The Limits of "Nuestra América"

In "Nuestra América" (1891), José Martí famously repudiates the idea of race as a biological fact. Martí argues that "there are no races," suggesting that biological race is the business of "lamp-lit minds" (295) who are committing a "sin against humanity" (296). Instead, Martí argues that "in the justice of nature" one will find not races but only "the universal identity of man" (296). In "Mi raza" (1893), Martí expands his critique of biologically determined accounts of race and argues not only against race but also against any sort of race-thinking at all. Martí argues that to believe that "in the black man" there is a "virus" (319) is a "sin against humanity," and then chides "the black man who trumpets his race" because he, too, is committing a "sin against humanity," just like the "white man who […] believes himself to be superior to the black man" (319).

Proceeding from his repudiation of race, Martí produces a concept of culture to take its place. What is striking about Martí's concept of culture, however, is its failure to abandon race—Martí's supposedly raceless concept of culture relies on the very concept of biological race which Martí denies. The problem with "Nuestra América," however, is not merely that its historically determined concept of culture depends on race, or that it exchanges racial normativity for cultural normativity grounded in biological race. The problem with "Nuestra América" is that it continues to function as the model for Latin American cultural normativity today.

I. Anti-Racism

Martí's claim that "there are no races" was at least as much a calculated political gesture, within the context of Cuba's complex nineteenth-century struggle for national sovereignty, as it was a manifestation of Martí's putative commitment to universal humanity.¹ Martí, in part for practical reasons, came to believe that anti-racism was essential to the success of the independence movement. The repudiation of race found in "Nuestra América" was necessary inasmuch as Cuba's struggle for independence was hampered by the failure to reconcile Cuba's multiracial population to the idea of a Cuban nation. Advocates of colonialism had long argued in various ways that Cuba's black population made an independent, sovereign Cuba impossible; or if possible, then undesirable for whites. Indeed, as Alejandro de la Fuente notes, Cuba's substantial mixed-race and black population was a compelling fact in arguments against the idea of a Cuban nation not only for Creole whites in Cuba but also for American and other foreign authorities (24). At least until around 1868, or the beginning of the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), Creole elites seemed willing to settle for Spanish rule (or annexation to the United States) because they believed colonial status offered protection from a Haitian-style slave rebellion. In fact, Spanish colonial authorities systematically exploited Creoles' fear of slave rebellion and race war in the years following the Haitian Revolution, even possibly falsifying, as Hugh Thomas suggests, the census of 1792, the first to demonstrate a black majority population in Cuba (81).

By the time Cuba's black population had become a majority, "nothing so preyed on creole consciousness […] as the specter of slave rebellion and race war" (Pérez 103). Moreover, since "slave rebellions during the nineteenth century confirmed creoles' worst fears," their "swift repression by the Spanish army provided creoles with comforting reassurance that their confidence in the efficacy of peninsular arms had not been misplaced" (Pérez 103). The Ten Years' War initially marked a shift in that attitude, with Creole elites offering important though tenuous support for independence; however, that support largely collapsed when Creole elites realized the role, power, and number of blacks in the rebel army, who cast "abolition as the twin goal of independence" and were radicalizing the "social vision" of the independence movement (Guerra 9). In other words, if white racial fears delayed Cuba's independence movement, they were also the main reason for the failure of the Ten Years' War, its fractious first armed struggle for national sovereignty. Recognizing that Cuba's independence movement could...