Hispanic American Historical Review

Hispanic American Historical Review 80.3 (2000) 415-462

"Barbados or Canada?"
Race, Immigration, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba *

Aviva Chomsky

The most optimistic Cuban commentators today can be heard arguing that the economic crisis on the island in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union has brought with it Cuba's first chance to be truly independent. The island passed from being a literal colony of Spain to being what Cuban scholars refer to as a "neocolony" of the United States in 1898, and then to a state of economic and political dependence (albeit of a different nature) on the USSR after 1959. In each of these periods ideologies of national independence provoked strong resonances among the population. But the nature of this nation and the meanings of independence have been subject to repeated contestation.

Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Cuba on 22 January 1998 with a speech denouncing Spanish colonialism, and linking Spain's extermination [End Page 415] of Cuba's indigenous population, its enslavement of Africans, and its atrocities during the War for Independence (1895-98) with the Nazi holocaust, the Roman persecution of Christians, and the current U.S. embargo of Cuba. He drew a parallel between Cuba's position in the world today as victim of the U.S. embargo and the situation of the indigenous, enslaved Africans, Cuban patriots, holocaust victims, and Christians. What it means to be Cuban, he suggested, is to be a victim of, and to resist, oppression by foreigners. Although he alluded to ethnic, cultural, ideological, and biological mixing as also inherent to Cuba's character, this was subordinated to a political and ideological characterization of Cuban identity:

Holy Father, the land you have just kissed is honored by your presence. You will not find here the peaceful and generous native people who inhabited this island when the first Europeans arrived. Most of the men were annihilated by the exploitation and the enslaved work they could not resist, and the women turned into pleasure objects or domestic slaves. There were also those who died by the homicidal swords or victims of unknown diseases brought by the conquerors...

In the course of centuries, over a million Africans ruthlessly uprooted from their distant lands took the place of the enslaved natives already exterminated. They made a remarkable contribution to the ethnic composition and the origins of our country's present population, where the cultures, the beliefs and the blood of all participants in the dramatic history have been mixed...

Today, Holy Father, genocide is attempted again when by hunger, illness and total economic suffocation some try to subdue this people that refuses to accept the dictates and the rule of the mightiest economic, political and military power in history; much more powerful than the old Rome that for centuries had the beasts devour those who refused to abdicate their faith. Like those Christians horribly slandered to justify the crime, we who are as slandered as they were, we choose a thousand times death rather than abdicate our convictions. The revolution, like the church, also has many martyrs. ¹

The difference between the way the colonial period, slavery, and the indigenous population are conceptualized and used in nationalist ideologies in Cuba and in the United States is quite striking. Patriotic speeches in the [End Page 416] United States rarely refer to European atrocities, and if British crimes (or more likely, in U.S. discourse, misdemeanors) are mentioned, they are crimes against white colonists (for example, taxation without representation). Slavery and extermination (or subjugation) of the indigenous are topics usually avoided altogether by nationalist ideologues; if they are mentioned at all, it is in the context of whether "we" need to apologize for them--the national "we" being identified with the perpetrators, not the victims, of these crimes (or misdemeanors). ² In Cuba, however, the post-independence period is today seen as continuing, rather than transforming, Cuba's subordinate political and economic status, and the internal social and racial inequalities that were a...