Divergent Paths toward Citizenship: The Cauca and Cuba
During the second half of the 19th century in the Cauca valley of Colombia, populations of African descent became a powerful constituency of the Liberal party, seeing it as their best chance for political inclusion. Likewise, the Afro-Cuban population supported Cuban nationalists by joining the Liberation Army during Cuba’s war of independence for a chance for a chance of political inclusion. However, popular liberalism in late 19th century southwestern Colombia was more successful for Afro-Colombians than Cuba’s ideology of racelessness due to the rights conceded to them, black unity in the Liberal party and the burgeoning influence of scientific racism in Cuban domestic policies regarding race.
Though popular liberalism was more advantageous, many similarities exist between the two regions. For example, elite Liberals and nationalists craved the support of the majority of the population to seize power, which in both cases meant black support. Indeed, estimates of the black and mulatto population in the Cauca range from 34.8 percent in the 1851 census to 60.4 percent according to a local geographer. Comparable numbers for Afro-Cubans also existed, with 36 percent and 16 percent of the population as slave and free people of color. Elites and nationalists in Cuba obviously needed the political and military assistance of this majority to overthrow Conservative rule in Cauca and Spanish colonial rule with black soldiers. Although the black majority in both regions made them necessary allies, the racelessness ideology crafted by José Martí and others weakened the Afro-Cuban struggle for racial equality.
Intellectual radicals writing in the late 19th century such as Martí, who attacked the notion of the contamination of ancestry through slavery, also criticized discriminatory practices like segregation that isolate races, because “everything that separates man is a sin against nature. ” On the subject of Afro-Cuban political rights, Martí defended their inclusion as citizens of the new republic, declaring that the new Cuban government could not deny the rights already conceded to Afro-Cubans by the Spanish for political reasons and racial equality being necessary to establish a meritocracy. Even before Martí’s lofty words were penned in 1893, radical white leaders of the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878) placed free blacks into positions of local authority, freed slaves, made them soldiers, and called them citizens. In the later phases of Cuban independence, at least 60 percent of the Liberation Army was Afro-Cuban, along with 40 percent of commissioned officers.
Colombia, on the other hand, was the setting for a different form of black mobilization. In order to take control of local politics in a region where Conservative hacendados ruled, Liberals found themselves forced to abolish the slave trade and establish democratic societies to encourage afrocaucano support. Perhaps best exemplified by a Liberal priest writing to the president, “The slaves that lose their chains bring to society gratitude for the government that has lifted the yoke off them…” Thus, abolition was primarily motivated by the desire to secure black followers. Before final abolition in 1852, juntas de manumision held public ceremonies to show the blacks their debt to the Liberal party, strengthening the link between freedom and their party. Throughout second half of the 19th century, elite Liberals established democratic societies, such as the Democratic Society of Cali, where all workers were invited to learn the values of republicanism, democracy, and liberalism.
However, the urban and rural poor of the region who came to the meetings shared their own concerns, and elite Liberals were forced to meet some of their demands, including an end to old forms of deference, removing property requirements for suffrage and ending monopolies like tobacco and aguardiente, which prevented tenants and small landholders from profiting by growing tobacco and cane and terminating vagrancy laws and new taxes. Blacks in the Cauca held public demonstrations and insulted Conservative elites, unlike Afro-Cubans who could not criticize discrimination without accusations of fomenting racial division and rebellion in an officially harmonious nation.
Interestingly, like the Liberation Army of Cuba, blacks were also incorporated into Colombian national guards that defended the Liberal government in the civil wars of the 19th century. Moreover, elite Liberals also developed a raceless citizenship ideology, with citizenship superseding all other identities. In the eyes of elites, citizenship was defined by one’s willingness to defend the party. In addition, liberalism in Colombia was perpetually connected to blackness in the Conservative imaginary, like Spain’s attempt to prevent rebellion by labeling the nationalist uprising a black revolt. Nevertheless, popular liberals did not necessarily share the elitist view on race, since their numerical superiority and unity in demands for racial equality were not considered over until they received economic equality through land allocation.
The multiracial society of the Cauca must also be taken into account as well, since mestizos and Indians often supported Conservatives, thereby pitting black workers against Conservative hacendados and their followers, which fostered racial collectivity among people of African descent who defined themselves in opposition to Conservatives and mestizos. Afro-Cubans, did not have the benefit of cultivating race consciousness, since in Cuba, those of African origin were courted by multiple established political parties after achieving independence, even electing blacks as representatives for Liberals and Conservatives.
For Cuba, scientific racism’s growing influence on Cuba’s upper class hindered the battle for racial equality The various established political parties divided the black vote, preventing a united front against the burgeoning influence of Social Darwinism, positivism, and biological determinism, new theories that concluded that education can never improve the Negro, who could only attain a fraction of the intelligence of European whites. The simultaneous development of scientific racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the enigmatic murders of white children often thought to have been committed by African-derived brujos, led to scientific essays and editorials doubting the benefits of universal male suffrage and citizenship to blacks. Essayist Francisco Figueras, like many others, believed Cuba could never become a modern republic with democratization and inclusion of the African majority, who were cursed with lasciviousness and lack of foresight.
Despite the absence of evidence of blacks being responsible for the murders, white Cubans responded to the crisis with increasing discriminatory government and persecution of African-derived religious traditions, though religious freedom was a constitutional right. Furthermore, the Afro-Cuban middle class, best represented by Club Atenas, the preeminent social club in Havana, expressed their discontent with the lynching of blacks along with accepting the inferiority of African traditions in order to facilitate assimilation into the Cuban Republic. The conspicuous class division of Cubans of color clearly impeded the struggle for citizenship because the majority of blacks, though not African born, possessed rather recent African ancestry. Denigrations of African cultural survivals by upper class Afro-Cubans unquestionably indicate the inevitability of the return of legal discrimination in Cuba.
In summation, the battles for Afro-Latin American political inclusion in the Cauca and Cuba shared many similarities, but the Afro-Colombian experience created a more egalitarian and democratic society than that of Cuba, though both were transient. The only flaw in Colombian popular liberalism was the partition of the Liberal party due to elite reluctance to grant land reform, which would have given Afro-Caucanos full economic equality. By allying with Conservatives, some elites worked for the return to the traditional social order, culminating in the 1886 constitution, which revived limited suffrage and excluded blacks from political life. Both regions developed raceless ideologies, but the unity of Afro-Colombians in the Liberal party and the opposition’s tendency to emphasize the ties between Liberals and blacks helped afro-caucanos develop a common racial identity that Afro-Cubans lacked. Racelessness in Cuba also impeded racial unity and political involvement because Cubans of color were not supposed to form associations or political parties that defined themselves by race, due to the raceless ideology conceived by José Martí, which attacked forms of racial separateness through religious traditions and political organizations. Finally, the development of scientific racism which justified exclusion of blacks and other nonwhites from politics, was more influential in late 19th century and early 20th century Cuba, whereas popular liberalism began in the 1850s and ended by period before new theories of race began to play an increasingly larger role in Latin American societies.
Works Cited
Bronfman, Alejandra. “ ‘En Plena Libertad y Democracia:’ Negros Brujos and the Social Question.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 82:3 (2002): 549-87.
Ferrer, Ada. “A Raceless Nation.” In Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations, edited by John Chasteen and John Wood. Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2005.
Martí, José. “My Race (April 1893).” In The America of José Martí: Selected Writings of José Martí. Translated from the Spanish by Juan de Onís. New York: The Noonday Press, 1953.
Sanders, James E. “’Citizens of a Free People’: Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 84:2 (2004): 277-313.
Stabb, Martin S. “The Sick Continent and Its Diagnosticians.” In Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
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