Insurgent Cuba by Ferrer Ada;

Author:Ferrer, Ada;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1999-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Seeing the Insurgents

When noncombatants (or potential combatants) looked at the invading insurgent army, they measured that army and its members against longstanding colonial claims about racial warfare, as well as against newer nationalist claims about the impossibility of such warfare, for as the insurgent army made its way westward, its arrival was preceded by stories and predictions of its coming. These stories revealed the continuing power of old images of black ascendancy, but they reflected, as well, a lack of knowledge about other regions of the island, as western communities heard rumors about armed men coming from a region characterized as the birthplace of predominantly black rebellion since the late 1860s. In small western towns and on farms and sugar mills on the path of the invading army, “everyone said in a single voice: here comes Maceo, here comes Máximo Gómez. . . and here comes Quintín Banderas [sic] at the head of the blacks with nose rings.”23 The circulation of such rumors conditioned the way westerners—even sympathetic ones—viewed the soldiers and officers arriving from the east.

As insurgents watched the westerners watch them, they seemed to know that the act of seeing them was inseparable from all those rumors and stories they heard now and all the rumors and stories they had heard for decades before. Thus Bernabé Boza, a white officer in Máximo Gómez’s column, described the insurgents’ arrival in the town of Roque in Matanzas province, where local officials came out to greet them, pleading with them not to hurt anyone and not to burn down their town. They were relieved, said Boza, to realize that the insurgents were honorable men, and they were happy “above all” to see that the Cuban soldiers were not “savage hordes of murderous blacks with rings in their noses.”24 Similar scenes of trepidation and relief were repeated throughout invaded territory. Their welcome in the town of Alquízar in Havana province, for example, was more enthusiastic, but not unambivalent:

All the stores remained open as if to show their owners’ trust in the honor of the invaders. . . . The multitude of people leaning out of doors, windows, and porches . . . did not stop, even for a moment, their shouting, giving frenetic cries of long live Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo and Cuba free and independent. I think there was a lot of fear mixed in those noisy public declarations. . . . I think those wide-open eyes of women and children concealed or covered the fear or terror that we caused them, and upon looking us over they searched in our faces—since they did not see the nose rings that the Spanish said we carried—for signs of something horrible and ferocious. . . and they were astonished to find none.25

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.