Abstract
This chapter reads U.S. plans to acquire Cuba as an immunitary response to mounting conflicts between North and South. A critical analysis of literary works about the possible annexation of the island reveals anxieties that the expansionist solution would simply intensify the nature of the contest over national sovereignty.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As Virginia’s John Randolph Tucker put it, “When I see the Queen of the Antilles” and the “rich clime of the Amazon valley awaiting the labor of the African under the direction of the intelligent Southerner,” I see “a nobler destiny for the South … than awaits any other people.” No Yankee “shall dictate terms … to such a people,” quoted in Freehling 146.
- 2.
Filibusters were adventurers who set out from North America to conquer lands in the Caribbean basin. See Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld.
- 3.
Amy Kaplan finds that “[t]he formulaic plot of the romance uncannily parallels the popular narrative of the Spanish-American War as chivalric rescue mission that rejuvenates the liberator,” 96. For Shelley Streeby, Cuba offered one of many “redemptive sites where damaged urban masculinities might be rehabilitated and where urban class conflicts might give way to cross-class homosocial bonds between white brothers forged at the expense of people of color,” 155. Even the dominant attitude by Cubans exiled in the antebellum U.S. was interventionist and expansionist in orientation. Rodrigo Lazo notes that many Cuban exiles “identified themselves as filibusteros [freebooters] and presented their expeditions as examples of republican efforts to bring democracy and egalitarianism to the island,” Writing to Cuba, 6.
- 4.
Jennifer Greeson argues that the “formulation of empire … was brought about by the Civil War, institutionalized through Reconstruction, and facilitated by yet another sharp renovation of the idea of the South in U.S. culture,” 229.
- 5.
As Greeson observes, “[i]n the decade immediately after the war, writers explicitly envisioned their Reconstruction South as a ‘new Africa,’ an American analogue to the continent upon which the last great frenzy of Old World empire was being played out,” 14–5.
- 6.
Perez argues that “in the aggregate, the means used by the United States in Cuba constitute a microcosm of the American imperial experience: armed intervention and military occupation; nation building and constitution writing; capital penetration and cultural saturation; the installation of puppet regimes, the formation of clientele political classes, and the organization of proxy armies, the imposition of binding treaties; the establishment of a permanent military base; economic assistance—or not—and diplomatic recognition—or not—as circumstances warranted,” 1.
- 7.
Dew’s “Address” appeared in a March 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger under Poe’s editorship.
- 8.
“Nearly half my life has passed in the service of the Union,” Calhoun wrote, “& whatever public reputation I have acquired, is indissolubly identified with it.” But while Calhoun could defend the need to preserve the Union, he realized that the Union would not be worth defending if absolute government arrogated to itself “the right of determining exclusively and finally the powers delegated to it.” What his opponents called the “anarchical and revolutionary” doctrine of State Rights was for Calhoun “the basis of the Federal Union,” Essential, 275.
- 9.
Calhoun’s work registers a tectonic shift in the definition of federalism, from a compact of confederated sovereign states to a consolidated national government: “The theory of our Constitution … which denies, that the constitution is a compact, between the States, and which traces all its powers to a majority of the American people, or, in other words, which denies the federal character of the government, and asserts that it is a consolidated system, is of recent origin, avowed for the first time, but three years since, and first officially proclaimed and asserted, with the last few months,” Essential, 295.
- 10.
As Susan-Mary Grant argues, “the North looked forward to a future in which its influence would dominate in both the South and the West, to a time when the nation would reflect all that was best in northern society. The construction of northern nationalism was the first and most crucial step toward this future,” 21.
- 11.
For historical analyses of Lopez and Quitman, see Tom Chaffin’s Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine War Against Cuba and Robert E. May’s John Quitman: Old South Crusader.
- 12.
Some Southerners felt that expansion into the Caribbean would result in the abolition of slavery in the U.S. and welcomed it. Virginia’s Matthew F. Maury hoped that expansion into the Amazon basin would serve as a safety valve for slavery to flow out of the U.S. Freehling, 153.
- 13.
While acknowledging the space of the political as empty, a constitutive lack, Zizek insists on the need to “endorse the act fully in all its consequences. Fidelity is not fidelity to the principles betrayed by the contingent facticity of their actualization, but fidelity to the consequences entailed by the full actualization of the (revolutionary) principles,” 377. If we follow Zizek’s logic aren’t we forced to accept slavery as a “contingent facticity of the actualization” of Calhoun’s ideas. Not necessarily. That Calhoun was ultimately a defender of slavery does not negate the value he placed, as do Zizek and Laclau, on the power of the negative to make political contingency into a reality.
- 14.
As the Burtons point out, “we cannot imagine them [the novel’s heroes] winning a war against Yankees, or even against their own clever slaves,” 47.
- 15.
As May argues, “[a]lthough it is tempting to conclude … that secession emanated from a dream of Caribbean empire, this would be absurd. Strong secession feelings dated at least to the nullification crisis of 1828–1833 … Also prohibiting such a dramatic conclusion is the fact that not all Caribbean expansionists were secessionists (nor were all secessionists expansionists),” 242.
- 16.
For Levander, “just as the freedom and liberty of the new United States was predicated upon a simultaneous opposition to and ownership of the U.S. South, so too was the Confederacy’s goal of assuming a separate and equal national status dependent upon colonizing Southern slave-holding territories such as Cuba—territories that had their own multivalent histories of colonization,” 823–4.
- 17.
John C. Havard finds Mann’s novel “less certain and more anxious than it seems about the validity of its nationalist narrative and about that narrative’s concomitant assumptions about US-Cuban relations” (146). Building on Havard’s argument, I identify in the novel’s retroactive gesture an indirect comment on an emerging postbellum politics where the socialization of would-be citizens takes precedence over contestation.
- 18.
Amy Kaplan argues that “disembodiment might describe the cultural fantasy underlying what historians have called the economically determined ‘informal empire,’ the desire for total control disentangled from direct political annexation,” 96.
- 19.
Maria Windell reads the death by fire of the novel’s black characters as Mann’s ideological move to write “blacks out of Cuba’s antislavery movement” and thereby eliminate “any basis for a Cuban independence movement.” She further argues that “Juanita presciently portrays the pattern of race relations that the United States seeks to impose upon Cuba when it intervenes in Cuba’s 1895 independence war,” 302–3.
- 20.
As Russ Castronovo argues, “clogged with connotations of the past, a semantic subject is made unwieldy by the weight of memory, antecedent, and context. But once ensconced in a language of syntax, as opposed to a language of semantics, freedom has no earthly awkwardness and flits about effortlessly as both premise and promise,” 117. Castronovo’s distinction between semantic and syntactic definitions of freedom articulates well with the dynamic at work in Mann’s novel. Helen’s investment in Cuban abolitionism grounds and gives her life purpose, forcing her to confront the conditions and limitations that animate her previously unexamined sense of freedom. Conversely, Muerta-Viva seems caught in a politically liminal zone between “premise and promise.”
- 21.
Hartman traces the disciplinary processes of indebted servitude that fashioned obligation after emancipation: “The freedmen’s handbooks, in their insistence on dutiful conduct as a prerequisite to enjoying the entitlements of freedom, disclosed the linkages between repression, discipline, and the regulation of freed population,” 145.
- 22.
For Bhabha, “the native refusal to unify the authoritarian, colonialist address within the terms of civil engagement gives the subject of colonial authority—father and oppressor [in Mann’s case, mother and oppressor] another turn. This ambivalent ‘and’, always less than one and double, traces the times and spaces between civil address and colonial articulation. The authoritarian demand can now only be justified if it is contained in the language of paranoia” (100). Bhabha’s concept sheds some light on Mann’s novel about an impossible love, not the conventional one between Juanita and Ludovico, but the one between Isabella and Camilla. Isabella wants Camilla to love her. That is why Helen is summoned to Cuba, to mediate and effect the colonizer’s demand that the slave submit to her out of loving devotion. But “the native’s refusal to return and restore the image of authority to the eye of power,” registered in Camilla’s hyperactivity and indecipherable mumbling, is “reinscribed as implacable aggression, assertively coming from without: [s]he hates me. Such justification follows the familiar conjugation of persecutory paranoia. The frustrated wish ‘I want [her] to love me,’ turns into its opposite ‘I hate her,’ and then through projection and the exclusion of the first person, [s]he hates me’ … Projection may compel the native to address the master, but it can never produce those effects of ‘love’ or truth’ that would center the confessional demand,” 100. Locked in this “amorous” dynamic, doomed by the master’s paranoia and the slave’s resentment to persist in a endless cycle of subversion and ever increasing strategies of domination, Mann short-circuits the dynamic and kills them both.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. Sly Civility. In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Burton, Orville Vernon, and Georganne Burton. 2002. Introduction. In The Free Flag of Cuba: The Lost Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Georganne B. Burton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Cooper, Michela. 2006. Should Not These Things Be Known: Mary Mann’s Juanita and the Limits of Domesticity. In Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, ed. Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katherine Rodier. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Freehling, William W. 2007. The Road to Disunion. vol. II. Secessionists Triumphant: 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press.
Grant, Susan Mary. 2000. North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Greeson, Jennifer Rae. 2010. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Havard, John C. 2012. Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita: Cuba and U.S. National Identity. Studies in the Novel 44 (2): 144–163. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2012.0028.
Kaplan, Amy. 2002. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lazo, Rodrigo. 2005. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
———. 2006. Against the Cuba Guide: The ‘Cuba Journal,’ Juanita, and Travel Writing. In Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, ed. Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katherine Rodier. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Levander, Caroline. 2006. Confederate Cuba. American Literature 78 (4): 821–845.
Mann, Mary Peabody. 2000. Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago, ed. Patricia Ard. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
May, Robert E. 2002a. The Southern Dream of Caribbean Empire: 1854–1861. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
———. 2002b. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Perez, Louis. 2011. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pickens, Lucy Holcombe. 2002. The Free Flag of Cuba: The Lost Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Georganne B. Burton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Streeby, Shelley. 2002. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and Race and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Urban, C. Stanley. 1957. The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853–55. Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (1): 29–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/2510177.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker. 1854. Health Trip to the Tropics. New York: Charles Scribner.
Windell, Maria. 2014. Moor, Mulata, Mulatta: Sentimentalism, Racialization, and Benevolent Imperialism in Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita. J19: Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2 (2): 301–329. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2014.0021.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rodriguez, R. (2019). Cuba and the Imperial Solution. In: Immunity's Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34012-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34013-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)