An 1848 for the Americas

7/29/2019 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

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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

432 Black Atlantic and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City


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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

American Literary History 433


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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



14/34

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



15/34

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



16/34

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



17/34

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



18/34

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)



19/34

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



20/34

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. . . .



21/34

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



22/34

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



23/34

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



24/34

(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



25/34

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



26/34

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



27/34

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).



28/34

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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