This ambitious study explores what the author calls Cuba's ‘sexual economy of race’ by focusing on the interaction between individual reproductive behaviours; family memory or genealogy; state and Church legislation regarding the family; and public intellectual discourse on family and nation.
Building on the scholarship that, since the late 1980s, has revealed Cuba's racial complexity and Afro-Cuban continuing historical agency, Karen Y. Morrison proposes to adopt an intersectional feminist and social constructionist approach to show that reproductive practices of sexual behaviour, family life and kinship recognition have also been crucial in the formation of Cuban racial meaning and social identities. In other words, she is interested in the ‘familial space’ or ‘the family’ as a fundamental building block for the study of Cuba's social, racial and national formation. For this, she relies on Cuban and Spanish archival sources, on literary texts, and on interviews, either conducted by her and a Cuban assistant in 1999, or published by other social scientists since 1970.
The first three chapters examine the colonial period up to the beginning of the independence struggle in 1868. Since early Spanish colonisation, the two doctrines of partus sequitur ventrem (the slave status of a child followed that of his or her mother) and limpieza de sangre (purity of blood, for which Spaniards and Amerindians qualified, but from which persons of mixed or full African descent were excluded) secured racial endogamy and discouraged – yet did not systematically prevent – interracial and socially unequal marriages. Interestingly, Morrison's analysis of the baptismal records in the Havana parish of Espíritu Santo also shows that up to 1820 most Afro-Cuban infants, whether free or enslaved, were born to couples married by the Catholic Church. Only with the exponential increase in the imports of enslaved Africans and the proportional decline in the free Afro-Cuban and white populations did illegitimate births among free and enslaved Afro-Cuban infants increase. The transformation of Cuba from a society with slaves into a slave society had a deep impact in strengthening the racial line, making interracial marriages extremely rare, but interracial ‘mating’ continued, with white fathers often recognising their mixed-race children.
In Chapter 4, ‘Nineteenth-Century Racial Myths and the Familial Corruption of Cuban Whiteness’, Morrison explores the alternative forms of family forming and assignation of child status that occurred between the so-called respectable racially endogamous marriage and disreputable consensual union, which she views as ‘race-making familial strategies’ (p. 108). Among these prevailed the legal recognition of paternity for children born out of wedlock; the furtive labelling of mixed-race children as white; and also the self-claim of black or mulatto status by persons who were designated as white.
Next, the author focuses on the independence movement initiated in 1868 and the gradual abolition of slavery (finally achieved in 1886) and the many ways they affected family formation among Afro-Cubans. Legal marriage continued to decline, but intermediate family forms, such as the recognition of children born out of wedlock, increased. Yet among the Afro-Cuban infants baptised during this period, children of single mothers represented the majority – a tendency that contributed to Afro-Cuban women's negative stereotyping after independence.
Chapter 6, ‘“Regenerating” the Afro-Cuban Family, 1886–1940’, contrasts Euro-Cubans’ racist writings about the supposed degeneration of the island's population and Afro-Cubans’ vanishing in their racial struggle with whites, with Afro-Cuban male intellectuals’ and politicians’ attempts to make Afro-Cuban families fit the Euro-Cuban patriarchal model. As these Afro-Cubans feared that illegitimate unions between black and mulatto women and white men would speed up the extinction of the black race in Cuba through whitening, they indirectly contributed to stereotypes of the Afro-Cuban woman as immoral and ignorant.
The last chapter begins with a discussion of mestizaje in the Afrocubanismo literature, first produced by Euro-Cubans such as Alejo Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz, and then created by Afro-Cubans, notably Nicolás Guillén. The chapter then turns to ‘family histories of race mixture’ based on interviews, some taken from oral histories published in the 1970s and the 1990s, and others conducted by Morrison and her assistant in Havana in 1999. Organised by racial category – los mestizos, los mulatos, los negros – these personal stories and reminiscences aim at showing the diversity of racial identities in pre-revolutionary Cuba. They are followed by a short discussion of spiritual mestizaje, or the identification of Cubans regardless of race with African-derived religions (such as santería), which the author considers as new forms of multiracial kinship.
The Epilogue, subtitled ‘Revolutionary Social Morality and the Multi-Racial National Family, 1959–2000’, alternates long quotations from and comments on interviews of Afro-Cubans conducted by scholars other than the author in the 1970s and the 1990s, with summaries of the book and the examination of some of the revolution's promises and programmes. Among these, the 1975 Family Code encouraged work among women and liberalised divorce. As a result, inter-racial marriages increased, especially between white women and black or mulatto men – but negative views of such unions continued. In the symbolic domain, however, the author highlights the revolutionary acknowledgement of African religious ancestors, particularly in the preamble of the 1976 constitution and in the slow government acceptance of African-derived religions worshipped by white and black Cubans. Oddly, the Conclusion to the Epilogue provides a one-page chronological list of the ‘familial factors in Cuban race relations’ identified in the book, before quoting lengthy reflections by a contemporary Cuban writer about the black, white or mulatto essence of Cubans.
Cuba's Racial Crucible retraces Cuba's ‘sexual economy of race’ throughout 250 years and brings to bear important new knowledge on race making, family formation and kinship on the island. Yet, its shifts in sources, methodology and focus and its complex language (and many misspellings in Spanish and English) sometimes give the impression of a work still in progress that careful revision and editing could have prevented. More insights into other former slave societies, notably Brazil, would have strengthened the book's argument, according to which ‘the battle over race in the symbolic representation of the Cuban national family’ (p. 268) and Cuban nation-building is so crucial.
