"En plena libertad y democracia": Negros Brujos and the social question, 1904-1919

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 82, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 549-587

  Bronfman, Alejandra ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644529794     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-82-3-549     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. El Mundo, Nov. 1904, 1. My account summarizes the case as reported in El Mundo between Nov. 1904 and Jan. 1906
2. See also Reinaldo Román, "An Indignant Public Opinion: The Cuban Press and the Negros Brujos Scares, 1904-1943," in "Conjuring Progress and Divinity: Religion and Conflict in 20th Century Cuba and Puerto Rico" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, 2000)
3. Stephan Palmié, "Una Salación Científica: The Work of Witchcraft and Science in Cuban Modernity," in Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002)
4. and Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), esp. 109-14 for accounts of the Zoila case
5. On ñañiguismo, see José Trujillo y Monagas, Los criminales de Cuba y d. José Trujillo; narración de los servicios prestados en el cuerpo de policía de la Habana, por d. José Trujillo y Monagas . . . y la historia de los criminales presos por él, en las diferentes épocas de los distintos empleos que ha desempeñado hasta el 31 de diciembre de 1881 (Barcelona: Tip. de F. Giró, 1882)
6. and Luis Sánchez Martínez, Guia del policía cubano (Havana: Imp. Comas y López, 1914)
7. It is difficult to provide an accurate portrayal of this practice. I neither claim that it did not exist nor that it was as sinister as most descriptions, but rather that reconstructing a "real" representation is a minefield riddled with historiographic and epistemological traps. On legal change, see Julio Angel Carreras, Historia del estado y el derecho en Cuba (Havana: Ed. Pueblo y Educación, 1985)
8. Spain. Ministerio de Ultramar, Spanish Rule in Cuba: Laws Governing the Island (New York: 1896)
9. Cuba, The Penal Code in Force in Cuba and Porto Rico (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900)
10. and Antonio Barreras, Textos de las constituciones de Cuba, 1812-1940 (Havana: Ed. Minerva, 1940)
11. See Palmié, "Una Salación Científica" for an astute discussion of the complex Spanish colonial legal apparatus that surrounded but never quite criminalized brujería
12. El Día, 6 Sept. 1918, 1, 12
13. See the following works by Alejandro de la Fuente: "Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899-1981," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995)
14. "Race, National Discourse and Politics in Cuba: An Overview," Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (1998)
15. "'With All and for All': Race, Inequality and Politics in Cuba, 1900-1930" (Ph.D. diss, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1996)
16. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
17. and "Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912," Latin American Research Review 34, no. 3 (1999)
18. See also Helg, Our Rightful Share, for a different interpretation of the early republic
19. Although the period just after the war saw a reconfiguration in the language of civility and race, "civilization" became a new yardstick with which to measure blacks' capacity for leadership as shown by Ada Ferrer in "Rustic Men, Civilized Nation: Race, Culture and Contention on the Eve of Cuban Independence," HAHR 78, no. 4 (1998)
20. De la Fuente, "With All and For All"
21. Ferrer, "Rustic Men, Civilized Nation"
22. Aviva Chomsky, "The Aftermath of Repression: Race and Nation in Cuba after 1912," Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 4, no. 2 (1998)
23. Rebecca Scott, "Race, Labor and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar District of Cienfuegos, 1886-1909," HAHR 78, no. 4 (1998)
24. and Tomás Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 1902-1958: Apuntes para la historia de la lucha contra la discriminación racial (Habana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1990)
25. Scholars as divergent as Alexis de Tocqueville and Barbara J. Fields have observed the intimate relationship between the elimination of legal barriers to equality and the crystallization of justifications of racial inferiorities. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: G. Dearborn, 1838)
26. and Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York; Oxford Univ. Press, 1982)
27. Aline Helg, "Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930," in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), esp. 48-49
28. Francisco Figueras, Cuba y su evolución colonial (Havana: Imp. Avisador Comercial, 1907)
29. and idem, La intervención y su política (Havana: Imp. Avisador Comercial, 1906)
30. Figueras's notion of "pacific penetration" is not clearly spelled out. See also Francisco Carrera y Jústiz, El municipio y la cuestión de razas (Havana: Imp. La Moderna Poesía, 1904)
31. Emilio Céspedes Casado, "La cuestión social cubana," published paper at the Instituto Booker T. Washington, 21 Apr. 1906 (Havana: La Propagandista, 1906), 7
32. El Mundo, 18 Dec. 1904
33. Also see Román, "An Indignant Public Opinion."
34. Orestes Ferrara, ed., Anuario estadistico de la República de Cuba (Havana: Imp. Siglo XX, 1914), 165
35. On the press and print culture in Cuba, see Ambrosio Fornet, El libro en Cuba: Siglos XVIII y XIX (Havana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 1994)
36. and José G. Ricardo, La imprenta en Cuba (Havana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 1989)
37. See Román's "An Indignant Public Opinion," for Varela Zequeira's extensive role in this case, including his participation in the investigation itself
38. El Mundo, 13 Dec. 1904, 1, 8
39. El Mundo, 5 Jan. 1906, 5, 8
40. Ibid
41. Césare Lombroso, L'homme criminel: Étude anthropologique et medico-légale (Paris: F. Alcan, 1887)
42. and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989)
43. "De la reorganización del servicio de vigilancia como una necesidad de la administración de la justicia en lo criminal," Archivo de la Universidad de la Habana, Fondo Secretaria General, Expediente Fernando Ortiz, no. 9975. There is an extensive bibliography on Fernando Ortiz that includes the following: Thomas Bremer, "The Constitution of Alterity: Fernando Ortiz and the Beginnings of Latin American Ethnography out of the Spirit of Italian Criminology," in Alternative Cultures in the Caribbean: First International Conference of the Society of Caribbean Research, ed. Thomas Bremer and Ulrich Fleischmann (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1993)
44. Fernando Coronil, introduction to Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995)
45. Diana Iznaga, Transculturación en Fernando Ortiz (Habana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1989)
46. Jorge Ibarra, "La herencia científica de Fernando Ortiz," Revista Iberoamericana 56 (1990)
47. and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, "Delincuencia y racismo en Cuba: Israel Castellanos versus Fernando Ortiz," in Ciencia y fascismo, ed. Rafael Huertas and Carmen Ortiz (Madrid: Doce Galles, 1998)
48. and Stephan Palmié, "Fernando Ortiz and the Cooking of History," Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 24, nos. 3-4 (1998)
49. See Fernando Ortiz, "Las tarjetas postales y la criminologíe, " Azul y Rojo 1, no. 10 (1902)
50. and idem, "Niños y salvajes," Azul y Rojo 2, no. 1 (1903)
51. Hampa was used at the time to invoke a criminal underworld
52. Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros brujos (apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal) (1906; reprint, Madrid: Ed America, 1917), 16. (Hereafter referred to as Los negros brujos.)
53. George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982)
54. Ortiz, Los negros brujos, esp. chap. 3
55. For an insightful discussion of the processes through which Latin American intellectuals differentiated and defined themselves during the initial years of their respective countries' independence from Spain, see Tulio Donghi Halperín, "España e Hispanoamerica," in El espejo de la historia: Problemas argentinos y perspectivas hispanoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1998)
56. For a further discussion on anthropological thinking, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002)
57. Instituto de Literatura y Linguística, Havana (hereafter cited as ILL), Fondo Fernando Ortiz (FFO) , carpeta 36 "Brujos," nos. 542-50
58. "Anonymous letter written to the chief of the Havana Detective Bureau," 21 Dec. 1900, United States National Archive, RG 140, Entry 3, letters received, box 105, file no. 4163
59. Discussed at the end of this essay
60. El Mundo, 16 July 1906, 2
61. "Muchas de sus observaciones se basan en datos recogidos con indisculpable ligereza," El Comercio, 10 July 1906, 3
62. Diario de la Familia, 10 July 1906, 3
63. La Discusión, 12 Aug. 1906, 11. Jesús Castellanos also took issue with Ortiz's technique, suggesting that Ortiz was not the only Lombrosian criminologist in Cuba. Refuting characterizations of the book as a straightforward criminological tract, he emphasized instead its ethnographic value as a study of "bajos fondos sociales." His conclusions were rather less optimistic than those of the others
64. La Unión Española, 5 Nov. 1906, 3
65. and 25 Nov. 1906, 10
66. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York; Norton, 1996)
67. Universidad de la Habana, Memorias: Anuarios correspondiente al curso academico de 1901-1902 (Habana: Imp. Avisador Comercial, 1903), 97-98
68. Darwin was not on the initial syllabi. For a discussion of Darwinism in Cuba, see Pedro M. Pruna, Darwinismo y sociedad en Cuba, siglo XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1989)
69. Universidad de la Habana, Memorias: Anuarios correspondiente al curso academico de 1906-7 (Habana: Imp. Avisador Comerical, 1908). The 1906 university reform created a new course entitled "Derecho municipal e historia de las instituciones locales cubanas" in the Escucla de Derecho Público. This class was first taught by Carrera Justiz, and later by his student Fernando Ortiz
70. Universidad de la Habana, Memorias, 1906-7, pub. 1908
71. For a better understanding of the disagreements among French and Italian anthropologists, see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton Univerity Press, 1984), esp. chap. 4
72. Aristides Mestre, "Brujería y criminalidad en Cuba," Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias (Havana) 33 (1923): 318
73. See Ricardo, La imprenta en Cuba, 152
74. Ferrara, Anuario estadístico de la República de Cuba
75. On the U.S., see Daniel T Rodgers, "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History 10 (1982)
76. and Gary Gerstle, "The Protean Character of American Liberalism," American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994)
77. On Europe, Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France
78. George W Stocking Jr., After Tyler: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995)
79. Daniel Pick, "The Faces of Anarchy: Lombroso and the Politics of Criminal Science in Post-Unification Italy," History Workshop 21 (1986)
80. and idem, Faces of Degeneration
81. Daniel T. Rodgers has also recently demonstrated the intertwined relationships between European and U.S. progressives in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998)
82. For Latin America, see Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America
83. and Charles Hale, "Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1870-1930," in vol. 4 of Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 12 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986)
84. See also Eduardo A. Zimmermann, Los liberales reformistas: La cuestión social en la Argentina, 1890-1916 (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1995)
85. Nancy L. Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics': Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991)
86. and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930, trans. Leland Guyer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). Zimmermann assumes that racialist theories were transposed from Europe to Argentina with minimal change. I would suggest that particular circumstances in Cuba led Cuban commentators to reshape European ideas
87. Editorial, Vida Nueva (Havana) 1(1921)
88. For autobiographical information, see Israel Castellanos, "Confidencias de Israel Castellanos, de la Habana," Higia 2 (1917)
89. For biographical information, see Andrés Gómez Galera, Ciencia y delincuencia: El determinismo antropológico en la España del siglo XLX (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigadones Científicas, 1991), 141-72
90. Israel Castellanos, La brujería y el ñañiguismo en Cuba desde el punto de vista médico-legal (Havana: Imp. Del Lloredo, 1916), 9
91. For another comparison of Ortiz and Castellanos, see Consuelo Naranjo Ovio and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, "Delincuencia y racismo en Cuba: Israel Castellanos versus Fernando Ortiz," in Ciencia y fascismo, ed. Carmen Ortiz and Rafael Huertas (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1998)
92. In his role as secretary of the association, Fernando Guerra published a number of manifestos calling for greater respect of African-derived religions on constitutional grounds. He also invited Fernando Ortiz to join the Culto Santa Barbara in 1911. See Fernando Guerra, "'Manifiesto' Culto Religioso Africano Lucumí 'Santa Barbara'," 19 July 1913, ILL, FFO, carpeta 34C
93. The armed uprising and massacre of 1912 can be understood as part of the same dynamic and merits a separate discussion because of the particular political circumstances. See Alejandra Bronfman "Barbarism and its Discontents: Race and Civilization in Cuba, 1912-1919," in "Reforming Race in Cuba, 1902-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 2000)
94. The literature on 1912 is extensive. See, among others, Serafín Portuondo Linares, Los independientes de color (Havana: Ed. Lib. Selecta, 1950)
95. Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 1902-1958
96. Thomas Orum, "The Politics of Color: The Racial Dimension of Cuban Politics During the Early Republican Years, 1900-1912" (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1975)
97. Rafael Fermoselle, Política y color en Cuba: La guerrita de 1912 (Montevideo: Ed. Géminis, 1974)
98. and Louis A. Pérez Jr., "The 1912 'Race War' in Cuba Reconsidered," HAHR 66 (1986)
99. Ernesto Chávez Alvarez, El crimen de la niña Cecilia (Havana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1991), 26-8
100. "Causa criminal contra Diego Ozeguera y otros por asociación ilícita," 10 Jan. 1913, ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, no. 43, Juzgado de instrucción de la sección segunda, 43
101. "Declaración del Vigilante 1247 Amador Prio Rivas," ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, pp. 31-2
102. "Declaración del vigilante 534 Juan Gonzalez," ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, p. 33
103. ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, p. 34
104. ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, pp. 94-111
105. ANC, AH, leg. 223-2, p. 118
106. ANC, AH, Sala tercera de lo criminal, leg. 223-2, pp. 49-50
107. For the cases between 1904 and 1923, see Alvarez, El crimen de la niña Cecilia
108. and the court cases in ANC, AH, legs. 459-5, 781-6, and 781-9
109. El Día, 15 Sept. 1, 11
110. This seems to be a unique phenomenon in twentieth-century Latin America. On persecution of and violence against minorities, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996)
111. On the fear of cannibalism, see Rosalind Morris, "Anthropology in the Body Shop: Lords of the Garden, Cannibalism, and the Consuming Desires of Televisual Anthropology;" American Anthropologist 98, no. 1 (1996)
112. El Día, 23 March 1919
113. El Día, 22 Apr., and 25 Apr. 1919
114. El Día, 28 June 1919. Interestingly, there were no accusations of this kind made during the colonial period. Their emergence in the modern period is examined in Roman, "An Indignant Public Opinion"
115. and Bronfman, "Reforming Race in Cuba."
116. It is not entirely clear who these men were. In Our Rightful Share, Helg claims that 8 men died, but the newspaper reports 1 dead and 12 injured. See, El Día, 29 June, and 30 June, 1919
117. For a discussion of a similar strategy deployed by Ida Wells in critiques of North American lynchings, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 2
118. De la Fuente, "'With All and For All'," 320
119. "Manifiesto relativo a los sucesos ocurridos en Regia y Matanzas a consecuencia de las prácticas de brujería y canibalismo," ANC, Fondo Adquisiciones, caja 65, no. 4201
120. and El Día, 2 Aug. 1919