden parties”; while young men played “sports,” and both women and young ladies liberated from a purely domestic life became known as “new women” and took up jobs “out in the world” as “typists” or “nurses” in offices and hospitals. Seemingly from one day to the next the urban landscape was also transformed, as streetcars and lines for electric lights and telephones rapidly made their appearance . A new element of “comfort” was introduced into Cuban homes with the installation of modern toilets “made in the U.S.A.” The several essays which make up this book attempt to isolate and recapture this unique and complex juncture in the history of Cuba, when the end of the War of Independence against the Spanish metropole and the beginning of the U.S. military occupation set the stage for a time of internal contradiction and confusion. Cuba in this transitional period—the twilight of one century, the dawn of another—was characterized by ambiguity, occupying an indeterminate middle space as neither colony nor sovereign state. While the country had made a definitive break with its colonial past, there was little clarity or agreement about its future shape and direction. Against the background of the symbolic void created by the formal end of more than four hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, a battle broke out among three segments of the Cuban polity: the proponents of a strident nationalism, the advocates of a forceful “Americanization” of Cuban customs and institutions, and the defenders of the Spanish cultural heritage, for whom the greatest threat was the powerful influence of the Anglo-Saxon model of modernization. The years separating the end of the War of Independence in 1898, facilitated by the U.S. intervention in the conflict, and the proclamation of the Cuban Republic in 1902, thus served as a kind of crossroads between two centuries and—in Louis Pérez’s apt phrase—“two empires.”1 The dismantling of Spanish colonial rule went hand in hand with the project of transforming the institutions of Cuban...