Abstract
By the early nineteenth century, talk of blood continued to do a great deal of work in giving meaning to political and social life in Spain’s American colonies. “Con sangre se hace azúcar”—”Sugar is made with blood”: this was a saying popular among Cuban planters during the nineteenth century, and it grimly evoked the backbreaking labor and quotidian violence that made possible their extraordinary wealth.1 Those planters were among many Cubans who undertook a major expansion of the island’s sugar industry and enslaved African labor force just as antislavery sentiment gained momentum throughout the Atlantic world. By 1791, British abolitionists circulated pamphlets advocating the boycott of Caribbean sugar, “steeped in the blood of our fellow-creatures.”2 In August of that same year in St Domingue, the French colony less than 50 miles from Cuba’s easternmost point, a slave named Boukman led a ceremony in which he and his conspirators sacrificed a black pig and drank its blood. That event initiated an island-wide revolt that ended slavery in far more radical and violent ways than sugar planters and officials, and even many abolitionists, had desired.3 The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) facilitated Cuba’s global dominance in sugar production but at a bloody price, namely, the brutality elemental to slave societies.
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Notes
Cited by Robert L. Paquette in Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 56.
On the Bois-Caïman ceremony, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 99–102.
Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 108–11.
María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008), 6. Blood was not the only biological marker of social difference in the early modern Iberian world; early settlers explained differences between Europeans and indigenous peoples through their bodies as well as their behavior, especially the humors (the blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile that governed bodily health) and the food that they ate. See Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Adolfo de Castro (ed.), Cortes de Cádiz: Complementos de las sesiones verificadas en la isla de León y en Cádiz, 2 vols (Madrid: Imprenta de Prudencio Pérez de Velasco, 1913), 1: 178.
On these distinctions and deliberations, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), ch. 7.
Verena Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Social Values in a Slave Society (Cambridge University Press, 1974), 18.
José Antonio Saco, La situación política de Cuba y su remedio (Paris: Imprenta de E. Thunot y Compañía, 1851), 38.
La Escalera (The Ladder) refers to the repression of an alleged antislavery conspiracy between slaves, free people of color, and British abolitionists, which inaugurated a period of harsh repression. See Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, and Michele Reid Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Miguel Rodríguez Ferrer, Los nuevos peligros de Cuba entre sus cinco crisis actuales (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Galiano, 1862), 26.
Francisco de Camps y Feliú, Españoles é insurrectos. Recuerdos de la Guerra de Cuba por el Coronel retirado, 2nd edn (Havana: Imprenta de A. Álvarez y Comp., 1890), 376.
Emilio Bacardí y Moreau, Crónicas de Santiago de Cuba, 2nd edn, 10 vols (Madrid: Gráficas Breogán, 1973), 4: 397.
Rafael Serra, Ensayos políticos (New York: Imprenta El Porvenir, 1892), 113.
Carlos Finlay, “El mosquito hipotéticamente considerado como agente de trasmisión de la fiebre amarilla,” Anales de la Academia de ciencias médicas, físicas y naturales de la Habana 18 (1882), 162.
Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Oxford University Press, 1974), 77. See also Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (University of Chicago Press, 1985), ch. 9.
Pedro M. Pruna and Armando García González, Darwinismo y sociedad en Cuba: Siglo XIX (Madrid: Editorial CSIC, 1989), 131.
Pedro M. Pruna Goodgall, “Biological Evolutionism in Cuba at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Ángel Puig Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 54–5.
Francisco Calcagno, En busca del eslabón (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983 [1888]), 111.
A. W. Reyes, “Estudio comparativo de los negros criollos y africanos,” Revista de Cuba 5 (1879), 155.
The connections made by Cuban leaders between political life and evolutionary thought should not suggest consensus, on or beyond the island, about the social, political, or biological legacy of Darwin. See Piers J. Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Joshua Goode, Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 29.
“The Great Weyler Ape” is reproduced in David Sartorius, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 213.
Cited in Louis A. Pérez, Jr, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 87.
Josep Conangla i Fontanilles, Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba: Un soldado del ejército espanol en la guerra separatista (1895–1898) (Barcelona: Ediciones Peninsula, 1998), 202–3.
Cited in Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 151.
See Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Modern World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
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Sartorius, D. (2014). Colonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century. In: Coles, K.A., Bauer, R., Nunes, Z., Peterson, C.L. (eds) The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338211_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338211_12
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