A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century

A CUBAN CITY, SEGREGATED

A CUBAN CITY, SEGREGATED

Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century

BONNIE A. LUCERO

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by Bonnie A. Lucero

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Cover image: Map of the Colonia Fernandina de Jagua, circa 1820

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lucero, Bonnie A., author.

Title: A Cuban city, segregated : race and urbanization in the nineteenth century / Bonnie A. Lucero.

Description: Tuscaloosa, Ala. : The University of Alabama Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018038925| ISBN 9780817320034 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817392123 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Cienfuegos (Cuba : Province)—History—19th century. | Cienfuegos (Cuba : Province)—Race relations—19th century. | Cienfuegos (Cuba : Province)—Social conditions—19th century. | Urbanization—Cuba—Cienfuegos (Province)—History—19th century. | Segregation—Cuba—Cienfuegos (Province)—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC F1852.5 .L83 2018 | DDC 972.91/43—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038925

To my mom, who early in my life planted the seeds of my curiosity in the intersections of race, class, and gender

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Terminology

Introduction: Urban Order and Racial Exclusion

1. A White Colony in the Age of Africanization, 1790s–1830s

2. A Town of Racial Enclaves, 1840s–1860s

3. Freedom and Marginality in a Divided City, 1860s–1890s

4. Negotiating Exclusion in the Historic City Center, 1890s

5. Consolidating a White City Center under US Rule

Conclusion: Reclaiming Urban Space in the Early Republic

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1.1. Map of Fernandina de Jagua, c. 1820

1.2. Black-owned plots within Jagua’s first twenty-five urban blocks up to 1820

1.3. Black-owned land in Cienfuegos, 1819–44

1.4. Town of Cienfuegos c. 1830s with swamp and flood zones

1.5. Eastern extension of city limits, 1829–36

1.6. Cienfuegos, c. 1838 with 1820 limits marked

2.1. Cienfuegos c. 1858 with neighborhoods and building code exemptions

3.1. Cienfuegos with neighborhoods and major thoroughfares subject to building restrictions, c. 1880

3.2. Urban property acquisitions by people of African descent, 1850–99

3.3. Urban block with measures of a standard solar

4.1. Location of Mercado and Paradero in relation to historic city center

4.2. Santa Cruz Street, nineteenth century

4.3. Corner of Santa Cruz and Hourruitiner in Mercado, early twentieth century

4.4. Teatro Tomás Terry, late nineteenth century

4.5. Teatro Tomás Terry, c. 1904

4.6. Locations of public schools in Cienfuegos, c. 1899

4.7. Church marriages involving people of color in Cienfuegos, nineteenth century

5.1. Plaza Real, c. 1890s

5.2. Captain of the port, c. 1899

5.3. Cienfuegos Bay and docks, viewed from the south

5.4. Condition of land in Barrio de Reina, pre-1879

5.5. Reina in the early twentieth century

5.6. Cemetery in Reina

5.7. Caricature of Boer War

C.1. Map of Havana, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.2. Map of Matanzas, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.3. Map of Cienfuegos, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.4. Map of Santa Clara, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.5. Map of Puerto Príncipe, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.6. Map of Santiago, c. mid-nineteenth century

C.7. Eastward view of Workers’ Arch of Triumph in Cienfuegos, early twentieth century

C.8. Westward view of Workers’ Arch of Triumph in Cienfuegos, early twentieth century

C.9. Arch in Paradero

C.10. Arch of Triumph on Santa Cruz and De Clouet Streets, 1902

C.11. Arch on Calzada de Dolores in Pueblo Nuevo

C.12. Arch at southern extreme of Mercado

C.13. Monument to Dionisio Gil, Cienfuegos

TABLES

1.1. African-Descended Population by Sex, Age, and Legal Status, Cienfuegos, 1830

1.2. Urban Population of Jagua by Race, Sex, and Age, 1830

2.1. Agricultural Specialization in the Hinterlands of Cienfuegos, 1827–62

2.2. Population by Race and Rural Neighborhood in the Jurisdiction of Cienfuegos, 1846

2.3. Urban Population by Race, 1826–66

2.4. Marital Status by Race and Gender, c. 1858

3.1. Population by Race in the Town of Cienfuegos, 1867–77

3.2. Population of African Descent in the Town of Cienfuegos by Gender and Legal Status, 1867–77

3.3. Chinese Men by Legal Status in the Jurisdiction of Cienfuegos, 1877

4.1. Employment for People of Color in the City of Cienfuegos, 1899

Acknowledgments

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Louis A. Pérez Jr., who originally suggested that I concentrate my research in Cienfuegos and then allowed me to pursue my vision and find my voice as a scholar. From the moment I arrived at Cienfuegos for the first time in summer 2010, Orlando García Martínez played an instrumental role in my research. He was on the front lines as I fought to gain access to the archives. He generously shared his notes on records that had been lost, and he welcomed me into his family. For that I am eternally grateful to him and his family. His daughter, Anabel García, a published historian in her own right, became one of my closest friends and colleagues. We spent hours poring over moldy papers on the blistering patio of the provincial archive, face masks plastered to our cheeks with sweat, and rubber kitchen gloves covered in spores. She was also there to confront the ongoing difficulties we experienced in that archive, facing them fiercely and unapologetically. In the many days and hours that the archive was closed unexpectedly, we had long conversations about Cienfuegos, social issues, the Imperio, and life in general. I have truly valued her friendship. Although we have never met in person, I would like to thank Hsuan Hsu at the University of California-Davis, who saw potential in this project when a very rough abstract arrived in his inbox more than eight years ago. His critiques pushed me to develop the ideas that eventually became part of this book. Many thanks to two amazing scholars of Cuba, Guadalupe García and Tiffany Sippial, who have offered encouraging words and the most constructive feedback throughout this process. I would also like to thank Cynthia Greenlee and the Richards Civil War Center at Penn State University for giving me a forum to share an earlier version of chapter 4. The feedback I obtained there helped chrystallize my ideas, and for that I am appreciative. I would also like to express my gratitude to Blythe Lucero at Blythe Graphics for transforming the numerous rudimentary maps I created into the aesthetically pleasing versions for this book.

During my research in various parts of the United States, I benefited from the generosity and expertise of friends, colleagues, and archival staff. I want to acknowledge the generous support of the Cuban Heritage Collection, which sponsored my research through fellowships in 2011 and 2012. The Massachusetts Historical Society likewise provided invaluable support that enabled me to consult their collections. I also want to thank Sarah Barksdale, Warren Milteer, and Valerie Martínez, who kept me company on the long stretches at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and College Park.

Thank you as well to my support system, now distributed throughout the country, but always a text away: Cassia P. Roth, Jeanine Navarrete, Sara Juengst, and Juan Coronado. I also thank my colleagues at my previous institution, Mayra Ávila and Jamie Starling, for providing much-needed diversion from the writing process and invaluable dog-sitting during my research trips.

I am grateful to Sally Kenney, who created Newcomb College Institute’s postdoctoral fellowship in intersectionality that enabled me to complete the final pieces of this project. During my year at Newcomb, I was fortunate to benefit not only from her example but also from her invaluable guidance and support during the last leg of the production process. This book would likely not yet exist without the calming words she offered during our weekly trips to teach at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, and it would not be as accessible without her and Newcomb’s generous subvention.

Finally, thank you to my editor, Wendi Schnaufer, at the University of Alabama Press, for believing in the project and ushering it along through the publishing process in a timely manner.

A Note on Terminology

This book relies on Spanish-language primary sources, which I have translated into the closest equivalent in contemporary US English. For the purposes of transparency, I have provided the original Spanish of some of the more frequently used words in italics on first instance, as well as a brief English translation in text. Readers can also refer to the Glossary for further definitions.

A number of terms merit further explanation. In particular, the racial terminology employed here is necessarily imperfect and politically fraught. Although most scholars now acknowledge that race is a social construct, with no basis in biology, the concept nonetheless has historically had—and continues to have—very real implications in people’s lives, particularly for people of color. Race has so frequently spelled the difference between life and death, health and illness, empowerment and disenfranchisement, centrality and marginality. As such, it is necessary to continue to name race and the racial labels historically imposed on or appropriated by historical actors. I use the term people of color to denote all individuals who were excluded from the privileged category of white, especially people of African descent and those of Chinese ancestry, who made up the bulk of the urban nonwhite population. Although allusions to this type of universalizing nonwhite label sometimes appear in the primary sources (for instance, in references to gente de color), I use it to highlight the parallel experiences of urban exclusion and marginality that typically characterized the lives of individuals of nonwhite or mixed-race heritage. To refer exclusively to people of varying degrees of African ancestry, I use the term people of African descent. In individual cases, I typically reproduce the racial labels assigned to historical actors in the documentation. For instance, if a court case names an individual as a pardo (mulatto), or moreno (black), I use that Spanish-language racial label in the first instance. In some cases, a single individual is labeled differently in different documents. In those instances, I explicitly note the discrepancies and offer explanation where possible. I use the term white in this context to indicate individuals whose lineage traced to Europe, mainly Spain, and to a lesser extent France. This usage departs from the way the term was understood in the United States, where nineteenth-century notions of whiteness were markedly narrower and were generally limited to Anglo-Saxons. Although North Americans may have disparaged white Cubans’ claims to whiteness, particularly during the US military occupation, white Cubans nonetheless benefited from racial privileges such as preferential access to urban space, unrestricted entrance into businesses and leisure venues, and broader professional and educational opportunities.

I use the term local authorities throughout this book to refer to a broad set of individuals who held positions of power in local governance. The category of local authorities does not include ecclesiastical or military officials, who operated within distinct jurisdictions. Rather, I use the term to refer to the broad categories of people who occupied civil positions of authority, through which they formulated policies or decisions that defined urban life. These included the mayor, the members of the city council, the municipal police, the various other inspectors who managed specific aspects of local affairs such as sanitation, medicine, or law, and deputies who oversaw particular neighborhoods. In general, the city council formulated these policies—sometimes under pressure from colonial or military authorities at the provincial level or above other times under the influence of local elites such as wealthy sugar planters, and occasionally at the request of local residents. The mayor generally exerted control over the topics discussed and influenced the direction of the conversations. The policies that ultimately emerged were then implemented by law enforcement and the courts. It was not uncommon for conflicts and tensions to arise among different groups of local authorities, particularly between the individuals creating the policy and those enforcing it. Even within the very city council, debates over local policies, such as how to address urban poverty or what measures were needed to promote urban order, were fierce. Where such tensions mattered for the lived realities of urban residents of color, I have made note of them.

Finally, I have followed standard conventions for naming people, by using their last names after giving their full names in the first instance. However, I made a few exceptions to this rule in cases when last names are unavailable or inconsistent, and for the sake of clarity. For instance, when referring to enslaved people, Spanish colonial documentation sometimes provides only the first names imposed upon African captives (bozales) and their Cuban-born descendants (criollos) at birth. In such cases, I have referred to those individuals by their first names out of necessity. Enslaved people were commonly listed with last names that reflected their place of birth (africano for African-born, criollo for Cuban-born), or broad ethnocultural names associated with their port of embarkation (among the most common in nineteenth-century Cienfuegos were Lucumí for Yoruba captives out of the Bight of Benin, Congo for captives out of West Central Africa, and Carabalí for captives coming out of the Bight of Biafra). These labels were in many senses arbitrary impositions employed by European slave traders to create a sense of order. As such, they failed to account for the vast diversity of populations engulfed by the slave trade through those ports. Nonetheless, some enslaved people appropriated these labels as parts of their own self-identities and deployed them to forge community and self-help networks during and after their enslavement. When a person of African descent readily claimed one of those labels, for instance, as some individuals did in their wills, I have included it in describing that person.

Referring to formerly enslaved people entails another set of considerations. When enslaved people obtained freedom, it was customary for them to assume the last name of their final owner. In vignettes involving multiple individuals with the same last name, I refer to the main person of interest by his or her first name for clarity. Spellings of last names, especially those with non-Spanish origins, varied significantly. I have standardized spelling in the text for consistency. It was not uncommon for enslaved people to use multiple names over their lifetimes. In those cases, I have provided all of the known names in parentheses and then referred to that individual by first name. I intended this decision to reduce the reinscription of violence inherent in naming as an act of possession. Moreover, even when a formerly enslaved person consistently used a last name, the lack of a second last name, denoted in many records as SOA or sin otro apellido (without a second last name), was a powerful marker of former slave status, as Michael Zeuske and others have noted. This custom makes it difficult to distinguish family ties from enslavement by the same person or on the same plantation. Thus, in cases involving multiple enslaved people of the same last name, I have explicitly stated the relationships, familial, marital, or otherwise, and then used first names to avoid confusion. This decision was not intended to reinforce the relations of power often implicated in calling social subordinates by their first name; rather, it is intended to provide the reader with greater clarity about who individuals are, what they are doing, and how they fit within broader social networks.

Introduction

Urban Order and Racial Exclusion

On a sparsely inhabited piece of land adjoining a central Cuban bay, Spanish and French settlers came together to establish a new urban community in 1819. Known as Fernandina de Jagua for its first decade, the fledgling settlement began modestly as an assemblage of rickety guano huts scattered haphazardly along twenty-five urban blocks. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, however, Jagua grew into one of Cuba’s most important cities: Cienfuegos.

From its inception the city was both anomalous and typical. One of the traits that set Cienfuegos apart from other Cuban cities was that its founding was explicitly premised on racial exclusion. Its founders declared outright that Jagua was a white colony. To realize this vision, they appealed to honorable white families across Europe and the Americas, enticing them to relocate to Jagua with promises of paid passage, land, and other subsidies. Theoretically, the only nonwhite people who would reside in Jagua were to be enslaved, laboring in service of the colony’s white residents.

This unique racial history was not a mere reflection of local idiosyncrasies, however. Rather, the apparent anomaly of overt racial exclusion from Cienfuegos was a product of island-wide racial anxieties that arose from global processes of empire and slavery. The British invasion of Havana (1762–63) opened the floodgates of the trans-Atlantic slave trade into the island. As unprecedented numbers of enslaved Africans were forced into the island, a parallel expansion in plantation agriculture further heightened demand for enslaved labor. Almost three decades later, the eruption of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) incited fears across the Atlantic world about the potential of other successful slave uprisings.

Whereas these anxieties fueled abolitionist efforts in the British Empire, Cuban planters clung to slavery more than ever. Between 1775 and 1841, the island’s enslaved population increased tenfold. Over 25,000 captives entered the island in 1817, and annual imports averaged more than 12,000 in the 1830s. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, profound demographic changes were under way, as Cuba was transformed from a predominantly white settler colony to a majority black slave society. Cuba’s total population of color exceeded its white population for the first time in the 1790s, and by 1841 enslaved people outnumbered every other demographic group. Within this context, white colonization—the policy of encouraging white families to settle in nascent racially defined settlements like Cienfuegos—promised to reverse the supposedly deleterious demographic and cultural consequences of Africanization.¹

Yet the city’s whiteness was always more of a project than a reality. The explicit racial exclusions spelled out in the colony’s founding documents could not curtail Atlantic slaving, nor could they preempt the ongoing migrations of African-descended peoples across the island, whether voluntary or forced. Cienfuegos was, from the beginning, a multiracial, multiethnic city. White settlers brought with them enslaved people of African descent who hailed from across sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, and upon whose labor their precarious survival depended. Simultaneously, a small number of free people of color migrated from other Cuban cities, and some even managed to secure land on the margins of the white settlement. Over the next century the urban population of color grew in number and complexity. Enslaved people acquired freedom and joined the burgeoning ranks of free urbanites. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, formerly indentured Chinese men established themselves in the city as well. By the end of the century, immigrants from southern Europe and the Middle East, too, had incorporated themselves into the multiracial urban working class.

As the urban population evolved over the city’s first hundred years, an ongoing struggle emerged between the white urban ideal and racially heterogeneous realities of everyday life. White residents continually attempted to enforce the city’s claim to urban whiteness. At the same time, people of African descent, and later other populations of color, carved out spaces for themselves and built thriving urban communities. Yet the presence of people of color in and around the city did not mean they enjoyed equal access to urban space. Rather, residents of color were relegated to the urban margins, far from the privileged Spanish and French settlers who congregated in the city center. From the ashes of total racial exclusion arose de facto racial segregation as a defining feature of the urban landscape of Cienfuegos.

A Cuban City, Segregated explores how this racial segregation emerged in a society devoid of explicitly segregationist laws. In Cuba experiences of racial exclusion rarely stemmed from the letter of the law. Whereas explicit racial language was rare in legislation outside of slavery, implicitly racialized interpretations of laws and local ordinances were far more common. I argue that local officials and ordinary residents enacted racial boundaries by invoking more culturally acceptable categories of difference such as gender and class. As the city expanded, local policies governing mundane aspects of urbanization, such as building construction, zoning, and land taxes became the vehicles through which local elites etched racial segregation into the city’s physical landscape. Although these policies outwardly targeted urban populations deemed to be problematic for class or gender reasons, such as organized labor or prostitutes, they effectively served to limit access by people of color to the city center. The result was an urban geography that simultaneously relied on racial segregation and denied its existence.

Over time these ongoing negotiations of urban racial boundaries transformed the meaning of urban space. Although residents of color contested these ongoing claims to urban whiteness, racial segregation intensified, even as integration became enshrined in law. By the early twentieth century, after a hundred years of exclusionary urbanization, local authorities proclaimed Cienfuegos as Cuba’s most modern city, a label that implicitly celebrated its whiteness. At that juncture, the city was no longer equivalent to the expansive space comprising the official urban boundaries; rather, local elites had redefined it to refer only the historic city center inhabited almost exclusively by white residents. That narrow vision effectively erased the expansive communities of color who resided on the urban margins, and whose ancestors had physically built the space that had become the urban center. Urban came to mean white.

Racial Segregation in a Land of Racial Harmony

Latin America has long boasted a reputation for racial harmony. Part of this mythic repudiation of race is rooted in the notion that mestizaje, or racial mixture, was fundamentally incompatible with racism. Long-standing patterns of interracial intimacy supposedly blurred racial divisions separating white from nonwhite. A veritable racial spectrum emerged, manifesting in infinite chromatic vocabularies and highly mutable racial identities. These social complexities supposedly fostered more benign race relations south of the Rio Grande. Enslaved people purportedly enjoyed greater legal flexibility, and individuals with lighter skin, more European-looking features, or more money could pass as white.² Later, as Creoles threw off the yoke of colonial rule, mestizaje became the ideological premise of Latin American national identities. Nation builders dismissed racial difference as a relic of colonial oppression, constructing national racial types that selectively celebrated racial mixture.³ Within this context, nation builders blamed whatever remnants of social inequality that survived the transition from colony to republic firmly on class stratification or ethnocultural difference.⁴

Cuba offers one of the most emblematic examples of Latin America’s supposed racial harmony. There, an entire national identity hinges on a bold claim to colorblindness cultivated through selective readings of the island’s history and carefully curated celebrations of mestizaje and racial brotherhood. Under Spanish rule, a limited number of legal protections for enslaved people and relatively high rates of manumission supposedly evinced the benign character of slavery and the benevolence of Cuban slave owners.⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century, white planters-turned-anticolonial-insurgents inaugurated the gradual abolition of slavery by (conditionally) freeing their slaves. Now celebrated for their early rejection of racial inequality, these men are credited with forging a truly cross-racial rebel army that erased historic racial differences. Over the course of three anticolonial wars (Ten Years’ War, 1868–78; Little War, 1879–80; War of Independence, 1895–98), men of African descent not only fought alongside whites but also rose to achieve officer rank. Over the twentieth century Cuba’s national pantheon came to include not only white men like rebel leader Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and Cuba’s celebrated apostle José Martí, but also a few exemplary men of African descent, like the famed mulatto general Antonio Maceo.⁶ These apparent cross-racial bonds have served as testaments to Cuba’s historic racial harmony. The idea that those bonds crystallized into raceless nationality continues to enjoy widespread popular and scholarly acceptance today.

Lurking beneath this idyllic national mythology of racelessness, however, were profound and long-standing inequalities, many of which were undeniably grounded in race. The celebratory rhetoric surrounding mestizaje silenced the coercion and violence often defining sex across race and legal status. Rose-tinted characterizations of Cuban slavery omitted the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings were abducted from their homes and reduced to chattel. Historical praise continually heaped on white abolitionists downplays the reality that Cuba was the penultimate society in the Western Hemisphere to abolish this institution: Cuban slavery is often said to have ended in 1880 when the Patronato Law transformed enslaved people into apprentices. However, patrocinados, as these apprentices were called, were slaves in all but name. Not until 1886 did colonial authorities formally end legal bondage outside prison labor by abrogating the Patronato. Memorializing the white rebels as great emancipators forgets that their slaves were forced to risk their lives in war before having a chance at freedom, and that many more enslaved people freed themselves. Even the immortalization of the great Maceo erases the barrage of racist attacks he and so many other black officers endured as they ushered their country into existence.⁷

An even more striking aberration of Cuba’s raceless mythology lies in the island’s unacknowledged history of racial segregation.⁸ The conceptual and physical separation of people of African descent from white Spaniards and Creoles permeated nearly every aspect of colonial life. For instance, official state and ecclesiastical documents marked people of color with explicit racial labels (pardo/a or mulato/a for mixed race; moreno/a or negro/a for black; asiático/a or chino/a for Chinese), and officials recorded their documents in separate registers for nonwhite people. (See Note on Terminology.) These bureaucratic practices influenced the kind of social arrangements colonial authorities deemed desirable or even possible. Such was the case with interracial relationships. Although interracial intimacy was common, people of African descent faced legal barriers to marrying across racial lines for most of the nineteenth century.

Racial segregation was also etched into the urban landscape. People of African descent faced exclusion from a wide variety of spaces and institutions, especially those located in the city center. Patterns of residence, land ownership, public education, leisure, and even occupational stratification all reinforced urban racial boundaries between the white city center and the racially heterogeneous peripheries. These relationships between racial hierarchy and the built environment underscore the ways negotiations of urban exclusion in Cuba are both enacted on physical space and are often themselves struggles over physical space.⁹

Even though racial segregation defined many aspects of urban landscapes, Cuba’s claim to racial harmony has remained remarkably resilient, not only retaining widespread popular acceptance in Cuba but also enjoying an enduring legacy in scholarly production on the island and abroad. Scholars have typically approached comparative race relations from an Anglocentric perspective, equating racism with discriminatory legal statutes. In contrast to better-known cases such as the Jim Crow US South or Apartheid South Africa, the dearth of racially explicit laws in Latin American societies has led many scholars to conclude that race remained relatively insignificant in social practice. Certain scholars have even claimed that the racial segregation and violence that punctuated twentieth-century Cuba was the product of US imposition.¹⁰

Indeed, Cuba’s myth of racial harmony relies on the perception that whatever racial inequalities existed in Cuba paled in comparison to the flagrant, often-violent discrimination and legalized segregation of Jim Crow in the southern United States.¹¹ There is some value to this argument. Cuba generally lacked a rigid legal framework mandating physical separation by race outside of slave codes. Moreover, around the same time as the US Supreme Court legitimized de jure segregation in its ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Spanish authorities issued a series of integrationist laws. Between the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Spanish monarch declared absolute freedom of marriage for subjects regardless of race, reversing a long-standing colonial policy of preventing marriages between individuals of unequal status.¹² During the same period, other decrees liberalized education, permitting people of color in secondary and vocational schools as well as universities, and mandating the creation of primary schools for black children. In the late 1880s the colonial authorities struck down the exclusion of people of color from first-class carriages and trains.¹³ By the 1890s the Spanish monarch ruled against racial exclusion in public establishments and explicitly outlawed the use of racial labels in official documentation.

Yet recent scholarship has presented compelling evidence that Cuba’s discursive disavowal and legal rejection of racial inequality did not necessarily shield people of African descent from racial discrimination.¹⁴ Nonetheless, most of these studies have stopped short of examining how the built environment fostered and perpetuated these racial inequalities or the ways people of color navigated these unequal terrains, particularly in urban contexts. Historians of Cuba, for instance, have commonly identified specific instances of racial segregation, such as the exclusion of people of color from particular social and political events, the periodic episode of a white-owned café or restaurant denying service to a black patron, or racial preference within certain public institutions. However, existing studies have generally glossed over these incidents as anomalous, temporary, or secondary to class conflict and cultural stigma.¹⁵

A closer look at racial exclusion in urban Cuba reveals that these instances of segregation were far from isolated incidents. On the contrary, they emerged from—and were made possible by—a much longer history of segregationist practice. In Cuba’s cities, segregation operated through the physical construction and organization of urban spaces in ways that created tangible and intangible racial boundaries, often in spite of inclusionary rhetoric and integrationist legislation. Urban Cuba thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how communities constructed and perpetuated urban racial segregation in a Latin American society that, like most, largely eschewed explicitly racial language and mostly lacked segregationist laws.

Perspectives on Urban Inequality in Hemispheric Context

From their very inception, colonial Latin American cities emerged as key sites of exclusion. The inequality that generally defined urban space has been the subject of a robust theoretical literature. Since the 1970s radical urban studies scholarship foregrounded the constructed and contested nature of urban space. Marxist-inspired perspectives on the city have critiqued capitalism’s impact on social organization by examining the social construction of the built environment along class lines. Feminist and postcolonial critiques, moreover, demonstrated how other forms of social difference, such as gender, race, and positionality within the global hierarchy, have also shaped spatial practices.¹⁶ Poststructuralist scholarship challenged the notion of the city as an object by emphasizing the dispersed nature of power. From this perspective, power relations function through the multitude of symbols and structures composing the city and reproduce social inequalities through discourses and representations of space.¹⁷ Together, these theoretical approaches have made inequality and power relations central to the study of cities.

Building upon these insights, decades of Latin American historians have interrogated the production of social inequalities and exclusions in key cities.¹⁸ Yet most scholarship on urban inequality in Latin America has historically foregrounded class as the principal axis of urban social hierarchy. For Angel Rama, imperial power operated through class distinctions, as a small privileged group of lettered elites, located primarily in Spanish America’s key cities, administered the power of the colonial state through urban institutions and law.¹⁹ Class analysis is similarly the central premise of recent collections on Latin American cities, including Cities of Hope, whose editors declare the need for a better historical treatment of working-class life and living conditions in the cities.²⁰ In other cases, scholars explicitly privilege class over other systems of urban inequality. One historian recently depicted the urban habitat and its commercial economy as the great equalizer of the caste hierarchies, while emphasizing the persistence of urban class stratification.²¹

Even when scholars explicitly acknowledge the existence of racial disparities, they are usually assumed to be extensions of class inequalities, which frame many studies in terms of working-class and poor subjectivities.²² According to R. Douglas Cope, for example, the social landscape of seventeenth-century Mexico City was organized principally along class, rather than racial lines, with a racially exclusive urban elite and a racially heterogeneous plebe.²³ Other studies suggest that similar arrangements prevailed in other colonial Latin American cities: centric urban spaces tended to be privileged zones reserved for the wealthiest, most prominent (white) members of the urban community, while poor and working-class residents of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds usually settled on the urban peripheries, where undeveloped land was plentiful and, most importantly, affordable.²⁴ By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proliferation of low-wage work, uneven development of infrastructure, criminalization of deviance, and bureaucratic obstacles to poor people’s rights exacerbated social exclusions from urban space and citizenship.²⁵ In more recent periods, exclusion through physical barriers and privatized security reinforced the highly segmented nature of urban communities and exposed visible segregation based on wealth and status.²⁶ The historic prevalence of class stratification in urban spaces foregrounds what Teresita Martínez-Vergne has referred to as the inevitable conflict, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, that produced the discourse on space.²⁷

While many forms of urban exclusion did hinge on unequal access to wealth, class differences alone fail to explain how people of color and unattached women experienced life in cities. Frameworks solely concerned with class tend to neglect the ways poverty impacted urban populations in racial and gender-specific ways. In that way, they risk the normalization of a universal ungendered, unraced, unclassed urban subject, one usually imagined as a white, middle-class man. White working-class men may have experienced urban exclusion on the basis of their low socioeconomic status;