The assumption that races and race-based social inequalities are natural is generally called racialism.Footnote ¹ But how should we name those moments when this assumption is questioned, when racial differences begin to appear less natural, and when ambiguous, divergent, or conflicting ideas about race lead to hesitation? It is the wager of this book that nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying both racialism and its flip side, which I propose to call racial doubt. In the prosperous slave-holding colony of Cuba, people were forced to reconcile commonly held notions of innate, essential, and hierarchical differences with evidence to the contrary, including captives born in Africa acquiring property and freedom, mixed-race individuals becoming legally and socially white, and Black journalists mocking the absurdities of scientific racism. Exploring how this wide range of Afrodescendants navigated and unsettled hegemonic racial ideologies, Racial Doubt interweaves analyses of literary works – from poems by enslaved authors to a novel by a mulato journalist who would later become president of the Cuban Senate – and unpublished archival sources – from captives’ testimonies to the arguments of white parents trying to prevent their sons from getting married to women they called pardas (mixed-race).

Centering doubt in a study of a slave-holding society may strike many readers as odd. Wasn’t the abyss that separated some human beings from others clear enough? And isn’t the task of unsilencing the history of Black communities across the Americas as urgent as ever? The answer to these questions is, of course, yes. Any affirmation, however, leaves something out. To describe every Afrodescendant person living in nineteenth-century Cuba as Black (or, in Spanish, as negro or negra) can be an effective mode of contesting a long history of whitening. It also defers important questions. For example, how did the different ways in which Afrodescendants related to their racialization inform the meaning of Blackness? Why do many Cubans now see themselves as simultaneously Black, white, and neither? “I am white,” “My wife tells me I am not white,” and “I am Black on my father’s side,” the Havana-based artist Ricardo Miguel Hernández told me when I interviewed him one afternoon in late 2024 to learn more about his work and the enslaved African-born man, Miguel, whose spirit has been speaking to the Hernández family for three generations. The experience of holding multiple views of race simultaneously, this book shows, has a long history – a history that is much broader than racial mixing or whitening. The book’s cover, a photocollage by Hernández, is one possible way of picturing it.

People living in colonial Cuba negotiated the meanings of race in myriad ways, beginning with captives’ freedom strategies. Racial doubt, in other words, was as intrinsic to whitening processes as it was to racial slavery and Black writing. Above all, it expressed a duality – static racial hierarchies and racial fluidity, or racialism and its refutations – that continues to inform Caribbean and Latin American societies, where socioeconomic success is dependent on skin color, but not always, and where ideologies of mestizaje still carry enormous weight despite the remarkable political victories of Afrodescendant and indigenous movements since the 1980s and 1990s. In Cuba, enslaved people and their descendants took advantage of and debated this disavowed duality. Racial categories like pardo (mixed-race) or blanco (white) seldom required clarification. They were used in courts and newspapers, in daily speech and in wills, in baptismal records and in novels. They helped to restrict the opportunities of many and to separate mothers from their children. They compelled people to act in certain ways: to command, to obey, to feel above the law, to feel beneath it, to endure, to rebel. However, people were also clear about the fact that racial categories and the racialist justifications they entailed worked best when doubts about them were kept at bay – or, conversely, that mobilizing racial doubt could help redefine racially enforced domination – because the fluidity of race was a fraught open secret.

Races do not exist, but they do. They did not exist in the past, but people brought them into existence through their actions and beliefs. They do not exist today, but racism and antiracist responses continue to make them real. Racial doubt, this book argues, provides a mediation not just between the fluid and the rigid but also between illusion and reality. And given that this mediation is context-specific, the contents of racial doubt (or, put differently, the forms that this mediation takes) have been articulated in relation to radically different certainties or beliefs – for example, that races exist, or that they do not exist; that racism is not a problem, or that it is. The gap between the historical period studied in this book and the one in which it was written is, in this sense, enormous. Yet, the question of race has not gone away. In Cuba, in fact, it has become increasingly present since the 1990s, both because of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, which deepened racial disparities, and because discussing racial disparities has meant problematizing the reluctance to address racism that was characteristic of the prior three decades – a reluctance that began to be described in public as a taboo that limited the egalitarian potential of the 1959 revolution.

The history of silencing race and breaking the silence, however, is much longer. During the peak of racial slavery, this book shows, before race-transcendent nationalism and the utopian society “con todos, y para el bien de todos” (with all, and for the good of all) imagined by José Martí became hegemonic notions, people came up with ways to take advantage of and contest the racialized silences that helped naturalize inequality.Footnote ² Before racial democracy began being described as a myth, comparable efforts to overcome racial barriers by questioning racial ideologies were part of many people’s lives – even if what seemed questionable to them was the mythical nature of racial inferiority rather than the objection to talking about race.

Racial doubt, therefore, is not equivalent to what is now commonly understood as racial denial (as in the Latin American ideologies of racial democracy under the veneer of which anti-Black prejudice and the idealization of whiteness continued). Rather, it refers to something much larger: those aspects of race which people have raised questions about in everyday life – aspects that they have found unclear, debatable, or negotiable. This includes Blackness as redefined by Black people – words that I capitalize when referring to their sense of ethnicity or diasporic belonging, of being a distinct community with a shared history and ancestry. During the period on which this book focuses, claims about people “de color” (of color) – a category used at the time to describe all Afrodescendants, mixed-race or not – were made against the background of three centuries of creolization, a well-established community of free Afrodescendants, and many families whose wealth and status had led others to stop using racial labels when referring to them. Across the Caribbean, as Pablo Gómez observes, Blackness had long been an “unending, incorporative, multipronged, unstable, vibrant, mercurial process.”Footnote ³ Neither the precipitous expansion of plantation slavery, the waning use of intermediate racial categories, or the growing number of Afrodescendants who self-identified as negros or as members of a single race would bring such an open-ended process to a halt.

A Note on Language

In books about the history of race, it has become customary to clarify that actors’ categories – in this case, the ones used by people living in nineteenth-century Cuba – are not easily translated into today’s English. “Black,” “mulatto,” and “passing,” for example, convey a different history, or a different galaxy of contingent experiences, than “negro,” “mulato,” or “adelantar la familia” (to advance one’s family).Footnote ⁴ An analogous clarification concerns the use of general categories like “slavery” (which has been described both as a single institution with variations and as an array of practices too heterogeneous to fit under a single noun) or “nineteenth-century Cuba” (which included places as heterogenous as Santiago and Cienfuegos, sugar plantations and fishing villages, maroon communities and fancy hotels).Footnote ⁵ While I often refer to enslaved people, free people of color, Black writing, and nineteenth-century Cuba, my focus on particular texts, places, and periods intends to foreground how different actors put unique, conflicting worldviews into words, how they used words idiosyncratically – in ways that already seemed peculiar back then – and how, by doing so, they unsettled the racial ideologies they moved within. Similarly, by alternating between actors’ categories and the ones that are most relevant and precise today in the sociolinguistic world in which this book participates (e.g., capitalized “Black” and afrodescendiente, which translates as “Afrodescendant”), I try to call attention to both continuities and changes. The Spanish word “moreno,” for example, signals a variety of things and merits different translations; in some contexts, “Black” might be the best one. Linguistic signs, like racial adscriptions, are relational, and “moreno” was sometimes used in direct opposition to “blanco” (white), or to allude to one’s pride in affiliating with a racialized community. In other cases, when the hierarchical difference vis-à-vis pardos or mulatos is at stake, it makes more sense to clarify that morenos were not mixed-race. In yet others, it is important to add some language conveying that the word was used as a sign of respect, as opposed to “negro” – or, alternatively, to characterize it as a euphemism that helped reproduce anti-Blackness.

I wrote this book with different kinds of readers in mind, but the two that have been most recurrent, probably because they are my closest colleagues, are historians interested in language and literary scholars curious about history. At the juncture of these two disciplines, admittedly, a few things are difficult to reconcile. This became evident as soon as I started to conceptualize Black writing. Most historians would probably not find it strange if by “Black writing” I simply meant any text written by a Black person. Most literary scholars would probably notice if I did not engage with the notion that literature exceeds the lives of authors and their time. In 1988, Henry Louis Gates Jr. made the following observation: “The blackness of black literature is not an absolute or metaphysical condition (…); nor is it some transcending essence that exists outside its manifestations in texts. Rather, the ‘blackness’ of black American literature can be discerned only through close readings.”Footnote ⁶ As a literary critic, I take off my hat. Many things have changed since 1988, but the importance of reading texts qua texts remains clear. However, I am not just a literary critic, and I keep thinking about the reasons why Gates’s remark now seems so dated and why, in the context of this book, a similar observation would feel out of touch. The political and personal urgency that Black affirmation has had for many Cubans across time is hard to miss, especially after the surge in Black activism in the 1990s; so is the increased spotlight on authors’ lives across the world. Over the course of the last few decades, moreover, much of the literary scholarship on Afro-Cuban literature has discerned Blackness even when it is not manifest in the texts – a type of reading in which absence is decoded as resounding silence or secret allusion. The survival of literary scholarship might very well depend on not letting go of the conviction that the relationship between a text and the person who wrote it is indeterminate; paradoxically, it also depends on the many people – beginning with our students and colleagues – who feel that texts are entryways into the personal experiences of authors and the history of their communities.

The notion of Black Cuban writing brings together two worlds – race and literature – that the disciplinary distinction between history and literary studies tends to either conflate or keep scholastically separated. I have faced this challenge by reading as a literary critic and a historian at the same time: by offering close readings of non-literary texts, by locating literary works within this expanded textual universe, and by asking how some Afrodescendant writers became Black authors. This book defines Black writing as texts in which authors foregrounded their racialized subject positions and challenged hegemonic views of race (while “Black writing” is the title of its third part, the other two parts examine other social struggles through which the notion of “Black” took shape). One of the sonnets included in the poetry collection that the enslaved poet Ambrosio Echemendía published in 1865 as part of the campaign to raise money for his manumission, for example, began like this:

By calling the racist skepticism of this doubtful “you” into question, Echemendía’s meta-sonnet went to the heart of what would be later conceptualized as the Black intellectuals’ efforts to establish a public standing. The “color maldito” (damned/maledicted/cursed color) to which the poem refers in another stanza, like the similarly stigmatized “mulato,” “pardo,” and “esclavo” identities mentioned throughout the rest of the book, could not but change valence when a poet foregrounded his own racialization as a way to establish his authority.

Throughout the six chapters of Racial Doubt, a recurrent figure helps to identify the counterhegemonic potential of racial doubt: the respondón (literally, “someone inclined to back talk,” although “lippy,” “mouthy,” “saucy,” and “cheeky” are also existing translations). In nineteenth-century Cuba, this word was sometimes used in ads for selling people. On January 1, 1811, for example, the Diario de La Habana included one offering an eighteen-year-old negro – a “good cigar maker, who earns a peso a day, coach driver, healthy and with the defect of respondón.”Footnote ⁸ The price, 600 pesos, was comparatively high, as this young man’s skills seemed to outweigh his bad habit. The attitude of respondón preceded race; it had long been part of the slave–master dialectic. Consider the apostle Paul’s advice to Titus in the New Testament: “Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them.”Footnote ⁹ In Cuba, however, it was a racialized trait. But rather than just a descriptor that helped buyers and sellers agree on the monetary value of human beings, respondón was a category that indexed an infrapolitical action – a linguistic one that could be as simple as uttering a word or as complex as telling one’s story.Footnote ¹⁰ Cuban archives (as those of the Spanish world more broadly) are rich in cases of enslaved respondones who forced their owners to enter into negotiations with them through colonial authorities – taking them to court for physical abuse, for example, or for ignoring promises of freedom. These negotiations were forms of talking back. As they talked back, questioning the assumption that their role was that of passive subordinates, respondones highlighted and altered the meaning of words like “negro” or “mulato.”

The enslaved house servant who made an unwelcome remark in front of her owner or the enslaved poet Amalia Gutiérrez, who managed to publish a sonnet, were quite different from the free Black journalists who chastised politicians for being racist hypocrites. Yet, to think of them as respondones helps form a continuum from those people who tried to take advantage of a given situation without rocking the boat to those who were openly defiant, as well as considering the degree to which Blackness developed across the spectrum of these seemingly opposing strategies. A focus on respondones also brings into relief the dialectical nature of racial doubt. The Haitian Revolution, for example, came to signify successful Black response to oppression and was often referenced by Afrodescendants to cast doubt on white supremacy. In Cuba, it informed the lives and intellectual strategies of many enslaved and free people throughout the century – from José Antonio Aponte, for example, who had been born free in Havana around 1760 and was sentenced to death in 1812 for conspiring to end slavery, to many of the journalists in the Black counterpublic sphere that took shape beginning in 1879.Footnote ¹¹ Martín Morúa Delgado is a case in point. He translated the biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture that John R. Beard had published in London in 1853, and that the US activist James Redpath had republished with many changes in Boston ten years later. Where Redpath had written “Toussaint was a negro,” as Carmen Lamas has noted, Morúa wrote “¡Toussaint era un negro!”.Footnote ¹² If “negro,” in the racist hierarchy of colonial Cuba, was the most pitiful and abject of social positions, a Black political leader of universal proportions, as Morúa stressed through the exclamation point, turned that hierarchy on its head. Yet, Morúa also expressed frustration when the Haitian Revolution was characterized as Black to segregate it from universal history, and he became (in)famous for rejecting race-based organizations. Frantz Fanon, similarly, would observe that to assume that some people are naturally closer to certain topics or events because they are Black contributes to reifying a historically specific form of social difference. “I am a man, and I have to rework the world’s past from the very beginning. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in Saint Domingue,” he writes as he concludes Black Skin, White Masks, his groundbreaking reflection on racism.Footnote ¹³

In the face of these dialectical twists and turns, my conceptualization of respondones and antiracist actions follows a two-pronged approach. When examining the emergence of Black Cuban writing, for example, I observe that most of the Afro-Cuban journalists of the 1880s and 1890s, despite their differences of opinion and personal antagonisms, shared a commitment to denouncing racial barriers. At the same time, attentive to the processes by which people and texts became and kept becoming Black, I have examined Black writing from another angle. From this second angle, it is evident that such writing did not always exist, because the possibility of defining it as Black only emerged under certain conditions, and because many people have refused to do so across generations. The dilemma can be summarized as follows: a history of Cuban literature that did not specify the roles played by Afrodescendants would contribute to silencing those roles, but to assume that Black writing existed even before it was named as such is a sure path to missing how it could emerge in the first place and how the expectations and desires of later generations produce that emergence retrospectively. The structure of this book – which begins with enslaved people and ends with Black writing – is a way of facing this dilemma. Black Cuban writing, in my analysis, is not just something that began in the nineteenth century; it has continued to begin (and to stop), and it might begin anew in unexpected ways. The reason is simple: the meaning of “Black” has been continuously under dispute, as respondones showed early on. It is this dispute, rather than any transcendent presence, that my references to Blackness intend to highlight.

Antiracist Skepticism

When considered in relation to racial certitudes, which were supposed to be stable (e.g., civilization = white), many of the racial doubts studied in this book can be imagined as epistemic earthquakes. The ground would stop shaking, either through disavowal (people denied their doubts), indifference (they shrugged them off), or the sheer magnitude of the status quo and the prevailing racial ideology (some people continued owning other people and being treated as socially superior). Nonetheless, there were both immediate effects and aftershocks. Following the initial shaking event, or the sudden question “Could ‘they’ be the same as ‘us’?”, the energy released destabilized other certitudes, generating new, low-intensity tremors. The seismological metaphor, however, only gives us part of the picture, for racial doubt was neither natural nor something that just happened – a force that suddenly made one’s epistemic ground shake. It was a cognitive terrain constantly transformed by people who maneuvered to avoid racially enforced barriers or loosen racist certainties. By emphasizing this second dimension, this book foregrounds the role that Afrodescendant historical actors played in redefining the significance of race.

To doubt is not intrinsically good or bad, radical or conservative, emancipatory or restrictive, but the concept is so frequently infused with negative connotations that I would be remiss if I did not address them. In religious contexts, doubt is associated with a loss of faith. In secular ones, it is sometimes understood as interference that hinders decision-making, or as the feeling of being at a loss. In the world of corporations, merchants of doubt are hired to maximize profits at the expense of consumers’ health. And in conversations about race, self-doubt, or the challenges that racism poses to self-esteem and confidence, is a familiar topic. In a recent reflection on the lack of Black women as romantic leads in popular genres like soap operas, for example, the feminist scholar Yarlenis Mestre Marfán mentions a Cuban saying that succinctly expresses the idealization of whiteness behind such self-doubts: “Negros, ni los zapatos” (Black, not even shoes).Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, in an essay that weaves together his autobiography with the history of Black Cubans as a collective, the cultural critic Roberto Zurbano observes that Black children who went to school in the 1970s “regresábamos a la casa llenos de dudas y de burlas al color de nuestra piel” (came back home full of doubts and mocked at for our skin color). Only some of them were lucky enough to have relatives, like Zurbano’s grandmother, who were openly proud of their African ancestry.Footnote ¹⁵ These forms of prejudice, manipulation, and contempt can easily be mapped onto colonial and slave-holding contexts. “The doubt regarding the aptitude of Blacks for self-governance,” Achille Mbembe observes in his Critique of Black Reason, “led to another, more fundamental doubt, one deeply embedded in the modern approach to the complex problem of alterity.”Footnote ¹⁶ This more fundamental doubt was whether Black people could ever assimilate, given their supposed lesser humanity.

The historical weight of this racist skepticism is precisely what explains the antiracist one analyzed here: the doubts raised by those who questioned racial slavery and whitening ideologies. Not all the people studied in this book mobilized doubt in this radical way. In fact, those who strove for whiteness reinforced racism, even if their lives laid bare the mythical nature of racial purity. But many others did, often enacting the kind of double negation (e.g., arguing that it was not the case that Black people did not possess the same human capacities) that was becoming frequent among Black intellectuals of the diaspora. In 1885, for example, the Haitian scholar and diplomat Anténor Firmin published De l’égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races). The book, edited in Paris, was intended as a refutation of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races), the second edition of which had just been released. Gobineau, a Count, postulated a natural inequality between the races and argued that no civilization had ever been possible without the white one. Firmin described him as “a man who had no doubt about anything” and who believed that speaking with a resounding voice was sufficient to “turn an arrogant thought into unassailable truth.” Casting doubt on the aristocrat’s assuredness, the Haitian diplomat argued that the “doctrine of the inequality of the races,” which rested on “nothing more than the notion of man’s exploitation by man,” would one day be seen “as one of the greatest proofs of the imperfection of the human mind and of the imperfection, in particular, of the arrogant race that made it into a scientific doctrine.”Footnote ¹⁷ As a recently admitted member to the Paris Anthropological Society, Firmin praised scientific reasoning and evidence, inviting his colleagues and readers to consider whether the many achievements of ancient Egypt (which he presented as Black), Ethiopia, and Haiti might convince them of the need to study humans through their social history rather than their physical traits, or through well-established facts rather than prejudice.

Three years after its publication, Firmin’s book would be discussed at the Cuban Anthropological Society, whose members tended to regard racial differences in diametrically opposed ways.Footnote ¹⁸ The society’s inauguration in 1877, for example, had included a speech that acclaimed the Havana doctor Miguel Riva y Urrechaga for using anthropometric knowledge to determine the ‘true’ race of an enslaved woman named Nazaria who had claimed to be white.Footnote ¹⁹ But from outside of these white-controlled institutions, Cuban intellectuals of African descent were beginning to put Black historical achievements in print and to mock the “orgullosa raza caucasiana, existente tan sólo en la imaginación de sus abogados” (proud Caucasian race, existing only in the imagination of its advocates), as Morúa would observe in 1892.Footnote ²⁰ In the magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets that they published during the 1880s and 1890s, they extended the antiracist skepticism of prior generations who had also deployed doubt in counterhegemonic ways.

An Interregnum

As abolitionism was on the rise across the Atlantic world and the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) unfolded a few miles away, Cuba was on its way to becoming the largest sugar producer in the world.Footnote ²¹ England and the United States officially ended the slave trade in 1807 and 1808. Beginning in 1810, nascent Spanish American republics started passing laws for gradual abolition. In Cuba, meanwhile, slavery reached its apogee through a renewal of the plantation system and the transatlantic slave trade, which today is often referred to as “second slavery.”Footnote ²² In a matter of a few decades, almost 700,000 African captives would be added to the approximately 93,000 who had arrived on the island between 1526 and 1807.Footnote ²³ Slavery, in other words, boomed in Cuba when it was being most questioned across the Americas and Europe, including in the public spheres of many countries that bought the staples produced in forced labor camps and offered the financial services required by human trafficking and the plantation system. When the prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade threatened to curtail profits, Cuban slaveowners did not hesitate to adopt illegal means of extending them.

Even for those who thought that there was no turning back, that the slave trade and even slavery would necessarily end, there remained a crucial enigma: how long would this process take? In 1930, in one of his most oft-quoted passages, Antonio Gramsci observed that a crisis of hegemony “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Footnote ²⁴ Gramsci borrowed the concept of interregnum from the history of royal sovereignty: after a king died and before a new one was enthroned, the government was provisionally suspended. The metaphor of a protracted interregnum helps to imagine the Cuban nineteenth century as well as second slavery more broadly – a period when a particular form of hegemony, one defined by colonialism and racial slavery, began to die but persisted for a very long time. This interregnum did not begin overnight, nor was it begotten by the death of a king. Rather, the new – liberal revolutions, abolitionism, wage labor, and Cuban nationalism – began to grow side-by-side with the old – slave-holding and its attending customary practices. If hegemony consisted of the process by which slaveholders were able to present their worldview and their right to dominate others as natural, the nineteenth century was a time when the certainty of a right to total dominion was both increasingly present and increasingly called into doubt. Between the 1820s and the early 1840s, for example, enslaved people’s insurrections shook the island.

In their salons and epistolary exchanges, white Cuban reformists lamented the moral corruption generated by slaving practices and expressed their shame at belonging to a metropolis where the fashionable notions of liberalism moved at a snail’s pace. As late as the 1850s, however, many other Cubans, peninsular Spaniards, and foreign investors worked hard to perpetuate the conditions for human bondage. Some of them believed that annexation to the United States would strengthen the international slavery alliance that went from Texas to Rio Grande do Sul.Footnote ²⁵ When considering the nineteenth century as an interregnum marked by the height and crisis of racial slavery, it is therefore important to keep in mind that the “morbid symptoms” preceding the establishment of a new consensus meant different things to different people. “Abolitionist,” for example, was a term commonly associated with the antipatriotic and morbid penchant for destroying the social order. In 1841, the Havana-born aristocrat María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo published an essay in the Parisian Revue des Deux Mondes, promptly translated and reprinted in Madrid, in which she mocked the “exaltación de los abolicionistas” (the frenzy of abolitionists) and offered a simple way to deal with the problem of natural rights: more benign laws, which would help convince captives that they were better off in bondage than emancipated.Footnote ²⁶

Cuban slaveowners’ concern over morbidly abolitionist ideas grew against a very particular background: the overthrow of slavery and the emergence of the first Black republic in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. The Haitian Revolution became a paradigmatic example of Afrodescendants’ power as well as of the reluctance to consider this power legitimate on the part of Eurodescendant elites; it also played an important role in discouraging white Cuban creoles from seeking independence, as the rest of the Spanish colonies began doing shortly after Napoleonic troops occupied Spain and imprisoned its king in 1808.Footnote ²⁷ By 1811, Cuban landowners had reached an agreement, to paraphrase a noted Cuban historian, to sacrifice political independence on the altar of sugar.Footnote ²⁸ The fact that keeping so many people enslaved made white creoles afraid of revolutionary upheaval was, as two Cuban exiles observed in 1834, “una verdad bien sabida pero que conviene callar” (a well-known truth that it is better kept silent).Footnote ²⁹ Since at least 1792 and until the middle of the nineteenth century, white people were a minority of the population in Cuba. Anxious to counterbalance, the elites called for racial mixing and cultural assimilation, and many planters experimented with bringing on workers from Yucatan, Galicia, and China.

In 1868, Cuban rebels began a cycle of wars that would catalyze gradual emancipation as well as seemingly opposed solutions to the racial question. In 1870, Spain passed a free womb law, which also prohibited selling mothers and their children separately and granted freedom to those who joined the Spanish army. As the 1870s ended, Afrodescendant Cubans began publishing their own newspapers and mobilizing to broaden access to education and civil rights. In 1886, the last enslaved people became legally free. If during most of the century white creole elites had considered blackness and the nation irreconcilable – since preventing the island from following the path of Haiti was one of their major concerns – in this new context, which included the formation of multiracial armies to fight against Spanish troops, every rebel became Cuban. For many Black people, the strategic denial of racial differences was a shield against discrimination, even if this denial could be also used to avoid addressing racism.Footnote ³⁰ The phrase “aquí no hay blanquitos, ni negritos, sino cubanos” (here there are no whiteys, nor blackies, only Cubans), attributed to the Black general Antonio Maceo, summarizes this ambivalence. While it is generally understood as a defense of racelessness, it also makes sense to interpret it in a much narrower way: as a critique of the derogatory racial terms that continued to be used.Footnote ³¹ The lofty ideal of an egalitarian nation, put differently, was inseparable from the persistence of racial discrimination.

The Cuban interregnum was, above all, a time of racial contrasts – of very different ways of living and understanding race. Born of enslaved parents in a Matanzas plantation in 1854, by the 1880s Juan Gualberto Gómez had become a famous journalist and activist; in 1901, as Black clubs across the island took his name, he contributed to writing the Cuban constitution.Footnote ³² His very success and visibility as a Black leader, however, would make some people describe him as culturally white during the first decades of the twentieth century – to which the Black journalist Gustavo Urrutia responded with an article entitled “¿Juan Gualberto es negro?” (Is Juan Gualberto Black?): “Sí que es negro Juan Gualberto, y bien negro…! Como son negros Maceo y Morúa, y Brindis de Salas y White y Lico Jiménez” (Juan Gualberto is indeed Black, and very Black…! Like Maceo and Morúa, and Brindis de Salas and White and Lico Jiménez).Footnote ³³ Maceo himself, the famous general in whose honor many US Americans named their children, was often regarded through a similarly whitening gaze – a gaze that was characteristic not just of the race-transcendent ideology of the early republic but also of much longer currents in Cuba’s social history. Until the beginning of the independence wars, in fact, Maceo’s parents had been treated as white; in Santiago, as Adriana Chira notes, “property ownership trumped color status.” Local ideologies associated whiteness with control over land and workers, granting the white honorific “don” or “doña” to some Afrodescendants, while granting many more the privilege of not receiving any racial label.Footnote ³⁴ In Maceo’s view, one may suppose, the fixation with race shown by his enemies might have seemed questionable not just from the perspective of the racially integrated Cuba for which he fought but also from that of the colonial society in which his family had prospered. What is certain is that such fixation on race, which insurgents frequently denounced as a scare tactic, made it impossible to act as if racial differences were irrelevant . In 1893, not too long before the beginning of the final war, the Black newspaper La Igualdad pointed out the hypocrisy of white Cubans who enforced color lines while at the same time claiming, as an op-ed published by the conservative Diario de la Marina had recently put it, that the “raza africana” (the African race) was fortunately not opposed to its assimilation into the “raza española” (the Spanish race).Footnote ³⁵ And even if many people could consider that the stigma of having been enslaved would end one day – and with it, blackness tout court – racism persisted, convincing many others that self-identifying and organizing as Black was more politically savvy than acting as if Cuba were a land with no races.

Racial doubt was a salient trait of the Cuban interregnum. Even if racial differences seemed self-evident, their meanings and implications were under dispute – some people, for example, questioned the assumption that kidnap allegations should not be taken seriously when coming from an Afrodescendant person. As an analytical category, racial doubt helps to discern how fervent proclaimers of unbridgeable biological and cultural differences confronted the limits of their own assertions, as well as the process by which others disentangled Blackness and slavery. While becoming white intergenerationally through marriage, wealth, or private pregnancies was not something that characterized the lives of most Cubans, examining whitening practices is also an effective way to notice the degree to which race was negotiable. Examples of how racialization worked in the other direction are less common, but certainly not less illuminating, as exemplified by Sofía, the protagonist of the first novel published by an Afro-Cuban writer. The daughter of white parents, Sofía becomes a mulata after being enslaved.Footnote ³⁶ However fictional or rare such cases might have been, the novel illustrates a shock-inducing strategy shared by many intellectuals of the 1880s and 1890s who described themselves as members of the raza de color (race of color): arguing that racial differences were produced by slaving practices.

On Silence

One of the main targets of Africans and Afrodescendants who questioned racist assumptions in nineteenth-century Cuba were the webs of pretense and deception that marked daily life. Analyzing how they perceived, critiqued, and in some cases co-opted these webs is, I argue, a crucial step toward understanding race-making, or how racial differences were enacted, disputed, and transformed. Pretense and deception took very different forms when a free mulata passed as white, when a captain burned his ship after disembarking hundreds of captives, and when a Spanish general declared that the main goal of pro-independence rebels was to exterminate whites. However, it would be difficult to get a sense of how racist structures worked without thinking of these and similar cases as part of a single story – the story of willing ignorance, hypocrisy, lies, and related forms of actively not-knowing and not-saying.

Much of this book is an effort to conceptualize these forms of actively not-knowing and not-saying, which would remain central in later accounts of the times of slavery and colonialism.Footnote ³⁷ As soon as Spain was expelled from the Caribbean, Cubans of African descent witnessed the white disavowal of their role in the wars of independence. Like other intellectuals of the Black Atlantic, Afro-Cubans would continue to denounce similar forms of erasure throughout the following century. In his 1968 book La presencia negra en el nuevo mundo (The Black Presence in the New World), for example, the Cuban historian José Luciano Franco would lament that “desconocemos, o tratamos de no darnos por enterados” (we ignore, or we try not to acknowledge) the four centuries of Black contributions to the nation’s march toward freedom.Footnote ³⁸ Putting this form of active ignorance in a wider framework, Sylvia Wynter would write about the “mechanisms of occultation” that help us “inscript and auto-institute ourselves as human” in ways that make some people seem more human than others.Footnote ³⁹ Active ignorance and deception, in other words, have been often described as catalysts for racial hierarchies.

In scholarship on colonialism, slavery, and their legacies, this is generally described through categories like silence and erasure.Footnote ⁴⁰ In his landmark 1995 book Silencing the Past, which continues to have an extraordinary impact on students and scholars, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed (switching metaphors) that the “ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”Footnote ⁴¹ Now, one of the obstacles to exposing these roots is the very concept of race. As Cedric J. Robinson pointed out, for example, race is “a covering conceit” that helps present socially produced inequalities as natural, and racial regimes are, therefore, “unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition.”Footnote ⁴² This makes the history of racism unique and puzzling. Even if race can be understood as a “covering conceit,” or as a way of mis-constructing social processes and justifying exploitation, racialized people found ways to mobilize racial discourse to address those very things. As an analytical category, racial doubt tackles this paradox. It highlights race (e.g., the use of the term negro to dismiss rights, claims, and cultural perspectives) as much as the disputes about its validity, meanings, and implications. It also helps understand why some Afrodescendants steered away from racial categories while others reclaimed them, or why they chose different paths to confront the “different ways of not saying” – as Michel Foucault and Trouillot would put it – that were integral to power relations.Footnote ⁴³ The concepts at the core of each of the six chapters of Racial Doubt – anagnorisis (to “re-cognize,” or to make known again), farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – are attempts to define some of these forms of not-saying with greater precision than what is afforded by metaphors like “silence,” “invisibility,” or “erasure.”

Arguing for one’s freedom, passing as white, and Black writing – the practices analyzed in each of the three sections of this book – were responses to and, in that sense, constitutive elements of the process of racialization and the active forms of not-knowing and not-saying it entailed. Captives who claimed to be free challenged the social senses of ‘their’ race and the silences that bolstered them.Footnote ⁴⁴ Mixed-race people who strove to become white contributed to shaping the amnesiac nature of whiteness. And authors of African descent who engaged racial categories in their texts made their writing recognizable as Black. “Black,” as Stuart Hall observed, “has always been an unstable identity (…) which had to be learned and could only be learned in a certain moment.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Racial Doubt pays particular attention to what Hall calls a “moment,” or to those junctures in which people felt that something about social relations could change.

A focus on practices of seeking freedom, passing, and writing, in other words, is a focus on what was and remains ongoing and incomplete – on the grammar of unfinished processes, or the “ing” dimension of “being.” Freed people were sometimes re-enslaved, the ‘true’ race of individuals was often exposed, and the authority of Afrodescendant writers was regularly questioned, but none of this could necessarily stop them. Race, they knew, could not be wished away. Some bodies, they knew, were hyper-visible and hyper-surveilled. Racial injuries, they knew, persisted intergenerationally. Many of them, however, also knew that thinking of racial differences as dynamic, relational, and provisional made sense and could help them. The racial regime under which they lived, it is worth emphasizing, was very different from the putatively raceless one that would mark the twentieth century. Rejecting the reification of racial identities can hardly be counterhegemonic in contexts where people say that the racist is the one who brings up race, or that bringing it up is antipatriotic, and where any reference to the socially constructed aspects of Black identities may be weaponized to deny the existence of racism and hurt people who struggle to reclaim histories and identities that they perceive as essential. When the existence of superior and inferior races was taken as a truism, however, casting doubt on racial differences could be deeply counterhegemonic.

The nineteenth century is often described as the time when race became ‘biological,’ or when scientific racism helped to convince large numbers of people that there existed fixed racial groups identifiable through phenotypical traits. Cuban history, however, is replete with elements that do not align with this description, as the factors through which socio-racial status had been determined for centuries, such as freedom, wealth, education, and genealogical fictions, kept playing an important role.Footnote ⁴⁶ Highly dependent on context, these factors were comparable to the “changing set of features” that, as Ann Laura Stoler has observed, also helped reproduce racial essences in other parts of the world.Footnote ⁴⁷ The intertwinement of change and essence was, indeed, a puzzling but fundamental aspect of race. In the midst of this, many people living in Cuba found opportunities to circumvent racial barriers, and even to question them explicitly, capitalizing on disagreements and casting doubt on the conflation of blackness with enslavement, the purity of whiteness, or the assumption that “Black writer” was an oxymoron.

My focus on process, fluidity, and provisionality is also an attempt to come to terms with the ever-elusive but unavoidable notion of identity – including the practices of racial ascription and self-identification through which people living in Cuba made sense of others and themselves. However, it is the richness of social conflicts, rather than a transcendental truth about the multiplicity inherent to any individual, that my emphasis on the disputed, contradictory, and shifting aspects of racial identities intends to foreground. In Cuba, as Rebecca Scott puts it, “attributions of color, self-identifications, and the social significance of perceived color could all shift with a shift in context, and were sometimes disputed and even litigated.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But how, exactly, did these shifts interlock with the belief in the existence of distinct racial identities? Some mixed-race people became white. Others chose partners who were morenos or morenas. Some enslaved people were able to purchase their freedom. Most were not. While part of the explanation for these different outcomes may very well lie in how each person related to his or her sense of self, and especially in the resources available to their families and broader networks, Racial Doubt focuses on a social arena where people reflected on and negotiated the implications of race: open secrets. The two most salient open secrets that the book examines are the illegal slave trade and the porousness of whiteness.

Out of complicity, indifference, or fear, most people looked the other way as they witnessed how captives kept arriving in Cuba after the slave trade had been banned. While the fate of nineteenth-century captives was socioeconomic – that is, the conflict between their right to freedom and their owners’ right to property was resolved in favor of the latter – it was also racial, because many people took for granted that uprooting and enslaving Africans (“raza africana,” or African race, was a category commonly used by both white and Black people) was not as bad as doing the same to people of ‘pure’ European descent. Their inferior status was reproduced and racialized through violence, but also through lies and dissimulation, which in turn led Afrodescendants to raise doubts about the racist certainties informing their oppression. When conceptualized as open secrets, the illegal slave trade and racial passing show striking similarities. What I call passing-as-open-secret made patently clear that non-biological forms of adjudicating race extended well into the era of its so-called biologization. In Cuba, the woman who passed as white – or simply became white – generally could do so not because she lived among people who were unaware of her ancestry, but rather because those people believed, pretended to believe, or had no good reason to dispute that she was white enough. Without forcing anybody to admit this, every whitened person showed that racial identity was not just primordial, internal, and fixed, but also acquired, exterior, and malleable. This tacit agreement on the importance of not-knowing and not-saying certain things helped to defer, and in that sense virtually reconcile, the main contradiction of the prevailing racial ideology, which was the existence of two one-drop rules – one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made him or her whiter. (Readers familiar with Latin America will probably find this reference to US history quite jarring; my point is precisely to question the assumption that US and Latin American racial ideologies are completely different – a long-held assumption stemming from the tradition of using the other region as a foil.)

When many of the victims of the illegal slave trade petitioned for freedom, they made direct reference to the fact that the crime being committed was an open secret. When Black journalists began to share their thoughts on racial mixing in public, they often highlighted the purposefully amnesiac nature of whiteness, or the silent imperative to forget the African origins of one’s family. When they foregrounded their own racialization, several Afrodescendant poets ‘made a scene’ in which the racially unmarked, white subject position clashed with the marked, Black one. These are examples of how people deployed racial doubt to disrupt the forms of not-knowing and not-saying characteristic of the open secret, but also of how much race changes when one looks at it through the lens of doubt.

In this book, to make this point more clear, racial doubt is not just an object of study but also a method (or, more modestly, an analytical category); part episteme (the body of knowledge that I analyze) and part epistemology (the theory about knowledge behind my analysis); both something I found in the archive and a way of approaching it. As many scholars have noted, suspicion has long played a key methodological role in the humanities, prompting a quintessentially predictable form of reading – one that requires, as Eve Sedgwick put it, “that bad news be always already known” – while foreclosing others.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a method of inquiry or analytical category, racial doubt has helped me move in a different direction and cultivate surprise. Focusing on texts in which people considered race in all its disputability, I have established my site of inquiry along the rupture of disagreements among scholars – for example, those who emphasize that not considering Afrodescendant writers the same as white ones is racist, and those for whom antiracist readings must focus on how different they were. As a method, racial doubt postpones the always already known to prioritize more dynamic forms of knowledge, beginning with the question of whether the struggle against racism gets strengthened or hindered when criticism makes room for some of the things that remain inconclusive about race.

Book Outline

With a focus on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist texts, the first part of the book charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement. The majority of African captives brought to Cuba throughout three and a half centuries arrived after the ban of the transatlantic slave trade that was supposed to become effective in 1820. Against the background of this massive contraband, denouncing the lies, pretenses, and cynicism used to implement racialized dispossession became a common strategy. Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness and slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and enslaved in Cuba for several decades. Cuban and US authorities called Ben a “negro.” In his testimony, however, he only referred to himself as “a man born free.” As he made clear, racist agnosia (i.e., the practice of actively not-knowing or ignoring the claims of racialized people) could sometimes be interrupted by anagnorisis (i.e., by the recognition of negros as legitimate claimants). Chapter 2 examines abolitionist texts that engaged the conventions of the theatrical genre of farce to denounce the illegal slave trade. Farce, it shows, played an important role in processes of racialization. It analyzes how a wide range of people mocked the generalized awareness of pretense that helped slavery flourish under prohibitions and concludes by tracing how captives turned the logic of pretense to their advantage, using forged documents to ‘pass’ as free in the cities of Havana and Santiago.

By putting literary fiction in dialogue with judicial records and other non-literary sources, the second part of the book foregrounds how free people of color wrestled with two one-drop rules. Racial passing relied on two contradictory notions of race: immutable fact and pliable fiction. Its fictional dimension worked through the logic of the open secret – an awareness of pretense that, I argue, also protected the illegal slave trade. As these chapters also show, while some people of known African descent participated in whitening processes, others mobilized racial doubt to call attention to the amnesia and denial inherent to whiteness as an institution and set of lived practices. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between whiteness and the awareness of pretense. For some Cubans, racial mixing could be an effective means to eliminate blackness and the possibility of its communal or political articulation as Blackness; for others, it would doom the nation. Passing as white was an individual form of escaping racism, even as it reproduced it. The pretense of acting as if races could be neatly demarcated despite countless examples to the contrary, in fact, endowed racism with the flexibility it required to preserve structures of inequality. When writers of African descent began to publish on the question in the 1880s, they often addressed this logic of pretense. Rodolfo de Lagardere, for example, deployed racial doubt in his 1889 booklet Blancos y negros to demonstrate that whiteness entailed a collective effort to forget the African origins of Cuban society. Literary texts, however, offered the most full-fledged exploration of the narratives of racial coherence that had most currency in Cuban society as slavery came to an end. Because of their ability to construct clashing voices, bring them into a tense truce via free indirect discourse, and engage the reader’s own knowing and refusal to know, novels were uniquely poised to stage racial passing. Chapter 4 puts the first novel published by a Cuban of African descent, Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1892), in dialogue with two others: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) and Ramón Meza’s Carmela (1887). Morúa, the son of an African-born freedwoman, made an entrance into the literary scene as a respondón. As his Sofía shows, white identities were secured through hypocrisy and cynicism – an open secret that Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés and Meza’s Carmela had not fully acknowledged.

The third and final part of the book examines the conditions for the emergence of Black Cuban writing. While enslaved poets generally avoided references to race, in the late nineteenth century, many free writers began to embrace a communitarian ethos and publicly identify as negros/negras (Black) or as members of the raza de color. For generations, literary critics have puzzled over who the first Black Cuban authors were. In this third part, I examine why. Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. Chapter 6, in turn, compares the work of the enslaved poet Ambrosio Echemendía with that of several free authors of African descent, including Juana Pastor (often considered the first woman poet in Cuba), Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, probably the most popular Cuban writer of the century), and África Céspedes (one of the collaborators of Minerva, [1888–1889], the first periodical by Black women). Black Cuban writing, the chapter argues, does not begin with Juan Francisco Manzano or Plácido, as most scholars have generally assumed; neither of them reclaimed Blackness in their texts. It makes more sense to argue that it begins with the poetry collection that Echemendía published in 1865 – the first book published in Cuba in which an author self-fashioned as racially stigmatized and questioned this stigma.