PlanetCuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island by Rachel Price

Author:Rachel Price [Price, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

For Saco, “gaming” (or gambling) is not only philosophically opposed to work. In what he imagines as a kind of economy, it consumes time and money that would otherwise be spent on more “honest” labor. Saco claimed that one cause of idleness was the sheer lack of journals or scientific papers in an Atheneum; the lack, in short, of what he saw as an enlightened society.37 He furthermore attributed idleness to a geographic determinism by which Cuban land was seen as so fertile one hardly needed to work at all.38 But the final reason intimated in his treatise was significant for comprehending the importance of his treatise as the product of a slave society: Saco bemoaned the creation of a class of aristocratic and mainly white non-workers in a society based on African slavery. Although he perceived the racialized character of idleness, he to some extent only partially described the nature of the problem. The issue, of course, was not only “white idleness” but black coerced labor. Undergirding this treatise on idleness written by the author of the monumental Historia de la esclavitud (History of Slavery, 1875) is the slave society underpinning the island’s wealth.

Debates about labor and idleness, from the Special Period back through the revolution, the Republic, and the colonial period before it, must be considered in light of this long history of racialized slavery on the island. Julio Ramos has argued that Saco’s text is itself the product of a metaphysics of racialized productivism, and that “the so-called question of work has, since the nineteenth century, an inescapably racialized and racist dimension in Cuba and in all of the Caribbean and Latin America, where the very theme of discipline and idleness assumed with much naturalness the privilege of the white man’s ‘free’ time.”39 “Free time,” in Cuba, has long been a charged concept rooted in an evolving or accruing Atlantic labor history.

In the late nineteenth century Paul Lafargue offered another connection between slavery and post-slavery societies and idleness. Lafargue was the Santiago-born son-in-law of Karl Marx and the author of the famous “Right to Laziness” (Droit a la peresse), which he published in France in 1880, six years before abolition in Cuba. In many ways, he was only nominally Cuban. He left the island around the age of ten, thereafter residing in France, Spain, and England. Yet his Cuban childhood may not be as immaterial as it at first seems.40 Nor, perhaps, is the 2007 re-edition in Cuba of his selected writings incidental.41

Lafargue was born in 1842. His paternal grandparents were a French-born landowner who fled the Haitian Revolution and a Dominican mixed-race woman who fled the mid-century wars in the Dominican Republic. The two moved to Louisiana after 1808, along with many other former slave- and land-owners escaping a post-slavery, newly independent Haiti. His maternal grandmother was indigenous (Taíno or Siboney), while his grandfather was a French-Jewish businessman.42 In 1851, at age nine or ten, he moved to Bordeaux. He eventually participated in the Paris Commune, worked in Spain, and opened a photography business in England.

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