The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past

4. Nation in Waiting

NATION IN WAITING As a man, as a Cuban, as a patriot, I am filled with anxiety in the face of the horrible and universal bewilderment produced by the American intervention. It has contributed to the dilution of the political consciousness of my nation. The moral consciousness of the nation has dissolved almost instantly, before my very eyes. And it appears to me in this moment of unbearable moral anguish that the soul of Cuba—that our soul—is threatened with extinction. — Esteban Borrero Echeverría to Nicolás Heredia (March 25, 1900) José Martí lived, dreamed, suffered, and died for Cuba. Antonio Maceo, [Ignacio] Agramonte, [Francisco Vicente] Aguilera, and [Carlos Manuel de] Céspedes died for Cuba. We will not debate if they died for a dream or for a utopia: they died for Cuba. And although everything has been an illusion, it is necessary to close our eyes and continue dying for that illusion, which is our dignity, with which we live among the other countries in the world; and even among the most powerful and the most arrogant countries we can maintain our heads high and our hearts disposed to love. — José Antonio Ramos, Manual del perfecto fulanista: Apuntes para el estudio de nuestra dinámica político-social (1916) 4 The great leaders of the liberation wars of 1868 and 1895 struggled to sever the political ties that bound us to the government of Madrid, not solely for the purpose of placing in Cuban hands the capacity to direct the national destiny but also with the goal of fundamentally renovating the bases of our collective existence and transform the manner in which all the national institutions were to function. — Carteles (March 29, 1925) Cuba possesses a unity in its tradition, and by virtue of a commonly shared destiny affirms its historical unity [unidad histórica]. And such unity has been intense, sufficiently strong to shape a common psychology within the population which—notwithstanding its diverse origins—allows one to speak of a “Cuban character.” — Programa de la Organización Joven Cuba (1934) The truth of the matter is that Cuba has been waiting for a long, long time to become a nation. — Luis A. Sanjenís (October 12, 1959) NATION IN WAITING | 117 T he republicwas inaugurated on May 20, 1902, an occasion celebrated on a grand scale: a national holiday, in fact, given over to acts of public ceremony and popular revelry. “The greatest day in the history of Cuba,” La Lucha pronounced.1 Cubans across the island surrendered themselves joyfully to public displays of euphoria and elation. Years later, Havana resident Tomás Villoch remembered May 20 as “a day with a splendid blue sky, almost as if God himself had come down to participate in the ceremony,”with street dancing, strolling musicians, and everyonedressed as formally as their means allowed. “There wasn’t a window, a door, a roof, a balcony, or a lamppost on a public thoroughfare without a Cuban flag.”2 But the national mood was not unmixed. General Máximo Gómez was inconsolable . The republic had indeed arrived, Gómez brooded, but “not with the absolute independence we had dreamed about.”3 Thoughtful observers understood that something had gone terribly wrong. “I knew many people who remembered May 20 [1902],” Graciella Pogolotti reminisced years later, “and preserved in their memory a sensation of confusion, of contradictions. On one hand, they experienced—finally—the joy of seeing the raising of the Cuban flag, but, on the other hand, they were not unmindful of the fact that this was a limited independence, an independence only half achieved, that there yet remained much to do and much to realize.”4 ... Much was made about the transition from colony to republic. But it was not entirely clear that the notion of transition accurately reflected the circumstances of Cuban independence. Just how much had changed and what had changed was difficult to ascertain. Some things had changed, of course, but much had not. And therein lay the problem, for much of what had not changed was precisely what Cubans had set out to change in 1895. Cuban pretensions to national sovereignty had challenged more than the propriety of Spanish colonial rule. Cuban aspirations had also threatened the presumption of North American succession to sovereignty. For nearly one hundred years, the United States had laid claim to Cuba as a matter of vital...