Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 71

acy,” by the end of the century the worries were presented as different, but were essentially the same: a
deep fear of otherness, interracial marriages or unions,
dances, music, religion, as well as a perpetual fear of
a rebellion of African descendants.
In this sense, we can understand “fear of blacks” not
only as a physical phobia produced by a conscious fear
of the Haitian revolution, as some have said,7 but also
as a cultural phobia due to the nearness of blacks in
their everyday lives, and their influence on white culture.
Cuba’s nineteenth-century, literature of manners became the preferred way to document all these misgivings. It became the vehicle through which the white,
lettered elite tried desperately to define its self as well
as others. Deep down inside, it was an extremely didactic attempt to reform the country from a white,
middle-class point of view, create order and uniformity in writing and customs, and keep the changes
from becoming the norm.
Criticism of African-origin practices, and those of
their descendants, as in the José Victoriano Betancourt
story “Los negros curros o el triple velorio” [Lowlife
Blacks or the Triple Wake], was meant to deny blacks
the right to influence criollo culture, and keep whites
from having to encounter a socially diverse multitude
of mestizos, blacks and mulattoes who were segregated in diverse urban and professional spaces because they were seen as inferiors. This is why we must
consider that those writers imagined themselves as occupying a central, privileged, national space, even
though in reality they were members of a group socially inferior to Peninsular Spaniards. Through their
writing, they put into practice, or supported exclusionary measures, in a desperate attempt to construct the
nation they wanted.
That explains why José Antonio Saco, Cirilo Villaverde, Eduardo Ezponda, Betancourt (father and
son), Francisco Calcaño and even José Martí saw
themselves like spatial administrators who analyzed,
selected and proposed a view of Cuba that was anchored in their own interests, and that of white, Spanish culture. Things outside this view were seen as “objects that should be removed from the national
space.”8
Could it be any other way, if it was really about their
survival as a class? No. As Michel Foucault stated in

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Nacimiento de la biopolítica [The Birth of Biopolitics], liberalism’s primary currency was “living dangerously.” Foucault spoke of a “culture of danger” in
Europe during this period, which is also reflected in
campaigns for savings banks, detective literature, publicity of crimes, and yellow or sensationalist literature.
Precisely, one of the ways to domesticate this fear in
Europe was using sanitary campaigns carried out by
numerous governments, to avoid their subjects’ “degeneration” (of any sort), whether it involved the family, individual, race, human being or sexuality.9
According to Foucault, a rigid system of surveillance,
control and coercion was implemented as an antidote
to the political freedoms that came with nineteenthcentury liberalism. Now the question was not what
people’s original rights were, or who could attain
them, but to what degree old or modern institutions
were useful or useless, or at what point they became
harmful.10
Angel Rama, who was influenced by Foucault, clearly
suggested a need to study what power the “lettered
city” had in the creation of Hispanic America’s national imaginaries ever since the Spanish Conquest.
This “city” would be the protective ring of those in
power, administrative systems, writers, jurists, and anyone who could possibly exert influence through writing. According to Rama, these writers saw themselves
as constantly threatened by most of the population that
lived at the periphery of urban centers, and constantly
changed language and customs.11
Paraphrasing Foucault, we could say that they asked
themselves at what point the modern institutions that
had brought progress to Cuba had become harmful
and threatened to extinguish them. They wondered
how science and literature could contribute to this progress and help avoid greater ills in the future.
To minimally understand these concerns, it is enough
to read the book Reflexiones histórico físicas naturales médico quirúrgicas [Natural, Medical-Surgical,
Historical-Physical Reflections (1798), by Francisco
Barrera y Domingo, one of the first books ever written
in Cuba. It details the different illnesses suffered by
slaves at sugar mills. Or, read in Papel Periódico de
La Habana [The Havana Broadside] the letter that
José Agustín Caballero wrote to “sugar harvesters”
who kept slaves locked up in slave barracks. According to Caballero, those places were dens of disease