Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 68

The Poison of Race:
The Colonial Lettered City and
Black Africans

History

Jorge Camacho
Professor
University of South Carolina, Columbia
Cuban. Resident of the United States
“Who wouldn’t tremble upon seeing the swarm
of Africans approaching us?”
JOSÉ ANTONIO SACO
Letter to Captain General Miguel Tacón

F

ear of blacks in Cuba was a real misgiving
among whites during most of the nineteenth
century, due to the possibility that the thousands of African slaves on the island could rebel and
kill them off, as had happened in Haiti.
José Antonio Aponte carried out the most famous
slave uprising of all during the nineteenth century, in
1812. He even had allegorical drawings inspired by
Haitian black leaders seized from him. In this essay, I
wish to highlight how other phobias that greatly affected the way period, Cuban intellectuals referred to
slavery, the African race and criollo culture, in general, were also a byproduct of that original fear.
These other phobias are expressed in the images of
abomination and rejection that Africans evoked in
these writers, and originated during the sugar industry’s process of modernization. This was a time that
saw racial mixing, and the emergence of laws to regulate it, coincide with basic concepts regarding hygiene and public health. I base my argument on Mary

Douglas’s notion of “impurity” (Purity and Danger)
to explain the interaction between European and African descendants in Cuba.1
According to British anthropology, the idea of impurity is comparable to that of transgressing or violating
cultural categories, because anything that does not fall
within them has the capacity to threaten normativity
and, thus, sets off the regime’s alarms. In following
Mary Douglas, we should ask ourselves how blacks
were represented and interpellated by Cuban literature, science and the power elite when the slavocracy
was being established. This was a time when the criollo elite was facing heterogeneous elements that
threatened to change the traditional sphere of white,
criollo, Cuban culture.
Indeed, given the African population’s growth, European descendants saw African influence as a blemish
on their country they wanted so much to cleanse that
any racial and/or cultural mixing represented for them
the possibility of perishing at the hands of that
“swarm” that surrounded them. Among these threats
we can include the variety of African languages, public recreational practices, the mixture of African religion and Catholicism through Abakuá, Regla Kimbisa
and Santería, and even the educational impact of African wet nurses.
For this elite, these practices were symptomatic of a
perversion and one more example of the corruption

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