“The revolution, as represented in the early 1890s, had thus created the basis of Cuban nationhood. It was a site, where in the words of Gomez, ‘blacks and whites became brothers’ and where, according to Marti, ‘facing death, barefoot and all, blacks and white became equal: they embraced and have not separated since.’ Even in death, the embrace continued, ‘as the souls of blacks and whites [ rose ] together through the skies.’
This transcending embrace was always between men and its fruit generally a fraternal community inherently masculine. Here the transcendence of race and the birth of the nation were both made possible not by the sexual union of races and the subsequent creation a ‘mestizo’ nation - as intellectuals would argue elsewhere in Latin America. Rather, racial transcendence and national unity were forged in manly union during war. Marti wrote of a mestizo America, but not quite of a mestizo Cuba. For him, as for others, racial union in Cuba was less a product of miscegenation than of masculine heroism and will. The difference is significant. First, the vision of a transracial Cuba essentially left intact racial categories like white and black, even as it argues for the transcendence. And second, the making of a transracial nation in war - and not in sex - excluded women from the symbolic birth of the nation. Women did make appearances in the public portrayals of 1868, but in ways that did not subvert their ‘foundational exclusion’ - usually as mothers, sometimes as wives and daughters, and generally as women whose bodies were physically incapable of producing anything other than Cuban patriots.
In much of the pro-independence writing, black-white union had been born out of a common armed struggle against Spanish colonialism. And though generally represented as a union between men, it was that black-white union that made the nation possible. The nation - born of the physical, moral, and spiritual embrace of black and white men - transcended race and converted white and black into Cuban. That image and that idea - developed jointly by white, mulatto, and black activists and intellectuals-provided a counterargument to dominant colonial claims about the impossibility of Cuban independence. But the notion developed by these writers did more. In a moment framed globally by the consolidation of racial theory and the escalation of racial violence, these authors constructed an ideal of racial transcendence not only in abstract or philosophical terms but with constant reference to concrete political mobilization, both past and future.”
Ada Ferrer tells a powerful story about a revolution the world pretty much ignored in Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898.
