Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 73

If we analyze nineteenth-century, Cuban literature using these concepts, we can clearly see that representations of blacks are subject to a contaminating action
equal to the degree that these subjects and their actions
threatened to destroy or blemish the symbolic order
imagined and imposed by the period’s slave society.
If the abject is something “rejected that one does not
separate from,”18 as Kristeva says, slaves would be the
quintessence of that abjection. Because white wellbeing depended on them, slaves were the greatest danger, their greatest worry, the thing whites would have
preferred to do without, but remained attached to.
This is why Del Monte’s group of writers saw slaves
and the slave social-symbolic system as a kind of illness that contaminated “all the trees,” and started promoting abolition. Yet, they simultaneously saw the influence slaves had on their lives with horror. Del
Monte would put this most expressively: “the cancer
that is eating away at us is domestic slavery.”19
By “cancer,” Del Monte was referring to a kind of illness that ate away at the “trees’ bark,” producing an
acrid, red liquid. Just as this illness could kill off a
good harvest, Del Monte was suggesting that black
slaves could be the end of them. These writers had no
choice but to carry out a “healing or purification” campaign whose focus was slaves who lived in their masters’ homes—wet nurses, carriage drivers and, mulatas, particularly, like those that appeared on cigar
box labels and in nineteenth-century literature, and
were seen as romantic femme fatales capable of giving
pleasure and simultaneously bringing about death.
One might say that this duality has Christian roots,
since, as Kristeva noted, the “brilliance” of Christianity in this respect was to conceive of the body as a
“desire” that manifests its self as sin, lacking, or iniquity, on the one hand, and a “spirit” filled with divinity
and the sublime—as expressed through beauty and
love—on the other.
In Creto Gangá’s poem “La mulata,” she is described
as a combination of heretic and Christian.20 In Cecilia
Valdés, the narrators says she is the “virgencita de cobre” [little virgin of Cobre], who simultaneously embodies all the lust and moral degradation of the mixture produced by blacks and whites. She is everything
the criollo, sugar aristocracy’s, white families fear;
everything that men want and fear at the same time.
She is a curse. This is why Leonardo’s romance with

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Cecilia ends with the mulatto Pimienta killing him and
Cecilia in an insane asylum. Something quite similar
takes place in El negro Francisco, Antonio Zambrana’s novel, in which the protagonist ends up hanging himself after his wife, another mulata, decides to
give herself to her owner to save his life.
In either case, even if the mulata acted out of love or
‘sacrifice,” she ends up ‘lost’ and ending the life of her
lover. That is why the mulata is not only as the most
obvious symbol of racial mixing, but above all a reminder of the very porous margins that separated
blacks and whites in Cuba. It was through racially
mixing with whites that mulatas could “escape” their
race, and remove the “curse” of having been slaves.
This explains why in slave society with norms and
fears about dispersion, male and female mulattoes
bore the sign of rebellion on the skin. This is why
those writers so emphasized trying to establish their
“virtue,” despite their desire for and fear of blacks, because when they succumbed to their masters, or
sought sexual relations with them, they endangered
their ideas concerning purity, privileges and racial descent. Once again, the threat of blacks permeated the
white family.
That fear, of course, was not new nor did it originate
with slave society. Purity of blood is a concept deeply
rooted in the Spanish mentality since prior to the Conquest, and exerted a great deal of influence on nineteenth-century, Cuban society. According to Verena
Stolcke, in Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial
[Racism and Sexuality in Colonial Cuba], purity divided Cubans into pure ones (whites) and impure ones
(blacks and mestizos). “He who is pure can easily be
contaminated and impure precisely through marriage
with a member of the impure category. Theoretically,
however, he who is impure can never completely be
rid of his impurity.”21
Eduardo Ezponda, an anti-slavery writer born in
Puerto Rico and who lived in Cuba for many years,
beautifully summarized this dilemma in his essay “La
mulata” (1878). In it, he refers to sexual relations between whites and mulatas as a contagion, epidemic
and impurity: “The degenerate offspring bears the seal
of maternal quality. She is not spared because she is
the child of a white man. Not being the product of a
seduction, or even force. Color reigns supreme over
any other, philosophical consideration. Impurity is