In the years following Cuba's independence, nationalists aimed to
transcend racial categories in order to create a unified polity,
yet racial and cultural heterogeneity posed continual challenges to
these liberal notions of citizenship. Alejandra Bronfman traces the
formation of Cuba's multiracial legal and political order in the
early Republic by exploring the responses of social scientists,
such as Fernando Ortiz and Israel Castellanos, and black and
mulatto activists, including Gustavo Urrutia and Nicolas Guillen,
to the paradoxes of modern nationhood.
Law, science, and the social sciences--which, during this era,
enjoyed growing status in Cuba as well as in many other
countries--played central roles in producing knowledge and shaping
social categories in postindependence Cuba. Anthropologists,
criminologists, and eugenicists embarked on projects intended to
employ the tools of science to rid Cuba of the last vestiges of a
colonial past. Meanwhile, the legal arena created both new freedoms
and new modes of repression. Black and mulatto intellectuals and
activists, working to ensure that citizenship offered concrete
advantages rather than empty promises, appropriated changing social
scientific and legal categories and turned them to their own uses.
In the midst of several decades of intermittent racial violence and
expanding social and political mobilization by Cubans of African
descent, debates among intellectuals and activists, state
officials, and legislators transformed not only understandings of
race, but also the terms of citizenship for all Cubans.