Cuban artist José Mesías’ 2017 installation piece, La muerte de Maceo (The Death of Maceo), presents ‘authentic’ artefacts (created by the artist) of the Afro-Cuban War of Independence that framed Antonio Maceo's life and death, to deconstruct the myths surrounding it and expose one of the many fictions of national narrative. Such mythologies and narratives of heroic Afro-Cuban revolutionaries and patriots have long been folded into the national canon, but the archive of military, political and discursive struggles has told a different story, which has received far less scholarly and popular attention. Bonnie A. Lucero's Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba joins a list of publications that also unpack and recover the role played by Afro-Cubans in fighting for and building the nation: Aline Helg's Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ada Ferrer's Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999); David Sartorius’ Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Duke University Press, 2014); and Lillian Guerra's Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958 (Yale University Press, 2018). Together they reframe the historical record, providing an account of the true conditions under which Cuban men, especially Afro-Cuban men, were included in and excluded from the national project. Lucero traces the gendering of national identity and the systemic disenfranchisement of Afro-Cuban soldiers and veterans as intertwined, recurrent themes in Cuban social and political history from the War of Independence to the post-war occupation and early republic. This deeply researched book focuses on the mid-island provinces of Santa Clara and Cienfuegos as crucial sites of revolutionary activity (both pro and con) – a refreshing departure from the more customary emphasis on Havana and Santiago. Santa Clara and Cienfuegos are particularly well chosen for this study because of their substantial Afro-Cuban populations.
Lucero carefully maps out the dissonance between the rhetoric of inclusion of Afro-Cubans in the project of nation-building and citizenship, and practices of exclusion that stripped them of benefits and opportunities both in the military and later in civil society. She deploys discourse in a novel manner; instead of linking language with cultural attitudes, she shows how discourse was linked to military and political goals, which ultimately worked against the greater good to marginalise and oppress a large portion of the Cuban population. Parsing inherent contradictions and paradoxes that continually erupt from the discourse (that is, language) of gender, race, masculinity and national identity, Lucero shows how gender served as a way to justify the gap between rhetorical/ideological anti-racism and actual (social) practice that preserved colonial power relations under the rubric of masculinity.
Under conditions ranging from Spanish colonial control to the Cuban Revolutionary Army to the US Occupation, Cuba and Cuban men, specifically White and Black Cuban men, were coded as strong, masculine and patriarchal or weak, lazy and feminine at different times. Lucero maps the discursive conditions under which Cuban men (and the Cuban nation) were feminised – understood to be a deplorable condition. Cuban men of European heritage were feminised in relation to Spaniards in the colonial era; subsequently Afro-Cuban men were feminised in relation to White Cuban men, except in those cases where they were dehumanised as beasts. Finally, Cuba as a nation was feminised in relation to the United States, which took upon itself the role of (White) patriarch to save and protect the weak, feminised island nation. This feminisation occurred time and again in rhetoric deployed in the press, in written communication and in lawsuits and complaints. The rhetorical battle takes place first in colonial relations to Spain, then internally in the Cuban Revolutionary Army and nascent political structures, and finally in relation to the United States and its occupation of the island.
Terms like ‘patriarch’ and ‘honour’ and ‘manliness’ became code words for citizenship, and were deployed by cultural and institutional agents like the press and the military as well as by Afro-Cubans to justify their contributions to the struggle and their entitlement to recognition and benefits. For example, the military and press explained battlefield losses as the result of ‘majasería’ (cowardice, selfishness) and general unmanliness, attributing this characteristic to Afro-Cubans, blaming them for the ‘crisis of noble revolutionary masculinity’ (p. 77). Through multiple case studies Lucero presents a compelling dossier of injustices and abuse of Afro-Cubans in the military, including the selective law enforcement in cases involving Afro-Cuban soldiers and officers in cases of military prowess, sexual conduct and fear of military control slipping away from White leadership.
Many Afro-Cubans served in the Cuban Revolutionary Army and subsequently held jobs in provincial police forces and rural guards in the early months of the post-war period, only to be systematically excluded by the heavy hand of the much more racist US Occupation which was modelled on the deeply embedded racism that persisted in the post-civil war United States. The pervasive and widespread deployment of military and juridical sanctions undermined and invalidated Afro-Cuban military agency. This led to the disqualification of former soldiers and officers alike for public office and government jobs, thus disenfranchising Afro-Cuban veterans and citizens and stripping them of benefits to which they were entitled.
Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality focuses its careful analysis of rhetoric and events on the central provinces in the crucial period of 1899–1900, leading up to the first elections of the newly formed Republic. Post-war struggles for political independence and the framing of the newly won nation were distorted by US intervention, which tried (largely with success) to craft a Cuba that in many regards reproduced the power structures of the former Spanish colony – or pre-civil war United States – through the appointments of former Spanish colonial officials and civilians (who did not fight in the Revolutionary Army) to numerous municipal and provincial offices. And while this reinforcement of White privilege might seem to favour White Cuban authority, it was widely perceived to foreclose Cuban self-determination and political autonomy.
To the consternation of the US occupying administration, Black veterans were well represented on the police force of certain municipalities in the provinces of Santa Clara and Matanzas. In the Constitution of the Rural Guard, US administrators sought to recruit White forces in response to fear of Blackness, and ultimately to authorise the formation and arming of (White) private guards and the evisceration of the Rural Guard. For Afro-Cuban men for whom participation in armed struggle had awakened a sense of civic entitlement, its denial led to violence.
Lucero is particularly knowledgeable about this region and this time frame, having previously written about it in her 2018 book A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century (University of Alabama Press). There she used a similar method, closely reading rhetoric and its deployment in struggles for spatial justice, householding, patriarchy and representation in the city of Cienfuegos. Lucero's original contribution to the field lies in her analysis of language and rhetoric as crucial elements in the consolidation of citizenship and justice. Through her attention to the discourses of race and gender, Lucero shows how language was used to occlude and mask embodied (and gendered) practices of racism. I would have liked to see greater clarification in the link between femininity and criminality: Afro-Cuban men are alternatively feminised and criminalised by Spanish, Cuban and US authorities, depending on the desired political or economic ends. Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality is timely in its attentiveness to the emergence of masculinity as a discursive field and it advances an interesting and original argument about the operation of gender roles in colonial and early republican Cuba.
