Maroon Communities of Immigrants: Africans in late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

• In Event: Daily Life and Death in Port Cities of the Colonial Circum-Caribbean

Abstract

This paper explores articulations of African political identity in early 20th-century Cuba. Drawing on research spanning 1880-1910 in Cuba’s western provinces, the paper traces the evolution of African political consciousness across the late 19th century and into the 20th as it developed alongside and in contention with Spanish and Cuban national identity. I explore how and why some of Cuba’s African-born and African-identified inhabitants saw themselves as distinct from both Spanish subjects and “Cuban natives.” Membership in the Cuban nation was at times likened to another form of coercion, if not slavery. The creation of Cuban citizenship and the constitution of the Cuban republic in 1902 only intensified the resolve of these resistant Africans to articulate a separate identity. Surprisingly, however, these individuals did not opt for repatriation to Africa. Unlike their compatriots in the diaspora who sought freedom in return, they were determined to flee in place, to exist as something that can only be described as a maroon community of immigrants. But with nowhere to go and no way to stay in Cuba and refuse Cuban citizenship, Africans devised creative strategies of resistance to both state and nation. While these small acts of resistance were largely unsuccessful, they provide a fascinating window into the lives and perspectives of a group of island inhabitants who rejected one of the most politically inclusive states to emerge in the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than see this rejection as counterintuitive, I see it as political, purposeful and prescient.

Author

• Dalia A Muller, University at Buffalo