Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (review)

This generously conceived and brilliantly argued book is the best scholarly treatment of racial themes in Cuban literature now available. The author brings to the task a firm historical grasp of issues and polemics involving the representation of race and sex by Cuban writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While offering at least one instance of close reading in each of the book’s six chapters, Kutzinski remains faithful to the stated aim of, as she puts it, not regarding the “individual texts” discussed “as the results mainly of personal idiosyncracies,” but rather as “modulations of discourses that are historically tied to specific economic and political group interests,” adding that the “most pervasive of those interests in Cuba since the early nineteenth century have been those of the tobacco and sugar industries” (9). While dealing in some detail with the related histories of these two great legacies of colonial exploitation, Kutzinski’s critical readings focus on the female figure of the mulata as a sexual commodity in Cuban culture at large and more particularly in the pervasive nationalist cant that celebrates her and the promiscuous mestizaje she embodies and makes available to men.

Sugar’s Secrets reinterprets the cult of mestizaje in mulata-bound terms. It examines how, starting in the nineteenth century, the mulata figure comes to embody a counterpoint of sublime and crude desires generated by the “masculinist” imagination of men in control of the culture’s means of expression, in poetry, costumbrista sketches, prose fiction, engravings, and lithographs (the chapter—”Caramel Candy for Sale”—in which Kutzinski examines the mulata iconography found in cigar and cigarette marquillas constitutes the book’s most valuable contribution to nineteenth-century Cuban cultural studies.) The treatment of these and other objects of symbolic and material life supplements Kutzinski’s revisionary interpretation of lyric poetry from the so-called período negro (1820’s through 1840s) in poems by Juan Francisco Manzano and Plácido. In addition, she closely considers Francisco Muñoz del Monte’s “La mulata” (1839) and similar early treatments and caricatures of the stereotype. As a result, her subsequent interpretations of poesía negra/mulata by the likes of Luis Palés Matos, Nicolas Guillén, Felipe Pichardo Moya, Ramón Guirao, and Emilio Ballagas gain in perspective and create a certain sense of cyclic reiteration in the examined lyrics. Besides the prominent place given to poetry, the book includes a probing chapter—”Filomena’s Law”—on Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1891), a novel of miscegenation and incest written in reaction to Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés.

Although it certainly condemns all forms of sexual stereotyping by implication, Kutzinski’s study does not concern itself directly with the rampant and exuberant sexism aimed at mulatas so dominant in Cuba’s ordinary life and past and present folklore. In strict discursive terms, one may speak of mulatez perhaps as Cuba’s aesthetics of amalgamation, driven by the trope of sublimity in male artists and thinkers trying to escape essentialist fixations upon racial origins or ethnic purity, as they search for performative or mobile modes of playing (with) culture. As such, mulatez would be the rare and ineffable register, heard or perceived as a strange horizon of possibilities set well beyond the most common constructions of race mixture at work in plain mestizaje. In such constructions, national and ethnic symbolic genealogies are invented and rephrased, much like a broken record of rhetorical virtuosity obsessed with locating and securing pure racial origins and with mourning their debasement—as “ethnic lynching”—or celebrating the forging of a new “cosmic race.” The discourse of mestizaje overvalues original race essences and sees them either obliterated or synthesized through coercive or coveted miscegenation. In either case, views on racial purity in Cuba are inconceivable outside the phobic or apologetic anxieties produced by a high rate of breeding between the perceived races...