The Merchant of Havana is a Spanish slave dealer, a red-headed reincarnation of Shylock, representing greed and evil, who threatens to destroy the Creole landed aristocracy in nineteenth-century Cuba. Unlike Shakespeare's protagonist, his Jewishness is not real, but imaginary. He represents the major characteristics that were attributed to Jews since the Middle Ages, though he is not an “empirical” but a “a notional Jew.”
Stephen Silverstein analyzes the phenomenon of antisemitism without Jews, taking as a case study texts dealing with abolition that were composed by liberal Cubans. He proves that white Creoles used antisemitic stereotypes as representing “the Others” in order to define Cuban-ness and its boundaries. He argues that Jewish racism is connected with black racism, suggesting antisemitism as a lens for the analysis of other excluded groups, especially slaves and free colored people.
The book describes the economic and political transformation of the sugar industry and its impact on Cuban society and culture. It emphasizes the central role of credit in the decline of the Creole aristocratic elite and in the rise of foreign nouveaux riches, most of them Spanish slave merchants and moneylenders who took over mortgaged plantations, threatening the hegemony of the Creole plantocracy. Another threat to the old social order was the racial imbalance caused by the heavy importation of African slaves. Silverstein focuses on the circle of Domingo Del Monte y Aponte, which expressed the desire of liberal Creoles to whiten Cuban society. Silverstein argues that instead of abolition, they advocated for better treatment of slaves in order to extend their life span and propagation.
Silverstein analyzes the use of antisemitism by intellectuals from Del Monte's circle as a weapon against the foreigners who challenged the old order in defense of their status and identity, and links it with pseudoscientific conceptions of racism. Some of the fictional figures are called Judas, referring to the betrayal of Jesus, as well as to the alleged participation of Jews in the slave trade that was forbidden to them by the Church. Others were based on the image of Shylock, a stereotype of an unscrupulous moneylender who inspired European authors, manifesting their fears of capitalism and modernity. Influenced by European literature, Creole intellectuals adopted antisemitic stereotypes to their own reality, attributing an imagined Jewishness to the foreign merchants who displaced them from their previous economic, political, and social status; corrupted their morals; and destroyed their families.
Modern antisemitism in Europe created the category of race, since Emancipation had blurred the external distinctions between the Jews and their host societies, causing an erosion of old certainties. In Cuba, racial ambivalence was attributed to the white-skinned mulattos, who challenged the whiteness of Creole society. Silverstein argues that Jews, as well as mulattos, represented an in-between-ness that blurred the old social boundaries of Cuban-ness.
The book analyzes three famous works, emphasizing the villains’ Jewish characteristics. In Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, two British merchants swindle a Creole aristocratic family. While the father was stereotypically Jewish, the son's racial identity was hidden. Sab, the title character, was a mulatto slave secretly in love with his master's daughter, but interracial love doomed him to death. Like the merchant's son, he represented a racial in-between-ness that blurred the borders of the old social system. The author used the negative stereotype of mulattos and Jews to protect the whiteness of Creole society.
In La cuarterona, a play by Puerto Rican writer Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, a Cuban Creole countess heavily indebted to a Spanish merchant and moneylender urges her son to marry the daughter of her creditor. The son loves Julia, a mulatta who grew up with him and who sacrifices herself for the family. During the wedding, Julia commits suicide, and the family's faithful black slave reveals that her father was the Spanish merchant who betrayed her mother Maria like Judas. While Tapia was influenced by Cuban intellectuals in demonizing the figure of the Spanish merchant, he did not share their negrophobia.
Cecilia Valdés, the eponymous heroine of Cirilo Villaverde's novel, is a beautiful and sensuous mulatta, who does not know that her father is Don Candido Gamboa, a Spanish slave merchant and rich owner of a sugar mill who abuses his slaves with cruelty. When his son Leonardo falls in love with Cecilia, he tries to break their relationship, fearing incest. He pressures Leonardo to marry Isabel, owner of a coffee plantation, who treats her slaves with paternalistic care. Deluded by Leonardo's promise to marry her, Cecilia begs her mulatto suitor to kill Isabel, but instead he kills Leonardo. According to Silverstein, Don Gamboa's carnality and Cecilia's sensualism threaten the whiteness of Creole society. Villaverde's project was buen tratamiento—good treatment that would enable the continuity of slavery, and subsequently the separation from Spain.
Silverstein's book is an important contribution to studies on antisemitism as well as to Cuban and Latin American studies. Using an impressive amount of literature, he traces the works that served as inspiration for the Cuban texts in the abolition archive and analyzes them with respect to various theories on antisemitism and racism. He cautiously cites every reference he uses, nearly overloading the reader with information, particularly in the endnotes, which are almost longer than the text.
The issue of the imagined Jew is relevant to understanding notions that existed in Latin America, where Iberian colonialism prohibited Jewish immigration, but transmitted prejudices against them. The Merchant of Havana uses the idea of a notional Jew as a different lens of interpretation for Cuba's cultural history. Instead of the Manichean division between liberalism and racism or between abolition and slavery, he suggests a more nuanced analysis, which uncovers the utopian aspirations of the Creole elite. It seems, however, that a more nuanced analysis would be needed also with respect to the image of the Jew, who also appears as a metaphor for hard work and thrift.
It may be interesting to note that the same arguments that were directed against the Spanish merchants in the nineteenth century were repeated in the 1930s by their descendants, this time against real Jews who threatened their commercial monopoly. Challenged by the nationalist ideology of the 1933 revolution, which presented them as foreigners, Spanish merchants used traditional and modern antisemitism to redefine the boundaries of Cuban-ness, to exclude the Jews in order to guarantee their own inclusion.
