CUBA, PUERTO RICO, AND SURINAM
MISCEGENATION in Cuba took place chiefly between whites and blacks because the Indians were soon killed off and Negroes brought in to take their place about 1523. There is little Indian strain in the Cuban.
The royal decree allowing slavery stipulated that no Moors, Jews, or native Africans were to be taken to the Indies but only Negroes who had been reared in Spain under Christian influence. The purpose was to have docile slaves but the blacks were so badly treated that rebellions began soon after and continued for centuries.
So many Negroes were brought to Cuba that they soon outnumbered the whites, a good many of whom were in reality, mulattoes. In 1817, the whites and near-whites were 259,260; the free blacks, dark mulattoes and slaves 379,188. Abbott, who was in Cuba in 1828, estimates that there were 300,000 whites, 200,000 free Negroes and mulattoes, and 500,000 slaves. The 1841 census gave 418,291 whites; 88,054 mulattoes; 64,784 free blacks; 10,974 mulatto slaves; and 425,521 black slaves, thus the black and mulatto population exceeded the white by 171,042. It must be remembered, too, that many of the whites, perhaps the most of them, were really mulattoes, because in Cuba as in other Latin American lands, mulattoes who had money or influence could get their “white” papers. J. M. Phillippo who lived in Cuba in 1856 says that the total number of slaves alone on the island was between 800,000 and 900,000.
Despite the many slave revolts, there was, however, much genuine affection between white and black in Cuba. The island’s first and only good school until 1792 was conducted by a mulatto, named Melendez, according to the Countess de Merlin, a native Cuban, and the majority of his pupils was white. A slave woman, too, was often the foster-mother of the future master or mistress of the plantation. Countess Merlin describes an affecting scene between an invalid white Cuban girl and her Negro nurse. “She took the woolly head of the Negro woman and toyed with it; struck her softly on the cheek, and made a hundred other caresses.”1
With no laws against mixed marriages, whites of both sexes married with the mulattoes and sometimes with the blacks. A white American visitor to Cuba in 1855, wrote, “Many Spaniards married Negroes and their attachment to the blacks is so strong that almost all the mulattoes are their children. White, or Galician, Spanish women had no aversion to marrying Negroes.”2
This has continued to the present. Another white American, Arnold Roller, writing in 1929, said, “The whites, particularly the workers, small shopkeepers and artisans, frequently marry the mulatto girls or live in free unions with them and the children of these unions are always considered white… . Many who in Cuba are considered whites would still be called Negroes in the United States.”3
Though Cuba is listed as a white country the visitor there will find a close ethnic similarity between its towns and the great centres of Negro population in the United States. This is especially true of the populous city of Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province. “Cuba,” says Beals,” considers white blood more potent than do we Americans. Among us, if a man has a drop of black blood he is listed as black, but in Cuba if he has a drop of white blood he is more likely to be put down as white. Hence official Cuban statistics cannot be relied on for any true picture. The 1930 census reports 2,570,000 white and 923,346 colored… .
“Cuba is predominantly a mulatto country. The nambises, the Negro-mulatto ethnic element, constitute the real Cuba. A more correct picture would probably give 30 per cent white; 40 per cent mixed; and 30 per cent Negro… . Oriente is predominantly a black province.”4
Schurz, a more recent writer, says much the same: “The mixture of white and black in Cuba has also proceeded so far since the early introduction of Negro slavery into the island that however light their complexion many of the old families could not pass a test of sangre puro.”5 Of course there has been a considerable immigration of Europeans to the island in more recent times but as Beals says the time has been too short to reverse the actual figures of colored and white.
The mulattoes, who were too dark to pass for white, with the blacks have played a role of great importance in Cuban history. They furnished more than 75 per cent of the fighting men in the wars for independence. Cuba’s most renowned military figure was a dark mulatto, Antonio Maceo. White and black fought separately but there were many of Negro strain in the white regiments. The leader of the whites, and commander-in-chief of the Cuban army, Maximo Gomez, was a native of Santo Domingo and had a light Negro strain, according to Sir Harry Johnston. Gomez was the first president of the republic.
THE PRESIDENT OF CUBA.
XXVI. Colonel Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s president.
The fight for independence brought all Cubans, regardless of color, closer together, but with American intervention and the introduction of American color prejudice, Cuba had her first great clash between colored and white since the abolition of slavery. In 1912 the colored people, large numbers of them veterans of the war of Independence, revolted under General Estenoz. Thousands were killed. This revolt resulted in an improvement of the racial situation. Today the president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, is of mixed white and Negro blood, with a touch of either Indian or Chinese. “He has the flat nose and dextrous white-palmed hands of the Negro,”6 says Carleton Beals. Batista’s complexion is that of a mulatto, while his hair is nearer that of the Indian.
There are also occasional marriages between white Americans and Negro Cubans. In the 1890’s, a white American society belle “of excellent family” chose as her husband, a coal-black Cuban, of great wealth. Dorothy Stanhope in the New York Times, September 16, 1900, describes her as “a reigning belle in a large city of one of our Eastern states, who was always spoken of as the beautiful Miss ——.” Deciding to marry for money, so it is said, she selected “the wealthiest of her suitors, a Cuban, black as night,” who “gave her a palace for a home and all the rest in keeping.” They lived in Cuba.
Cuba has had many distinguished mulattoes. Among them are Placido, her greatest poet; Jose White, celebrated violinist, who won many honors in Europe’s greatest concert halls, and was later head of the Conservatory of Music of Brazil under Dom Pedro II; Juan Gualberto Gomez, who was a dominant figure in Cuban politics for nearly half a century; Paul LaFargue, Socialist writer, who married the daughter of Karl Marx; and Jose Maria Heredia, one of the Forty Immortals of France. Heredia denied his Negro strain saying that he was of conquistador ancestry, but in France, he was generally known as a colored man,7 and his name was linked with a great contemporary of his, Alexander Dumas the Younger, who was of Negro ancestry. Still another Heredia of Cuba, unmistakably a Negro, was a French Cabinet minister in 1887. Both the Heredias married white French women.
Among the most distinguished blacks were Manzano, slave poet, “whose facile and easy prose” exceeds even the flow of his verse; Brindis de Sala, one of the greatest violinists in the history of music, who won the most lavish praise of the critics of France, Italy, and Germany, and who was chief violinist at the Court of William I of Germany, who made him a baron, and approved his marriage to a German lady of rank; General Quintin Bandera and General Guillermo de Moncada, both heroes of the Cuban Revolution. Two more recent distinguished blacks are Morúa Delgado, who was president of the Senate and Minister of Agriculture; and General Manuel de Jesús Delgado who was Minister of Agriculture. Arredondo gives a partial list of noted colored Cubans.
Puerto Rico
What is true of Cuba is also largely true of Puerto Rico. The Spaniards arrived in the island in 1508, and in less than ten years the Indians were either killed off or driven into the mountains. Negroes were brought in such numbers to take their place that as early as 1544, Governor Lando wrote, “The island is so depopulated that Spaniards are scarcely seen; only Negroes.”8
Among the eighteen companions of Ponce de Leon in the settlement of Puerto Rico was at least one Negro, Pedro Mexia,9 who was wealthy, and who married the widow of an Indian chief, Donna Luisa. Mexia was killed while defending her from her own