an 1848 for the americas
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An 1848 for the Americas: The Black Atlantic, "El negro mrtir,"and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City
David Luis-Brown
American Literary History, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 431-463
(Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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An 1848 for the Americas:
The Black Atlantic, El negromartir, and Cuban ExileAnticolonialism in New YorkCity
David Luis-Brown
In the wake of the European revolutions of 1848 and the
convulsions of independence and abolition sweeping across the
Caribbean and Latin America, scores of political refugees arrived
in New York City. Many of these exiles contributed to republican
periodicals like the French Le Republicain, the Italian LEco
dItalia, and the Cuban El Eco de Cuba, El Filibustero, El
Horizonte, El Mulato, El Pueblo, La Revolucion, and La Verdad
(Catania 2:1415; Ortiz).1 In the early 1850s, New York City was
an incubator of republican nationalism for both Europe and the
Americas, linking Young America to Giovane Italia and Joven
Cuba, the anticolonial Cuban exile movement.2 New York reacted
more to celebrity than to ethics when it gave a heros welcome to
both the antislavery Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian nationalist, and
the proslavery Jose Antonio Paez, the Venezuelan caudillo and
president, when they arrived in July 1850.3 Two years later,
Francisco Aguero y Estrada, an obscure white exile from Cuba,
sailed into New York harbor without any fanfare. But Aguero, a
veteran of an ill-fated anticolonial guerilla war in Cuba, wouldsoon usher republicanism into an innovative reckoning with its
contradictions of race and slavery, which defined the position of
the Americas in the modern world system.4 As the intellectual
architect of El Mulatos intervention in republicanism, Aguero dis-
mantled the Negrophobic logic of Cuban exile nationalism as
pro-slavery annexationism when he boldly declared that if the
David Luis-Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Miami. He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and
Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (2008).
doi:10.1093/alh/ajp026Advance Access publication July 8, 2009
# The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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Cuban anticolonial movement hoped to succeed, it must recognize
and celebrate Cubans as a racially mixed people.5
El negro martir: novela cubana (The Black Martyr: a
Cuban Novel), an anonymous novella serialized in 1854 in ElMulato, fleshed out Agueros breakthrough, exposing the contra-
diction that white Cuban creoles viewed their nation as enslaved
by colonialism even as they sought to unseat Spain by perpetuating
slavery in an alliance with US annexationists. Young America and
Joven Cuba sought to rid Cuba of Spanish colonialism by forging
an alliance among proslavery white Southerners, white northern
proponents of Manifest Destiny, and Cuban exile nationalists.6
This alliance could hold only so long as Cuban exiles excluded
Afro-Cubans from their imagined national community. In contrast,
in a literalization of the figure of the enslaved, El negro ma rtir
focused on the martyrdom of a slave in the anticolonial La
Escalera (Ladder) slave rebellion of 1844 to foreground how an
emphasis on slave insurrection could propel republican nationalism
closer to its stated ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. El
Mulato was the first Cuban exile publication to foreground
Afro-Cuban culture and history as the foundation for Cuban
nationalism, and El negro martir was one of two Cuban anti-
slavery texts to endorse slave rebellion as the basis for republican
freedom. By using the story of a slave rebel to capture the plightof Cuba, El negro martir stakes claim to an 1848 for the
Americas.
To untangle the meanings of an 1848 for the Americas
involves defining republicanism and revisiting scholarly accounts
of the American and European 1848. Republicanism is a twofold
theory of freedom and of government (Pettit, Republicanism).7
Classical republican theorists, ranging from Niccolo Machiavelli
and Charles de Secondat Montesquieu to William Blackstone,
Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, subscribed to a belief in
freedom as non-domination. The very notion of liberty posited anopposition between liber and servus, citizen and slave (Pettit,
Republicanism 31). Machiavelli, for instance, characterized
tyranny and colonization as forms of slavery, as would Cuban
exiles centuries later (Republicanism 32). In the extended debates
over republicanism in the American and European 1848, it was a
matter of contention how the non-domination of freedom would be
defined. Since an influential vein of republican thought had justi-
fied inequality and empire through a states pursuit of what
Machiavelli called grandezza (greatness), a particular nation could
invoke republican freedom only to deny it to others, as did the pro-
ponents of US expansionism and slavery.8
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If the metaphor of slavery had been crucial to classical
republicanisms descriptions of the suppression of liberty, by the
1850s, discussions on the promises and limitations of republican
conceptions of freedom revolved around the question of chattelslavery.9 Following the European revolutions of 1848, it was
impossible to think of the ideals of republican nationalism apart
from their contradictions. Many New York exiles had lived
through the European revolutions of 1848, which had ousted mon-
archs from Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, and the Pope from Rome.
However, in France, the erstwhile democratic state swiftly trans-
muted into a dictatorship in June 1848 when General Louis
Cavaignac, the former governor of colonial Algeria, declared
martial law.10 Young America and Joven Cuba failed to learn from
this betrayal of the revolutions of 1848. They violated the prin-
ciples of equality and liberty by endorsing the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850 and by applauding the US annexation of 55% of Mexican
territory at the conclusion of the Mexican War (184648).11 Race
and empire, then, constituted the central contradictions in the
claims of Young America and Young Cuba to uphold republican
ideals. Focusing exclusively on Young America, Michael Rogin
has named this historical conjuncture, one defined by the suppres-
sion of the revolutions in Europe and by the ascendancy of US
imperialism and slavery, the American 1848: By the American1848, I have meant the moment when the [US] continental expan-
sion of freedom foundered on the conflict between slave and free
labor (Herman 80). Departing from Karl Marxs analysis of the
betrayal of the European revolutions of 1848, Rogin shows how
Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851) chronicled [the] defeat of
the principles of the European revolutions of 1848 through rep-
resentations of controversies over slavery, US expansionism, and
dictatorial rule (Subversive 22). Rogins insights on the American
1848 have inspired other scholars to investigate how working-
class, African-American, and Mexican-American writers joinedcanonical figures of the American Renaissance in intervening
within debates on the legacy of the French and American revolu-
tions in the wake of 1848.12
I seek to contribute to scholarship on the American 1848 by
focusing on how El Mulato and its serialized novella El negro
martir staked claim to an 1848 for the Americas, one built on the
perspectives of pro-democracy groups in Latin America as well as
on the insight that black diasporic groups were central to the
future of republicanism in the Americas. Following the ratification
of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and conservative retrenchment
in Europe in late 1848, the Caribbean and Latin America offered
models of more egalitarian republics. Abolition was sweeping
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across the British colonies (1833), Paraguay (1842), Martinique
(1848), Guadeloupe (1848), St. Croix (1848), Venezuela (1850),
Colombia (1851), Panama (1852), Argentina (1853), and Peru
(1854) (Benot 360 361; Gil-Blanco 293; McGuiness 93).Moreover, a series of major slave revolts shook the Americas,
demonstrating slaves commitment to securing their own freedom.
These slave revolts took place in Saint Domingue (1791 1804),
Barbados (1816), South Carolina (1822), Virginia (1831),
Demerara (1832), Jamaica (1831 32), Brazil (1835), and Cuba
(1844). By staking claim to an 1848 of the Americas that endorsed
antislavery politics and slave revolts, El Mulato pried apart the
Young America/Joven Cuba proslavery annexationist alliance,
exposing the contradiction that while slavery was ascendant in the
US, it was increasingly embattled in the Caribbean and Latin
America. Moreover, bringing together discussions of republican
freedom with debates over slavery and the legitimacy of colonial-
ism allowed the writers in El Mulato to reject imperialist notions
of grandezza and extend the principle of non-domination to all
peoples, thereby radicalizing republicanism.
Building on the antislavery challenge posed by Latin
America, and further sharpening El Mulatos construction of an
1848 for the Americas, El negro martir intervenes in Cuban
nationalismand in the Americas 1848by representing theracially egalitarian promise of Latin American republics. Rather
than putting its faith in the republican state, which Cavaignac had
rendered treacherous to democratic ideals, El negro martir
focused on subaltern insurgency as a model for democracy, as rep-
resented through the martyrdom of an African-born bozal slave. It
represents this subaltern agency as growing out of the black
Atlantic, conceived as a culturally, ethnically, and politically het-
erogeneous network of contestation along the routes of the slave
trade (Fischer 22; Gilroy).13 By constructing the interracial Ladder
Rebellion as a corrective to the limitations of the FrenchRevolution of 1848 and the Haitian Revolution as offering a fuller
egalitarianism than the French Revolution of 1794, El negro
martir emphasizes the challenges that the black Atlantic issued to
the putative universalism of the French Enlightenment.
In sum, in their references to republican struggles on three
continents, El Mulato and El negro martir point to the high pol-
itical stakes of their project of interracial and antislavery republi-
canism. France, one of the primary political reference points for
El negro martir, had repeatedly balked at granting liberty and
full citizenship rights to Afro-Caribbean people.14 Cuban national-
ists of the early 1850s similarly had forged a contradictory, negro-
phobic republicanism in alliance with proslavery Democrats to
El Mulato . . . expos[ed]
the contradiction that
while slavery was
ascendant in the US, itwas increasingly
embattled in the
Caribbean and Latin
America.
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annex Cuba, the worlds wealthiest colony, to the US. But the
developments that define the 1848 of the Americasthe failure of
attempts to annex Cuba, a wave of abolition sweeping through the
Caribbean and Latin America, mounting critiques of US slavery,and unabated trans-Atlantic republican enthusiasmcombined to
fracture the Young American/Joven Cuba alliance. In response to
this ideological crisis of republicanism, a dissenting wing of
Cuban exiles began to construct a broader social ideology for their
revolution by characterizing the struggles of Afro-Cubans as
central to Cuban nationalism. These renegade Cuban exiles sought
to create a more inclusive republicanism by likening Cuban exile
to the African diaspora, by invoking interlinked French and Latin
American traditions of antislavery republicanism as alternatives to
US slaveholding republicanism, and by condemning government
repression following La Escalera and the Fugitive Slave Act. This
interventionist narrative of history radicalized the Cuban indepen-
dence movement by harnessing the energies of the antislavery
republicanisms of the Americas 1848. I examine this struggle
among racial nationalisms, black Atlantic antislavery uprisings,
and republicanisms in three sections that explain how El Mulato
broke away from the Cuban exiles narrow racial nationalism and
imagined an antislavery and racially egalitarian republicanism
rooted in the history of the black Atlantic.
1. Exile Republicanisms in New York City: LEco
dItalia and La Verdad on 1848
Comparing perspectives on the revolutions of 1848, the
question of Cuban independence, and the black republic of Haiti
in the Italian-language LEco dItalia and the Spanish-language
La Verdad can clarify the extent to which the various exile groups
produced a shared discourse on race and republicanism. The storyof the founding of La Verdad, the organ of New Yorks Cuban
exile council, exposes the alliance between Cuban exiles and
pro-slavery US expansionists that set it at odds with the more
radical versions of republicanism in circulation. In 1846, Gaspar
Betancourt Cisneros, a Cuban cattle rancher and writer, moved to
New York, where he gained the support of Moses Yale Beach, the
editor of the New York Sun, an advocate of the purchase of Cuba
and the Latin American adviser to President James Polk (Allahar
289).15 With Beachs financial backing, Betancourt and Cora
Montgomery (Beachs daughter) began publishing La Verdad in
1848. The paper advocated the US annexation of Cuba and gained
the support of John OSullivan, the former editor of the
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expansionist Democratic Review who had coined the term
Manifest Destiny in 1845 (Poyo 9; Widmer 3).16 During this
period, most Cuban exile tabaqueros (tobacco workers) worked in
New Orleans, some lending support to La Verdad (Portel Vila1:59). La Verdad maintained this uneasyor unholyalliance
among southern slaveholders, northern Democrats, and Cuban
exiles even as it expressed its own version of post-1848 enthu-
siasm for republicanism.
Cuban exile newspapers in New York extended nation-based
conceptions of fraternity by proclaiming solidarity with post-1848
republican movements. In The French Revolution of 1848, a
contributor to La Verdad writes that all countries will see in
Republican France, their ally (1). Just as Cuban exiles closely fol-
lowed the European 1848, the Italian-language LEco dItalia,
located a few doors down from Magnascos Trattoria, where exiles
mingled over maccheroni, kept close tabs on the Americas in
Notizie dAmerica (News from America). LEco dItalia
advocated Cuban independence: come potremo, noi figli della
democrazia, tolerare piu oltre un potere cos vicino che tiene in
schiavitu migliaia denostri fratelli? No, giammai! (how can we,
sons of democracy, possibly tolerate such a nearby power to hold
in slavery thousands of our brothers? No, never!).17 Garibaldi had
set the precedent for Italians republican solidarity with theAmericas by leading forces fighting for republican causes in South
America.18 Could we have in these various declarations and prac-
tices of cross-Atlantic republicanism evidence of that ever-elusive
ideal of fraternite?
Marx warned that the intoxication created by the revolu-
tions of 1848 was a victory . . . already forfeited, questioning the
republican doctrine of fraternity in two ways. First, he pointed out
that republics turned on one another, as in 1849, with the assassi-
nation of the Roman republic by the French republic, which
resulted in Garibaldis exile in New York (85). Second, Marxreported that in France the bourgeoisie broke a workers strike by
murdering 3,000 in a civil war. Marx argued that nationalists
had to address such class conflict: The Hungarian, the Pole, the
Italian shall not be free as long as the worker remains a slave!
(59, 61).19 Marx helps us to understand the volatile, contradictory
character of republicanism as a political system, whether in Europe
or the Americas. While LEco dItalia uses slavery as a metaphor
for colonialism, Marx uses slavery to refer to what he regarded as
the key contradiction of the national form, the class struggle. Both
of these uses of slavery as a metaphor violated the ideal of frater-
nity by not explicitly addressing the issue of republicanisms lack
of concern with racial inequality, an especially pressing concern in
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the Americas. However, my account of an 1848 for the Americas
follows Rogins lead by modifying Marxs analysis of republican
contradiction to make it relevant to the analysis of race and empire
in the Americas.20
In the context of the Americas, to use slavery as a metaphor
for the thwarting of republicanism was to invoke and sidestep the
relationship between republicanism and slavery in slaveholding
republics and the question as to what extent republicanism would
extend to nonwhites. Ironically, the article in LEco dItalia decry-
ing the political enslavement of Cuba celebrates Narciso Lopez,
who was employed by slaveholders. These conflicts between pro-
and antislavery republicanisms peaked in 1850, when Lopez and
his secretary, the novelist Cirilo Villaverde, asked Garibaldi to
head an annexationist expedition to the island (Catania 1:329;
2:298; Ortiz 130 135). Although it is not clear why Garibaldi
declined their offer, evidence suggests that antislavery convictions
guided his decision.21
Both LEco dItalia and La Verdad referred to Haitian
history as a cautionary tale of the woes of multiracial nations.
LEco dItalia ridiculed the coronation of Haitian President
Faustin Solouque colle labbra grosse e la pelle nera (with big
lips and black skin), distorting his African facial characteristics to
portray him as unqualified for rule (Le Notizie dHaiti 195).Moreover, the newspaper defended its pro-slavery stance by
arguing that slave emancipation would result in a massacre of
whites and economic disaster, as allegedly had occurred in Haiti
(Cronaca Americana 175). Similarly, Cuban exile publications
frequently invoked the specter that el segundo acto del sangriento
drama de Hayt (the second act of the bloody drama of Haiti),
a second black-led revolution in the Americas, could install an
imperio negro (black empire) in Cuba (Montgomery 17;
Valente 4; Cuba. Aprendizaje Africano 1).22 They feared the
Haitian Revolution, which they knew had served as a model forthe Aponte Conspiracy (1812) and the Ladder Rebellion. However,
from a different perspective, the Haitian Revolution could be
viewed as contesting the incomplete universalism of the Age of
Revolution: in 1801 Toussaint LOuverture wrote the most racially
inclusive constitution ever.23 The Haitian Revolutions challenge
to the racism of republics points to a different black empire
not one allegedly commandeered by savages, but one that chal-
lenges existing republicanism by outlawing racial inequality. Thus,
prior to El Mulatos intervention in 1854, New York exile papers
constructed a transatlantic republicanism at the expense of denying
the black Atlantics contributions to the Age of Revolution and
rejecting racially egalitarian models of republicanism. Colonial
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conceptions of race overwhelmed the ideals of republican solidar-
ity when it came to Haiti, the black republic. Indeed, Cuban exiles
developed an antiblack and anticolonial republicanism that con-
structed the Cuban nation as white, a republicanism whose contra-dictions I will explore further in the next section.
2. The Implosive Nationalism of Enslaved Cuba
The contradictory imperialist anticolonialism of La Verdad
relied upon a narrow definition of Cuban national identity as
white.24 Despite their opposing positions on the question of
annexation, both Betancourt and Jose Antonio Saco, the most pro-
minent Cuban exile intellectual, excluded Afro-Cubans from their
conceptions of cubanidad (Cubanness). Saco, who had inherited
slaves from his father, warned that the horrors of San Domingo
could repeat themselves in Cuba (45).25 Similarly, in a letter
written in 1848 to Saco, Betancourt writes, Give me Turks,
Arabs, Russians; give me devils, but dont give me the product of
Spaniards, Congos, Mandingas and now . . . Malays to complete
the mosaic of population (el mosaico de poblacion) (Cartas 13
14).26 Although at first blush the Cuban exiles fear of the Haitian
Revolution and of racial mixing would seem to endear them toYoung America, I argue that Joven Cubas racial views actually
conflicted with the ultimate aims of its exile nationalism. These
implosive racial views help explain why El Mulato suddenly com-
manded attention with its dissenting racial egalitarianism in 1854.
Although doctrines of racial inferiority were common to both
Young America and Young Cuba, Anglo North Americans often
viewed light-skinned Cuban creoles not as whites, as they con-
ceived of themselves, but instead as members of a third, Iberian
race, as De Bows Review claimed: Cuba is now . . . in the hands
of the Spanish race, which can never be assimilated to our own(Cuba and the United States 65).27 Cuban nationalisms racial
logic contradicted North American opinion that the whiteness of
all Cubans was suspect; thus the first way in which Cuban exiles
constructed an implosive nationalism was that its racial logic
didnt effectively transfer to the US.
The speeches at a ceremony in New Orleans in 1854 com-
memorating the death of Lopez point to tensions of race, gender,
and empire that made the Young America Joven Cuba alliance
vulnerable to the new vision of El Mulato. The white US annexa-
tionist John S. Thrasher responded to the racial arguments of anti-
annexationists by downplaying differences between Saxon and
the Iberian, instead emphasizing their shared devotion to
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freedom (Betancourt and Thrasher 34). Thrasher leaves intact the
anti-annexationists notion of the Iberian as a third race in order to
claim that the struggle for Cuban freedom can effect a Union of
the Races, bringing together Iberian and Saxon.At the same meeting, in a shift toward a more skeptical atti-
tude on annexationism, Betancourt says that Spain is the thief
that robs and despoils Cuba, . . . but the Government of the United
States is the ravisher that violates and dishonors her (Betancourt
and Thrasher 6). Here Betancourt introduces a gendered and
imperial rift in the racial harmony that Thrasher imagines: If the
idea of the annexation of Cuba to the United States has ever had
the slightest consideration . . . it has always been with the under-
standing that [it] should be the result of the sovereign will of the
Cuban people, without stain or dishonor to Cuba; that, as a beauti-
ful and rich maiden emancipated from the paternal authority, she
may select from her admirers the bridegroom that best pleases her,
and thus fill the station of a lady, and not that of a sad, redeemed
slave (Betancourt and Thrasher 6). This opposition between white
lady and slave, a latter-day, gendered incarnation of the
citizen slave opposition in republican thought, ignores the irony
that Cuban exiles were excluding Afro-Cubans. It conjures up an
anxious vision of racial mixture that imagines Cuba as a sad,
redeemed slave, deprived of all choiceand of the privilegedstatus of a white ladyby the US imperial bridegroom. This
language suggests that Cubas redemption from colonialism
would be incomplete if US annexation were ultimately to deprive
Cuba of agency. Ironically, Betancourts newly skeptical attitude
toward annexationism finds Cuba in danger of falling into what
US annexation was designed to perpetuateslavery.
Betancourts metaphor of Cuba as a sad, redeemed slave
perpetuates a long tradition of using slavery as a metaphor for
various oppressions within the metropole while maintaining
silence on actually existing slavery in the colonies, as in Lockeand Rousseau (Buck-Morss 826 31). This parasitic reliance on
slavery as a metaphor for colonialism implicitly used slave rebel-
lion as a model for anticolonial struggle. In what David Lloyd has
called the intercontamination of logics within nationalism, the
racist anticolonialism of Cuban exiles suggests the implosive force
of slave rebellion as a potential rival model for its goals (74).28
This is the second way in which Cuban nationalism was implosive:
La Verdads reliance on the metaphor of slavery for colonialism
anticipated the subsequent move towards a more ethnically inclus-
ive nationalism, such as that proposed by El Mulato. To return to
Betancourts pessimistic scenario of annexation, one could argue
that the only way to give Cuba full choice in its post-colonial form
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of government would be to do away with the opposition between
white lady and slave on the island and abolish slavery so that all
Cubans might exercise choice in founding the republic.
The use of slavery as a metaphor for colonial oppressionwithout reference to actually existing slavery implied that freedom
could be split into two separate components, the first political and
the second social, as Saco argued in 1848: In our present circum-
stances, a political revolution will be necessarily accompanied by
a social revolution, and a social revolution [would be] the com-
plete destruction of the Cuban race (raza cubana) (46 7). In
Sacos view, a political revolution against Spanish colonialism
would necessitate a social revolution enfranchising blacks, as in
Haiti, thereby undoing all racial hierarchies. Reading Sacos state-
ment against the grain makes it possible to argue that even as
Cuban exile writers hoped to exclude blacks from citizenship
rights they acknowledgedhowever begrudginglythe impor-
tance of the Haitian revolution as a precedent for the necessarily
interethnic character of a Cuban independence movement.
As if to corroborate Sacos acknowledgement of the need for
Afro-Cubans to participate in the revolution, Cuban exiles con-
ceded that Cuban popular culture was a product of interethnic col-
laboration: Que horror! Nadie se ocupa de lo futuro, todos
corren, van al baile, a los juegos, a la humillacion, a la tumba(How terrible! No one occupies himself with the future, all run
to dances, to gambling, to humiliation, to the tumba) (La
Revolucion 47).29 Ironically, the nationalism proposed by La
Revolucion admitted that it was out of step with Cuban popular
culturethe writer expressed horror over the fact that everyone
consorted with Afro-Cubans.30 This statement, along with
Betancourts construction of the ideal Cuba as a white maiden,
was symptomatic of an unwillingness among Cuban nationalists to
construct a broad popular base for their revolution, which had dis-
astrous effects for their attempts to annex the island. In 1849,when Lopez landed in Cardenas he remained alone without any
contact with the local population (Opatrny 172). A final reason
why Cuban nationalism was implosive, then, was that it required a
broad social base to succeed, but despised most of that base.
Aguero perceived this paradox in 1853 when he criticized those
who excluded Afro-Cubans from the independence movement:
quisieran para s . . . todas las garantas, el presente y el porvenir
de Cuba, y nada quieren para la infortunada raza africana. . . . En
fuerza de ese funesto principio . . . Cuba no hara mas que cambiar
de despotismo y no tendra sino un fantasma de libertad (they
want for themselves . . . all the rights and guarantees and the
present and future of Cuba, and want nothing for the unfortunate
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African race. . . . As a result of this ruinous principle . . . Cuba will
only exchange despotisms, resulting in a phantasm of liberty)
(21n3). Agueros exposure of the racial contradictions of Cuban
nationalism would serve as the starting point for El Mulatosexpansion of the social base of the revolution. These three aspects
of Cuban exiles implosive nationalism paved the way for the
novel, interracial Cuban nationalism of El Mulato, which the news-
paper framed as an 1848 for the Americas.
3. Words of Liberty: El Mulato and El negro martir
In 1854 a rift within the Cuban exile community developed,
creating two Cuban nationalisms. The first, expressed by La
Verdad, constituted national identity through an expulsion of the
racialized other. The second, articulated by El Mulatos title, con-
structed national identity as racially and culturally mixed. While
La Verdad attempted to achieve a racially pure national unity, El
Mulato asserted the impossibility of purity in its very name. El
Mulato parted ways with La Verdad by opposing slavery and
annexationism and by broadening the social base for Cuban nation-
alism (20 February 1854, 1). It arguably did so, however, by
implicitly lightening the black populace, in keeping with variousschemes that had proposed whitening Cuba through the immigration
of white Europeans.31 Therefore, any analysis of El Mulatos racial
politics must address the extent to which it endorsed the agency of
specifically black Cubans (not just mulattoes), recognized their con-
tributions to national culture, and indicated a willingness to share
the responsibilities of governing a future republic with them.
Although at times El Mulato exemplified as much as it
resolved conflicts over the racial contours of the future Cuban
republic, it did provide a forum for expressions of a more egalitar-
ian nationalism. El Mulato exposed the racism of its competitor:La Verdad assumed que la humanidad para con los africanos
(nada de las clases de color) (that humanity does not include
Africans [they do not mention free people of color]) (M, 17 April
1854, 1). Agueros plea for racial harmony explains the signifi-
cance of the renegade newspapers title: Hijos de Cuba! . . . El
verdadero patriota, y verdadero hombre libre, deben ser los amigos
del pueblo, y el pueblo de Cuba es un pueblo misto. . . .
Depongamos jenerosamente las pretensiones inveteradas de
nuestro orgullo, nuestras preocupaciones de razas (Sons of
Cuba!. . .
The true patriot, and true free man, must be the friends
of the people, and the people of Cuba are a mixed people. . . . We
must generously remove the inveterate pretensions of our pride,
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our preoccupations with races) (Pobres Cubanos! 23). Here, a
generation prior to Jose Marts advocacy of a race-neutral Cuba, a
Cuban exile insists that universal fraternity must be racially uni-
versal. Agueros assertion that Cuba was a pueblo misto (mixedpeople) was the most radical statement of racial egalitarianism by
Cuban exiles because it came accompanied by an attack on white
Cubans racial pride. Such a recognition of the racially hybrid
character of Cuban culture was emboldened at that historical
moment by Cubas Captain-General Juan de la Pezuela, who in his
brief rule precipitated the Africanization of Cuba scare in early
1854 by asserting the superiority of free to slave labor, liberating
all slaves imported after 1835, and rescinding the prohibition of
black-white marriages.32
Despite its bold challenge to the prevailing racial views of
the Cuban exile movement, at times, El Mulatos egalitarianism
struggled to rise above fears of blacks and slave rebellion. Its first
editor, Carlos de Colins, feared that Cuba . . . [could] follow the
fate of Haiti in a massacre of whites by blacks and claimed that
Cuba had two enemies: the Spanish government and the blacks
(M, 8 April 1854, 1; 6 March 1854, 1).33 However, rather than
concluding that colonialism should persist, Colins argued that
independence for Cuba and gradual emancipation for slaves were
the only ways to avert a bloodbath: Es un error creer que los afri-canos esperan tranquilos el termino de nuestra revolucion; . . .
como entes racionales tienen el instinto de la independencia, y ay,
de nosotros si reclaman con cuchillo en mano sus usurpados dere-
chos! (It is a mistake to believe that the Africans will tranquilly
await the end of our revolution; . . . as rational beings they possess
the instinct of independence, and woe to us if they reclaim their
usurped rights with knives in their hands!) (M, 27 February
1854). Colins hoped that black slaves would become anticolonial
revolutionaries rather than slave rebels. If Colins made concessions
to the Haitiphobia of Saco and other exiles, he transformed thatdiscourse by using it to promote the inclusion of Afro-Cubans in
the revolution. In subsequent issues of the newspaper, Aguero
expressed more unequivocal support of equal rights for
Afro-Cubans.
El negro martir, serialized in El Mulato during the ten-year
anniversary of the Ladder Rebellion, constructed an 1848 for the
Americas by placing Afro-Cuban rights and the black Atlantics
story of diasporic scattering, loss, and rebellion at the center of
Cubas identity and quest for national liberation.34 It sought to
undermine white Cuban exiles deep commitment to racial hierar-
chy by establishing a parallel between the longings of those swept
into the black and Jewish diasporas and the pervasive sense of loss
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experienced by the Cuban exile community. The title character,
Francisco, comes to Cuba as a black slave from Loango.35 He tells
the story of his life to his fellow slaves at a cafetal (coffee planta-
tion) in Matanzas in 1844, the year of the Ladder Rebellion. Thenovella is conversant with the tradition of Cuban antislavery
writing developed in Domingo Del Montes literary circle: the
Autobiography (1840) by the slave poet Francisco Manzano and
the novel Francisco (1839) by Anselmo Suarez y Romero, as
suggested by the name of the main character that it shares with
these texts.36 In these and other nineteenth-century Cuban antislav-
ery novels, the possibility of Cuban autonomy and independence
depends on the suppression of black insurrection, as Sibylle
Fischer has argued (117). El negro martir differs from this anti-
slavery literary tradition by joining Martin R. Delanys Blake, or
the Huts of America (1859, 18612) in figuring slave insurrection
as a necessary correction to the French and American Revolutions,
linking the Ladder Conspiracy to the Haitian Revolution.37 In a
pivotal moment, Margarita, the young wife of Don Pedro, the
owner of the cafetal where Francisco works, sends a letter to her
lover stating her opposition to the colonial regime via Francisco,
who serves as a messenger. Senor Gonzalez, a frustrated suitor of
Margarita, intercepts the letter, bringing it to the attention of
Leopoldo ODonnell, the Captain General of Cuba who presidedover the reign of terror following La Escalera. To prevent
ODonnell from imprisoning Margarita, Senor Gonzalez blames
Francisco for inciting rebellion and the lover of Margarita for cor-
rupting her. The lover of Margarita is sentenced to ten years of
prison and Francisco dies after suffering six days of lashes on
la escalera (the ladder).
El Mulato and El negro martir rooted their transformation
of Cuban nationalism in citations of racially egalitarian strains of
transatlantic republicanisms. El Mulato invoked French republican-
ism by quoting Montesquieus dictum, A Republic that desires tobe free, ought not to possess slaves (Ought a free Republic to
possess slaves? 4). In El negro martir, Margarita, the wife of a
slaveholder, writes a letter to her lover thanking him for exposing
her to the ideas of liberty developed in the books that he sent her
by Antoine Claude Destutt de Tracy, Juan Jacobo (Jean Jacques
Rousseau), Constantin-Francois Volney, and Felicite Robert de
Lamennais, intellectuals associated with the French Revolutions of
1794 and 1848 (26 March 1854, 3). El Mulatos readers would
have known that Tracy, Rousseau, Volney, and Lamennais served
as mentors and models for prominent antislavery Latin American
intellectuals.38 Through Margaritas readings, El negro martir
invokes three sets of composite figures linking specific French
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intellectuals to their Latin American counterparts who popularized
their ideas, setting in parallel the French Revolutions of 1794 and
1848 and Cuban and Latin American antislavery struggles. These
composite figures include: (1) Montesquieu Rousseau Tracy Felix Varela, (2) Montesquieu Volney Jose de la Luz y
Caballero, and (3) LamennaisFrancisco Bilbao. In 1822, while a
delegate to the Spanish Cortes, Varela, who readily acknowledged
his intellectual indebtedness to Tracy, insisted that republicanism
was utterly incompatible with slavery and with racial inequality, in
a close paraphrase of Rousseau (Memoria).39 Luz y Caballero, a
student of Varela who translated Constantin-Francois Volneys
Travels, was also known for his antislavery position and was
accused of being a conspirator in La Escalera (Cotta 16 17).40
The Chilean Francisco Bilbao, who translated several books by
Lamennais as a young man and then met Lamennais while exiled
in France in 1848, applied the French republicans radicalism in
Latin America. Returning to Chile in late 1849, Bilbaos mass
mobilization of workers resulted in his exile to Peru, where he
helped to achieve the abolition of slavery in 1854 (Varona 122).41
One historian has described Bilbao as a central figure in the cycle
of revolts of 1848 in Latin America (Bao 52). These transatlantic
composite figures of democratic reform, working-class mobiliz-
ation, and abolition cast Latin American republics as at the van-guard of democracy in the Americas, shining an unflattering light
on a US democracy undermined by empire and slavery. Thus El
negro martir links antislavery republicanisms on both sides of the
black Atlantic.
The articles included in El Mulato provided its readers with
ways of understanding the novellas particular interventions within
the racial politics of Cuban nationalism. In the same issue in
which El negro martir figures Franciscos love for his querida
and his longing for Africa as universal sentiments, an editorial
expresses horror at the live burning of a slave in Mississippi andcondemns US racial hierarchies (M, 27 February 1854, 3). Thus,
El Mulato attacks white racism in theory and practice in both
Cuba and the US. El negro martir simultaneously celebrates the
centrality of Afro-Cuban culture to Cuba through three related
moves: (1) by valuing the contributions of black African and
Afro-Cuban culture; (2) by aligning exile discourses of liberty
with antislavery discourses; and (3) by refusing to view slavery as
only a metaphor for colonialism, instead figuring it as the master
trope for a wide range of oppressions, including chattel slavery
itself.
El negro martir respectfully represents slave culture in
Cuba in a passage on slave songs: aquellas notas vibraban largo
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rato con esa tristeza que espresa la musica de los que habitan en la
soledad, y se prolongaban tranquilamente como jemidos que salian
de corazones enfermos (those notes vibrated for a long time
with that sadness which the music of those who live in solitudeexpress, and prolonged itself tranquilly like moans that come from
sick hearts) (M, 20 February 1854, 2). At a time when African
music sounded like unmeaning noise to white European and
American observers, the narration emphasizes the sorrow of the slave
songs, as did the ex-slave Frederick Douglass in the US context.42
The novellas respect for slave culture is matched by an
appreciation for the contribution of Afro-Cubans to distinctively
Cuban cultural practices, such as the decima, a popular form of
poetry put to song:
Se divertia Francisco entonando algunas de esas alegres
decimas que resuenan perennemente en nuestros campos, y
en las que si se maltratan los dulces acentos de la rica lengua
de Castilla, no por eso dejan de llegar en ondas sonoras a los
oidos del transeunte meditabundo. Yo he escuchado muchas
veces en los labios de estos cantorres algunos versos de nues-
tros mas celebres poetas. (M, 1 April 1854, 2).
Francisco entertained himself singing some of those happy
decimas that perennially resound in our fields, and if they mis-treat the sweet accents of the rich language of Spain, that does
not prevent their sonorous waves from reaching the ears of the
meditative traveler. I have heard many times from the lips of
these singers some verses of our most celebrated poets.
The narrator notes that a variety of Cuban cultural groupsranging
from African and creole slaves to the putatively white campesino
solitario (solitary peasant)participate in making the decima what
the contemporary Cuban poet Jose Fornaris called la estrofa del
pueblo cubano (the verse of the Cuban people) (Lopez Lemus22). This recognition of Afro-Cuban contributions to the decima is
a surprising representational move, because as a scholar of the
decima has written, They [white Cuban creoles of the 1850s] still
had not recognized the role of the black in the national culture
(Lopez Lemus 86). By recognizing Afro-Cuban contributions to the
performance of the decima, the novella departs from the dominant
tendency in the mid nineteenth century to erase the role of
Afro-Cubans in national culture, instead implying that the decima is
one of the prime examples of its mulatto character.
The novella extends its focus on the cross-ethnic composition
of Cuban culture by deploying sentimentalisms tropes of shared
sorrow to demonstrate common humanity.43 When Francisco tells
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his fellow slaves of his final meeting with his lover just prior to
his departure from Africa, the narration directly addresses the
readers: Expreso con melancola la afliccion repentina de su
querida, que lloraba temiendo separarse de el para siempre. Quienno conoce estos pesares? (He expressed with melancholy the
swift affliction of his loved one, who cried, fearing to be forever
separated from him. Who does not know such sorrows?) (M, 27
February 1854, 2). This passage resembles a crucial moment in
Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) when Uncle
Tom cries upon learning that he is to be sold away from his
family: Just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where
lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you
heard the cries of your dying babe. For . . . ye feel but one
sorrow! (91). As I have argued elsewhere, the problem with this
sentimentalist universalism is that the move to concede the human-
ity of slaves through a discourse of sameness threatens to deprive
them of the right to be different, collapsing disparate affective
experiences: the sorrows of the slave and of the white mother of
the deceased newborn are quite distinct.44
El negro martir goes beyond such stock sentimental
appeals, establishing a commonality in the sentiments of whites
and diasporic Africans by appealing to an issue specific to Cuban
nationaliststhe emotionally charged issue of exile. In narratingthe middle passage of Africans to the Americas, the text focuses
on the pain of being torn away from ones country: Aquellas
vctimas fijan los ojos empapados con lagrimas sobre la tierra que
abandonan, y en su estado de barbarie conocen cuanto vale el
esplendor del cielo de la patria (Those victims fix their eyes
soaked with tears on the land that they abandon, and in their state
of barbarism they know how much the splendor of their countrys
sky is worth) (M, 27 February 1854, 3). This passage blurs the
otherwise pernicious distinction between barbarism and civiliza-
tion with tearsthose of the Africans and the Cuban exile readersof the texthereby aligning the figure of the African stolen into
slavery and the Cuban exile. El negro martir refuses to privilege
the anticolonial struggle, contending instead that Spanish colonial-
ism and slavery in the Americas are equally odious.
The novella extends the alignment between Cuban exile and
the African diaspora through the mediating figure of the wander-
ing Jew, here the embodiment of geographical displacement as a
result of persecution. After Francisco tells the other slaves of his
impending sale to a new owner, the narration comments,
Ved ese grupo de vctimas y confesad si no hay en el interior
de vuestra alma una fibra que se estremece al escuchar los
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lugubres lamentos con que pretenden distraer su desventura.
Adonde dirijes tus pasos oh! raza perseguida por tantos
despotas? Tu eres el judo errante del siglo XIX, y la ignor-
ancia haciendose arbitra de tu destino, es la maldicion que tegrita: anda! anda! (M, 6 March 1854, 3)
Look at that group of victims and confess whether there is
in your soul one fiber that trembles when hearing the lugu-
brious laments with which they attempt to distract themselves
from their misfortunes. Where are you directing your steps,
oh race persecuted by so many despots? You are the wander-
ing Jew of the nineteenth century, and the ignorance that
makes itself the arbiter of your destiny, is the curse that
shouts: Move! Move!
This passage establishes a connection among exiles that most
white Cubans wanted to deny, aligning Cuban exiles with Jewish
and African diasporas against Spanish colonialism. Encapsulated
in the slaveholders order Anda! (Move!) and in Franciscos sale
to a new owner, geographical displacement is a curse that links
the plight of the Wandering Jew to that of Cuban exiles and
slaves. The race persecuted by so many despots could refer to
Jews, black slaves, or Cuban exiles. By invoking diaspora through
the figure of the Wandering Jew, El negro martir critiques colo-nial, racial, and religious oppression and offers a model of nation-
alism that links peoples and lands . . . not naturally and
organically connected (Boyarin and Boyarin 723). Discourses of
diaspora offer a national identity capacious enough to allow same-
ness and difference to coexist, thereby avoiding the key pitfall of
sentimental universalism.45 El Mulato deploys intertwined rep-
resentations of diaspora and exile to suggest that Cuban exiles and
Afro-Cubans could claim the same national identity based on ana-
logous yet distinct historical experiences.
Like the figure of the Wandering Jew, the representation ofLa Escalera in El negro martir also links exile and diaspora:
Si el lector conoce la conspiracion que tuvo efecto en la isla
de Cuba el ano de 1844, no estranara ver tan barbaros pensa-
mientos en boca de los mandarines que ocupaban entonces
los asientos del gobierno. Los esclavos morian en los casti-
gos, los propietarios perdan gruesas cantidades para salvar a
sus siervos de injustas persecuciones y el espiritu del pueblo
se acongojaba al aspecto de tan crueles como impoliticos
sucesos. . .
. llenaronse las carceles, los castillos; multiplicar-
onse las confiscaciones, los destierros, todo era horror en la
reina de las Antillas. (M, 17 April 1854, 4)
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If the reader knows the conspiracy that took place on the
island of Cuba in the year of 1844, he will not be surprised
to see such barbarous thoughts spoken by the mandarins who
then occupied the seats of the government. Slaves died fromtheir punishments, property owners lost great quantities to
save their slaves from unjust persecutions and the spirit of
the people grieved at the sight of such cruel and ill-advised
events. . . . [T]he jails and the castles were filled; confisca-
tions and banishments were mounting, everything was horror
in the Queen of the Antilles.
This passage works against the common perception that blacks
were the enemy of the Cuban people, instead characterizing the
enemy as the colonial functionaries, or mandarins, in a reference
to the history of another empire, that of China. Here slaves, slave
owners, and exiles, somewhat improbably brought together in
anticolonial resistance, can lay equal claim to the sympathy of el
epiritu del pueblo (the spirit of the people).
In El negro martir, the representation of La Escalera consti-
tutes a discourse of liberty that grows out of the specific histories
of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean. El negro martir
becomes a martyr because he leads his fellow slaves into insurrec-
tion with words of liberty:
Casi al mismo tiempo fue encarcelado Francisco por con-
spirar contra los blancos insureccionando a los negros del
cafetal de D. Pedro con palabras de libertad, y se le condeno
a sufrir cincuenta azotes por dia hasta que descubriese a
todas las personas que estuviesen mezcladas en el asunto de
que se trataba. (M, 25 April 1854, 5)46
At nearly the same time Francisco was imprisoned for con-
spiring against the whites, inciting the blacks of the coffee
plantation. . .
with words of liberty, and he was condemnedto suffer 50 lashings a day until he would reveal the names
of all the people who had been mixed up in the affair.
Franciscos participation in La Escalera makes the interracial
revolt a touchstone for Cuban exile nationalism, whereas in other
Cuba journals it presented the threat of the nations dissolution in
a Haiti-like rebellion. If La Escalera could be characterized as the
most traumatic event in Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth
century, one that demonstrated that the colonial regime was
willing to terrorize the population in order to protect the livelihood
of slaveholders, in the pages of El negro martir, La Escalera
underscores the potential for Afro-Cubans and white Cubans to
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join together in a struggle for independence. El negro martir
suggests that the terms of such cooperation would not be dictated
by whites; instead, Franciscos words of liberty collapse republi-
canisms opposition between liber and servus, turning the slaveinto a theorist of liberty, rather than a foil for its definition. El
negro martir thus suggests that slaves and the descendants of
slaves would have to play a central role in future liberation
struggleswhether for Cuban independence or over the meaning
of liberty. According to Fischer, at a time when all antislavery
narratives written by white creoles from the 1830s onward [were]
stories of romantic love and sexual desire that focused on docile
slaves, El negro martir eschewed the love plot for multiethnic
revolt and exchanged the docile slave for the intellectually and
politically rebellious slave (121).
Readers of El negro martir must have felt frustrated when
the narrator reported in its last episode that he or she had hoped to
write seven or eight more chapters but had to abruptly bring the
narrative to a close almost midway into the story, just when
Francisco was about to share his words of freedom with his
fellow slaves (M, 25 April 1854, 5). But the narratives inability or
reticence to represent Franciscos words of freedom has the
advantage of bypassing the tendency of discourses of national
unity to subsume difference. This representational reticencerespects the agency of Afro-Cubans, who expressed their aspira-
tions for freedom through their participation in the conspiracy of
1844 and would later play a central role in the Ten Years War
(186878).47
The issues of El Mulato that followed the publication of El
negro martir reflected further on the discourse of liberty via a cri-
tique of US slavery. While La Verdad celebrated the US as the
cradle of liberty, El Mulato figured the US as Cubas persecutor
and as a slaveholder:
En el pas de los libres, la libertad esclaviza, atormenta,
oprime, castiga, hiere y quema a algunos de nuestros
semejantes. . . . Bajo instituciones bienhechoras, un desgra-
ciado fujitivo que rompe las cadenas para buscar alivio en
sociedades bien morljeradas, lo entrega a sus verdugos. . . .
Humanidad! Humanidad! a donde habeis ido? Sera que
enojada en la tierra libre de Washington, habeis resuelto
buscar mejor morada en otras rejiones, donde la libertad
tenga su verdadero culto y los hombres firmes y lejtimas
garantas? (Esclavitud 3)
In the land of the free, liberty enslaves, torments,
oppresses, punishes, wounds and burns our fellow men. . . .
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Under benevolent institutions, a wretched fugitive who
breaks his chains to search for relief in corrupt societies, is
delivered to his tormenters. . . . Humanity! Humanity! Where
have you gone? Could it be that enraged with the free land ofWashington, you have resolved to search for a better home in
other regions, where liberty has a true following and men
have firm and legitimate rights?
By portraying the US as a flawed land of the free that paradoxi-
cally enslaves and oppresses our fellow men, and by comparing
true liberty to a fugitive slave seeking liberty, this passage con-
structs the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a contradiction of repub-
lican ideals. Condemning the Fugitive Slave Act in itself was
nothing unusualDelany, Douglass, Stowe, and many other US
writers condemned the Fugitive Slave Act. What made this state-
ment extraordinary was that it broke with the previous orthodoxy
of Cuban exiles in its condemnation, rather than embrace, of US
slavery and in its expression of solidarity with fugitive slaves.
Finally, it calls for a better home for liberty, one that the Cuban
exile contributors to El Mulato could no longer find in the annexa-
tion of Cuba to the US, but rather in the wandering paths of exile
and diaspora, which figuratively linked white Cubans and
Afro-Cubans in a shared project of national liberation. El Mulatothus joined the dissenting writings of the American 1848 that
insisted on the gap between the power of what Delany termed the
ruling element and the disfranchisement of the majority of the
people (Political 246247). This gap captured both the limits of
the republican experiment and its ongoing promise of universality.
Gayatri Spivak has similarly argued that subaltern groups need to
expose how they are withdrawn from lines of social mobility in
order to release the possibility of self-abstraction, self-
synecdoche and gain citizenship agency (483).
4. Conclusions: An 1848 for the Americas
Like Rogins theory of an American 1848, El Mulatos 1848
for the Americas brings together diverse historical moments and
geopolitical strugglesthe Haitian Revolution of 17911804, the
widespread abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and Latin
America beginning in the 1830s, the Ladder Rebellion of 1844,
the USMexican War of 184648, European revolutions of 1848,
and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850into a broad figure or spatio-
temporal complex, for republicanisms ideals and contradic-
tions.48 In my revision of Rogins American 1848, I have sought
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to show not only that there were many 1848s that spread beyond
Europe and the US into Latin America, but also that these 1848s,
brought into physical proximity and intellectual exchange in early
1850s New York City, were oftentimes politically incommensur-able. But the very incommensurability and non-simultaneity of
these 1848s, once brought into the imaginative space of El negro
martir, permit the creation of a strikingly utopian vision of
democracy produced through the checks and balances of compet-
ing republicanisms. El negro martir is a rare example of a theory
of republican liberty that departs from the standpoint of the servus,
the enslaved subject, rather than the free citizen. The novellas
transnational vision of various republicanisms and diasporas lays
the foundation for a critical sensibility that could construct a more
racially inclusive and democratic future republicanism.
El negro martir is a text steeped in transnational migrations
and cultural flows, from the Loango coast of Africa to Havana and
New York, even as it is written with the purpose of founding one
nation. The possibility of Cuban independence becomes viable
through recognition of the multiethnic character of Cuba and the
traumatic histories of displaced peoples from various parts of the
globe. Equally important, a broad analogy between Spanish colo-
nialism and the formation of black and Jewish diasporas serves to
secure the ethical legitimacy of the nation. The transnationalism ofEl negro martir functions by setting up a framework that con-
structs an interdependence among legacies of the black Atlantic,
the republicanism of the European 1848, and the specific racial
crises of Cuba and the US. But this transnational mapping of an
1848 for the Americas only becomes fully intelligible with the rec-
ognition that the slave rebel acts as an ethical and political
compass.
El Mulato and El negro martir are ideal texts for under-
standing the crisis of national-language literature departments, as
well as the limitations of the critical paradigms and disciplines thathave sought to devise new methodologies for the analysis of trans-
national political formations and cultural flows.49 El Mulato and
El negro martir are revealing studies in paradox: they are at once
exemplars of nationalist texts that are the products of multiple
migrations and purveyors of transnational imaginings; of an
American literature that is not solely US American; of Cuban lit-
erature published in New York; of an Atlantic paradigm that
insists on the intellectual and political primacy of the Americas; of
hemispheric Americas literature that refuses to be confined intel-
lectually or geographically to the Americas; of a claim for the cen-
trality of a black Atlantic critique of republicanism that clears the
space for interracial dialogue, but does not yet enact it; of a world
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literature that invokes and displaces the presumed European
norm.50 El Mulato and El negro martir cannot be adequately
described by any single one of these paradigms in isolation; they
therefore both serve as a rationale for existing transnationalapproaches to culture and challenge them to be more agile and
protean.
Notes
This essay draws on research in the Biblioteca Nacional of Havana, the
Biblioteca Nacional and the Hermeroteca Nacional in Madrid, the Bancroft
Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the New York Public Library,
and the Schomburg Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. My workwas supported by a University of California Presidents Postdoctoral Fellowship,
a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Mellon
Foundation Research Fellowship awarded by the Library Company of
Philadelphia, a Lafayette College summer grant, and a University of Miami
Orovitz Award. I am grateful to the following institutions for providing me with
the opportunity to present earlier versions of this work: the Atlantic Studies
research group at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of
Miami and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American
Research at Harvard University, which hosted me as a Sheila Biddle Ford
Foundation Fellow. My thanks go to the following scholars who helped me both
conceptually and logistically (in rough chronological order): Susan Gillman,Francine Masiello, Julio Ramos, Sara Johnson, Alessandra Lorini, Marveta
Ryan-Sams, Stephanie Carpenter, Diana Pardo, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Lisa Surwillo,
Frank Palmeri, Laura Lomas, John Paul Russo, Ashli White, and Tim Watson.
1. See Poyo and Lazo on these periodicals.
2. Cirilo Villaverde refers to Thrasher i su Joven Cuba ([John S.] Thrasher
and his Young Cuba) in a letter to Juan Macias, New Orleans, 30 Dec. 1852.
Kirsten Gruesz has investigated New Orleans as another center of what she terms
the polyglot print culture of US Cuban literary exchanges and debates over
empire in ch. 4 of Ambassadors of Culture (111).
3. See Catania, 2: 3436; Convegno italiano in Nuova York, 103;
Disposizioni del Ricevimiento del Gen. Garibaldi, 103; and Lynch, 311. For
Garibaldis antislavery stance, see Gemme 128. On Paezs support of slavery, see
Lynch, 283, 287, 305.
4. On the centrality of race and slavery to modernity, see Fischer; Gilroy; on
the centrality of Americas to modernity, see Quijano and Wallerstein.
5. Aguero Estrada edited and contributed to El Pueblo and El Mulato. He had
joined his cousin Joaqun Aguero in a Camaguey-based independence movement
that was discovered by colonial authorities in 1851; Joaqun Aguero was exe-cuted, while Francisco Aguero escaped into exile in New York in 1852. In an
ironic twist in his career, he traveled to Nicaragua in 1856 and became editor of
El Nicaraguense, the organ of US citizen William Walkers government
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(Calcagno 17 19; Cordova 126; Cano). In 1855, Walker wrested control of
Nicaragua, declaring himself president and reinstituting slavery; he was ousted in
1857 (Gonzalez 50). Although for the purposes of brevity I accept contemporary
accounts that described Aguero and other contributors to El Mulato as white,
since whiteness was more capacious in Cuba than it was in the US, it is possible
that some of the contributors to the newspaper may have been part African.
6. In 1836, the Spanish Cortes voted overwhelmingly to exclude Cuban creoles
from representation in the Spanish government (Schmidt-Nowara 24).
7. The primary characteristics of a republican form of government include: (1)
a constitution, (2) the representation of competing interests in the selection of
government officials, (3) rule by law, (4) the division of power, and (5) an active
citizenry (Pettit Republicanism). Republicanism attempted to secure liberty by
devising a political system with effective rules, procedures, or goals that are
common knowledge to all persons (Lovett).
8. On Machiavellis concept of grandezza, see Armitage 29 35. Senator Lewis
Cass from Michigan, the Democratic candidate in 1848, was an exemplary US
proponent of Machiavellian grandezza: he had led the Polk administrations
Mexican War agenda in Congress and viewed territorial expansion as a reward
for a people capable of self-government (Roberts 84).
9. Republicanism in New York in the early 1850s was diverse in its positions
on race and slavery: the antislavery republicanism of Garibaldi circulated along-
side and in tension with the slaveholding nationalism of Paez and the contradic-
tory legacy of Simon Bolvar, the liberator of Latin America, whose antislavery
ideology stood in tension with his fear of the rise of new Haitis. On Bol vars
distrust of blacks, see Helg 45051, 458.
10. As Giorgio Agamben has written, After the fall of the July Monarchy, a
decree by the Constituent Assembly, on 24 June 1848, put Paris in a state of
siege and assigned General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city.
Consequently, an article was included in the new constitution of 4 November
1848, establishing that the occasions, forms, and effects of the state of siege
would be firmly set by a law (12). For another account of Cavaignacs role, see
Reynolds 44 5.
11. As Lazo notes, US veterans of the Mexican War joined Narciso Lopez inhis annexationist expeditions to Cuba, and in 1848 La Verdad characterized the
US annexation of Mexico as its redemption (52, 76).
12. Larry Reynolds and Paola Gemme have followed through on Rogins study
by showing how American Renaissance writers such as Martin Delany, Frederick
Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Melville, and Walt Whitman
rethought their views on democracy by writing on the European revolutions of
1848, at times with the benefit of direct observation. Shelley Streeby has shown
that sensationalist dime novelists, white working-class intellectuals such as Ned
Buntline and George Lippard and white women writers such as Ann Stephens
and Metta Victor, infused their gothic narratives on urban class struggles withanxieties over the expanding US empire in the USMexican War and ensuing
efforts to annex Cuba in the early 1850s. Jose Saldvar has shifted the geographic
focal point from the US northeast to California in his analysis of Mar a Amparo
American Literary History 453
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Ruiz de Burtons critique of US imperialism following the Mexican War in The
Squatter and the Don (1885).
13. Sibylle Fischer has criticized Paul Gilroys conception of the black Atlantic
as the counterculture of modernity on the grounds that it opposes the African
diaspora to a Eurocentric conception of modernity (Gilroy 37). Rejecting analyses
of modernity that claim primacy for its European face, she calls for a different
approach that focuses on the multiple productions of modernity: If we read mod-
ernity from the perspective of the Caribbean colonies, the opposite view seems
more plausible: that heterogeneity is a congenital condition of modernity (22).
14. In the 1790s, France had failed to apply its republican principles of self-
determination to its Caribbean colonies. Two generations later, the French bour-
geoisie betrayed the radical potential of Victor Schoelchers abolition decree of
1848, refusing to ratify Schoelchers proposal to provide land grants to the former
slaves in the French colonies, who could now vote, but soon found their freedomsharply curtailed by harsh labor regulations and repressed political rights
(Schmidt 310). On Cuba as the worlds wealthiest colony, see Paquette 29.
15. This veteran of Cuban anticolonial movements had traveled with other
Cuban exiles in 1823 to meet with Bolvar in an unsuccessful effort to persuade
him to lead the Cuban independence struggle (Paz Sanchez 618).
16. The Young Americans, advocates of US expansionism who collaborated
with OSullivan, wielded great influence in the Democratic Partythey tried to
persuade President Polk to purchase Cuba in 1848 (May 23).
17. Supplemento dellEco dItalia 25 May 1850, n. pag.
18. In 1835, long before joining the battle to defend the Roman Republic,
Garibaldi had joined forces with a revolutionary leader in Brazil who had
declared an independent republic of the Rio Grande do Sul. Later, Garibaldi
formed the Italian Legion in Montevideo in 1843 to defend the city against the
forces of Juan Manuel Rosas, the Argentine dictator (Hibbert 16 17, 21, 23;
McLean). Clara Lida argues that the struggle against Rosas was one of the key
events leading up to the 1848 Revolutions in Latin America.
19. Historians have argued that Marx exaggerated the role of class in the civil
war of June (Ellis 42).
20. For a somewhat similar move in relation to the work of Antonio Gramsci,
see Hall.
21. Garibaldi would later refuse to join the Union Army in the Civil War
because it would not advocate slave emancipation (Gemme 12829).
22. Such fears of a repeat of the Haitian Revolution led to a series of efforts to
whiten Cuba. The first major blanqueamiento (whitening) program in Cuba
brought white colonos from Europe in the 1790s as a result of anxieties over the
incipient revolution in Haiti (Naranjo Orovio 47).
23. As Susan Buck-Morss has written, For almost a decade, . . . the black
Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the
454 Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City
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Enlightenment goal of human liberty (8356). For an extended analysis of the
Jean-Jacques Dessaliness Constitution of 1805, which declared all Haitians
black, see Fischer, ch. 11.
24. Cuban exiles reinforced their sense of whiteness through their personal and
political ties to slaveholders. OSullivan, a supporter of La Verdad, was the
brother-in-law of Cristobal Madan, one of the leaders of the Club de la Habana,
an organization of Cuban slaveholders that funded the filibustering expeditions of
Lopez.
25. On Sacos inheritance of slaves, see Moreno Fraginals, Saco 39.
26. Cuba began importing Chinese men to work as peons in 1847, which
explains the mention of Malays (Moreno Fraginals, Sugarmill 141).
27. Similarly, in his inaugural address of 1852, President Pierce argued that theannexation of Cuba would be a very hazardous measure. It would bring into the
Confederacy a population of different national stock, . . . not likely to harmonize
(Opatrny 212).
28. Cuban exile periodicals commonly used the metaphor of slavery to describe
colonialism. See, for instance, A los patriotas Cubanos El Cubano 1.1 (5 de
Marzo de 1853): 23.
29. The tumba is a typical Afro-Cuban dance accompanied by drumming.
30. El Pueblo noted, In almost exclusively relying on the rich, what has been
missing is. . .
that revolutions must be made not only for the people, but by the
people (20 July 1855, 2).
31. For an account of these themes of whitening through European immigration
in Cuba, see Naranjo Orovio and Garca Gonzalez. I am indebted to Laura Lomas
for suggesting that I emphasize the ambiguity of the term mulato in Cuban racial
politics.
32. These efforts were short-lived. See Martnez-Fernandez 34 35; Thrasher
53; Urban.
33. I assume, but cannot confirm, that Carlos de Colins, the editor ofEl Mulato,is the author of the unattributed lead editorials on the first page of each issue.
One way of interpreting the racial ambivalence of El Mulato is suggested by
Martin R. Delany, a prominent black emigrationist. Delany wrote a letter criticiz-
ing El Mulato in the black abolitionist journal the Aliened American (El Mulato,
25 Apr. 1854, 6). Although that issue of the Aliened American has been lost,
Delany certainly would have objected to El Mulatos provisional claim that
blacks were enemies of Cuba. El Mulato briefly mentions Delanys letter in a
note that was written in English: We read a letter of one Mr. R Delany in the
Aliened American, dated march [sic] the 8th, 1854. The letter contains a tissue
of invectives, directed against Mr. Colins the Editor of this journal. We may be
permitted to say that the reputation of Mr. Colins reposes on too firm a pedastal[sic] to be affected by Delany; and that he, Delany, and his remarks, Mr. Colins
can treat with the most sovereign contempt. . . . [T]he statements contained in
American Literary History 455
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Delanys letter are false (6). Subsequent references to El Mulato are cited par-
enthetically in the text as M.
34. For readings of El negro martir, see Brickhouse, Manzano; Lazo
16467.
35. The Loango coast extended from present-day Gabon to the city of Luanda
in Angola. The Cuban-bound slave trade from Loango began in the early 1830s
(Eltis 420).
36. Although Suarez y Romeros character Francisco is African-born, unlike the
main character of El negro martir, he is characterized by resignation (54). On
the literary predecessors of El negro martir, see Brickhouse, Manzano 225
26; Fischer 10728; Lazo 16566; Luis. My attempt to situate El negro martir
within debates over race and republicanism builds on what Brickhouses analysis
of the storys cartographic revision of Cuban antislavery writings, in which itstakes claim to a broader transatlantic, antislavery politics (Manzano 228).
37. Although some would read Blake as simply endorsing a bloody uprising
against slaveholders, both Gofer Gondolier and Blake invoke what Gondolier
calls the natural rights of man as the basis for more democratic form of rule
that insists on equal rights for all peoples (Delany, Blake 273, 293).
38. In El negro martir, Margarita specifically mentions Lamennais Dogma of
Free Men, first translated into Spanish in 1836, in which Lamennais calls for
brotherly love rather than conflict among peoples. As a member of the French
Constituent Assembly, Lamennais proposed a radically democratic constitution
(Nisbet 782).
39. Varela, an influential educator and the most popular writer of early
nineteenth-century Cuba, worked to adapt Tracys concept of ideology in his own
philosophical writings (Fornet 73 74). Varela was a towering figure in Cuban
culture: he taught a generation of Cuban intellectuals as a professor in the
Colegio de San Carlos from 1811 to 1821. In 1821 Varela traveled to Madrid to
serve as one of three Cuban delegates to the Cortes. When the royalists regained
power in 1823, Varela fled to New York. Condemned to death by Spain, Varela
would spend thirty yearsthe rest of his lifein exile in the US. In 1824,
Varela moved to Philadelphia, where he edited the journal, El Habanero.
Subsequently Varela moved back to New York and co-edited El MensajeroSemanal (18281831), along with Saco (Torres Cuevas).
40. Luz y Caballero (1800 62) was a prominent Cuban educator and philoso-
pher who worked in Havana. In 1848 he founded El Colegio del Salvador and,
contrary to the laws of the colonial regime, admitted poor students to his school
and provided them with free instruction (Cotta 345).
41. On Bilbao, see also Alba; Spindler; Wood.
42. On the widespread perception of slave music as noise, see Jon Cruz,
Culture on the Margins, 43 50.
43. The aim of sentimental literature was to nurture the moral sense by
arousing sympathy (Halttunen 47).
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44. On this problem see Boyarin and Boyarin 707; also see my own critique of
sentimentalist discourse in chapter one of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of
Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States.
45. I hope that my use of diaspora here is compatible with Brent Hayes
Edwardss call for anti-abstractionist uses of diaspora that emphasize the terms
foregrounding of differences within and among various diasporas: diaspora
forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through
and across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor (1213).
46. Manzano was similarly imprisoned during the repression of the Ladder
Conspiracy (Paquette 228).
47. Here I concur with Brickhouse, who has argued that this narrative silence indi-
cates that Francisco is an agent of his own potential freedom (Manzano 232).
48. On the need for a spatiotemporal analysis, see Gillman 330. Gillman has
called for a more self-critical version of hemispheric Americas studies that would
seek to balance its obsession with a geographical extension of American studies
with an attention to temporal questions.
49. See Spivak, Death of a Discipline. Spivak argues, If a responsible compar-
ativism can be of the remotest possible use in the training of the imagination, it
must approach culturally diversified ethical systems diachronically, through the
history of multicultural empires (Death 1213).
50. Caroline Levander and Robert Levine have reminded us that nation-based
paradigms of study remain central to American studies: much current Americanist
scholarship continues to take the nation as the key organizing unit for literary and
cultural studies (2). Ironically, a similar provincialism has plagued comparative
literatures efforts to construct a world literature. As David Damrosch has noted,
Until recently, world literature has often been defined in North America all too
specifically as Western European literature (110). Similarly, Peter Coclanis has
argued that historical studies of the so-called Atlantic World have led to the rela-
tive neglect of hemispheric approaches (para. 29). For ringing endorsements of
hemispheric Americas studies, see Shukla and Tinsman and Culler. Culler argues,
perhaps over-optimistically, that American literature is now in the process of
reconfiguring itself as comparative American literatures (2378).
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