THE CUBAN TEACHERS AT HARVARD,
IN THE ERA OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM
of the
AUTHOR: ALEJANDRO DE LA FUENTE
Like "grown up children... who could not understand the importance of what they saw." This is how an American newspaper described the Cuban teachers who visited Harvard in the summer of 1900. That the Havana press echoed the note illustrates the tensions that this initiative inevitably generated. The purposes, values, ideas and knowledge that supported the expedition were subject to diverse interpretations, both in Cuba and in the United States.
Race was at the center of those tensions. The US occupation of Cuba took place at a time when various narratives and knowledge about human differences, evolution and progress had been consolidated in a scientific corpus that openly proclaimed and supposedly explained black inferiority. Since the mid-19th century, a group of eminent biologists and phrenologists, including Harvard luminaries like Louis Agassiz, have tried to anchor that inferiority in the biology and physiology of people of African descent. Southern doctors dissected the black body for signs of inferiority and found it in every possible organ, from limbs to lungs. Validated by the supposed neutrality and objectivity that make science a special form of knowledge, numerous anthropometric studies concluded that black people were inferior. They were incapable of participating in civilized societies and were condemned to disappear in the inevitable process of competition with the superior white race. At the height of their glory, Social Darwinists used these conclusions to argue that the battle for "survival of the fittest" explained not only the subservience of the Negro, but the rise of certain nations and races in a world that seemed to have no place. for the so-called primitive peoples.
The American occupying forces brought this racist ideology—and the segregationist practices it rationalized and justified—with them to the island. What they found in Cuba was precisely one of those primitive populations that social Darwinists placed at the bottom of the evolutionary scale. It was about a population that, according to their perceptions and racial ideologies, was made up fundamentally of “Negroes” in need of supervision and control. If there was any doubt about Cuba's capacity for self-government and betterment, none existed about its collective inferiority. The American military believed in the cultural and racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and viewed the Cubans as members of a "race of ignorant savages." As one contemporary observer admitted, even the best-intentioned Americans came to the island as missionaries "among barbarians."
The inferiority of the Cuban people was, of course, racial. As Governor Leonard Wood—“a man from Harvard,” according to the Cambridge Chronicle—explained to President McKinley, “we are dealing with a race that has been in decline for hundreds of years and in which we must instill new life, new principles, and new methods of doing things.” This could not be otherwise, he explained, because after being inundated for centuries with the dregs of Spanish society, the island had too much "mixed blood" to enter successfully into the concert of civilized nations. "There are definitely black elements in many of Cuba's whites," said an Oxford professor. Blackness was so prevalent in Cuba, another observer noted, that the majority of the population was not actually white. “Based on our standards, it is doubtful whether five percent of the population can show clean white lineage”
Such a level of miscegenation was seen as a legacy that the island could not escape. The mixture of races, the American scientists had concluded after numerous investigations on the subject, resulted in degeneration. "The anthropometry of the mulatto is decidedly against it," said Professor William Smith of Tulane University. Miscegenation, in turn, violated the harmony of nature and led to "racial decadence." According to influential geneticist Charles Davenport—another Harvard graduate who later taught biology at the University—Multattos combined "ambition" inherited from whites with "intellectual insufficiency" received from blacks, making them "unhappy hybrids" prone to disrupt social harmony. The consequences for Cuba were disastrous, as an American journalist explained: “Cuba is politically impossible, socially impossible, economically impossible, because morally it is rotten... These Cubans are... the dregs of a race... They cannot rise above themselves. themselves. Guilt is racial. Cuba...produces a difficult, unruly mixed blood that leads to depravity”.
Mixed, unruly, depraved. These visions had clear political implications that resulted in a political order that sought to exclude Afro-Cubans and cede control to what Wood described as "the actual Cuban population, I mean the producers and merchants." As the Immigration Commission expressed in one of its reports to the United States Senate, “The term 'Cuban' refers to Cuban people (not blacks)”. Consequently, just as they were preparing the trip for the teachers, the US authorities passed an electoral law that was as restrictive as possible. The law stipulated that only men who possessed the following qualifications could vote: 21 years of age or older; natives or Spaniards who had not explicitly declared their allegiance to the crown of Spain, and residents in the municipalities for at least 30 days. In addition to these general requirements, voters had to possess one of the following: be able to read and write; property worth $250.00 (American gold), or having served in the Liberation Army with priority on July 18, 1898, a concession that Wood considered to be an inevitable evil. The first municipal elections (1900), and those of the Constituent Convention (1901), took place under this electoral law. As in the American South, where African Americans were disenfranchised, these restrictions were designed to appear racially neutral. But what the officers did not publicly proclaim, they privately acknowledged. Wood admitted that the law had the virtue of excluding "the sons and daughters of Africans imported to the Island as slaves" from the political process, which would in turn prevent a "second edition of Haiti or Santo Domingo in the future."
This exclusion was short-lived, however, because the almost exclusively white Constitutional Convention of 1901 decided to support the principle of universal male suffrage over the objections of Governor Wood. This principle was defended as an “acquired right”, a popular “conquest” that should reach all Cubans (men) regardless of their race or wealth. As one of the white delegates to the Convention put it, any limitation on the right to vote was to introduce a "disgusting privilege" into the life of the new republic.
Of course, many Cubans shared the notion that limiting the right to vote was desirable and patriotic. The racial ideologies of the American authorities found a receptive ear among Cuban landowners, businessmen, and other members of the elite who were already convinced of the racial inferiority of people of African descent. As for the traditional white Cuban elite, US officials, journalists, and scientists preached to those who did not need to be converted. It was precisely because of their apprehension that Afro-Cubans could play a significant role in Cuba's future political order that some members of the elite shared the colonial vision of black peril and opposed independence. As a white politician explained in 1888, to make Cuba a truly “civilized” country it was essential to sustain the superiority of its “Caucasian elements”. Cuba's most important problem was its multiracial population; That is why he called on "the descendants of Aryans" to maintain economic and political control of the island.
Many of these Cubans campaigned in favor of political annexation, which they perceived as the best guarantee for order and progress on the island. This group shared the prejudices of the occupying forces about the ability of Cubans to successfully establish an independent republic, free from US tutelage. In a well-known ethnographic and sociological analysis of the island's history, politician and writer Francisco Figueras argued that only by adopting Anglo-Saxon values was it possible to counteract the destructive effects of Cuba's racial composition. His skepticism was shared by other public figures, who maintained that the Cubans' penchant for misrule could only be explained by "atavism or the law of inheritance of the race." Spanish culture and colonialism not only made Cubans incapable of governing themselves, but also generated the presence in the population of "inferior types, masterfully described by Herbert Spencer," characterized by "witness, frivolity, and penchant for to jokes."
These inferior types were often infantilized, a metaphor anchored in evolutionism that was frequently used in the early 20th century to describe the racialized populations of the Caribbean. As the German zoologist Carl Vogt put it in 1864, "the adult Negro shares... the nature of the child." Numerous cartoons from the time portray Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Panamanians, and Central Americans as dark-skinned children who need to be disciplined and guided. Although the implementation of these childhood metaphors in the name of white supremacy could result in diverse politics, they all shared a common denominator: their civilizational concerns. This is one of the backgrounds—if not "the" background—of the expedition of the Cuban teachers of 1900.
Of course, such a program also projected the belief that racialized populations were capable of achieving high levels of culture and civilization—that is, they could approximate American ideals of citizenship and propriety. Americanization was never just a channel for imperialist domination, a space inhabited exclusively by bankers, investors, and planters. As scholars of Americanization in Puerto Rico have shown, it was polyvalent, multidirectional, and contradictory. Many agents of progress and civilization, such as missionaries, ended up living with rural populations and developing networks of true sympathy and support for them. The participants developed affective ties with the new territories and with their inhabitants, ties that could not be easily contained in the molds of pre-existing ideologies and prejudices.
In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and throughout the surrounding Caribbean area, many of these agents shared the American Progressives' conviction that education was central to building stable democratic orders. Local actors, on the other hand, frequently shared or manipulated these convictions to create institutions and opportunities that in many cases responded effectively to the aspirations and needs of racialized populations. The expansion of the public education system in Cuba during the first decades of the republic, closely linked to the teachers' visit to Harvard in 1900, is a good example of this. Importantly, that system was notoriously racially inclusive. The surprising and outstanding participation of a large number of Afro-descendant teachers in the expedition was, in this sense, foundational: it pointed out that the creation of a new order on the island could not be done without the participation of Afro-descendant people.
Note: this text is based on and reproduces portions of the book A nation for all: race, inequality and politics in Cuba, 1900-2000 (Havana: Contemporary Image, 2015).
further.