IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 2 ENGLISH | Page 78

some places, but many of them were without
jobs.”6
The scarce presence of dark-skinned people in
Cuba’s national imaginary at the beginning of the
twentieth century was caused by a number of factors that forged together prejudices that had prevailed since the colonial era. Even since the Haitian revolution, demographics and repeated insurrections carried out by blacks began to concern
the governing elite, which promoted “fear of
blacks and all things black.”7 The presence of
blacks in the Cuban society’s lower classes was
important; many of them did the kind of work that
had always been reserved for them, e.g., cleaning
and manual labor.
There was also a concomitant emergence of a
middle class, which coincided with the creation
of the Atenas Occidental club in Pinar del Río, a
response to the creation of important, homologous clubs in Havana. Later on, the Hijos de Maceo club was created in Pinar del Río, as a result
of the 1930s Afro-Cuban movement. Its membership was a new generation with new ideals.
Despite this undeniable progress, there was still
overt discrimination in daily life and implicit discrimination in the nation’s culture. The black
population, too, had its own, internal form of distinction. It functioned according to a combination
of social and racial criteria. Associationism was
not only a reflection of equality’s imperfection in
Cuba, but also reproduced. Both the Atenas Occidental and Hijos de Maceo clubs participated in
the elaboration of an imaginary indeed held up
equality as a guarantor of national unity, but it
also perpetuated stereotypes.

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Each and every objective represented in the Hijos
de Maceo club’s motto and emblem intended for
its members to conform to hegemonic representations of Cubans and embodied all the contradictions one might expect: morality, progress, regeneration and fraternity.
Atenas Occidental and Hijos de Maceo reinforced
the idea of patriotic integrity, emphasizing a past
and heroes common to all Cubans. They commemorated a number of symbolic dates every
year, and certain articles written by Atenas Occidental members recalled how everyone fought for
the country’s independence, whether they had
light skin or not: “Atenas Occidental is above all
our passions and only Cuba is above Atenas Occidental, given the great deal of blood that was
spilled for our nationality’s underpinnings.”
The references to national heroes emphasized the
position of blacks regarding race. The two, most
frequently mentioned men were, of course, José
Martí and Antonio Maceo. They believed in fraternity among the insurrectionist troops and prioritized the idea of nation over race.8
Even if that nationalism was opposed to racism,
its manipulation by certain groups among the
white bourgeoisie offered a different perspective.
In proclaiming that there was no racism to reinforce patriotic sentiment, there was a concomitant
erasure of cultural differences and denial of racism, even when its manifestation was obvious:
“Cuba, which cannot be racist for reasons of history and family…Parallel to this, certain racist
ideas about Maceo emerged. Given the fact that
the white elite accepted the Bronze Titan as an independence war hero, a national commission was