Abstract
Technically speaking, the military war between the United States and Cuba lasted less than a month. It started the evening of 22 June 1898, when the troops of Generals Lawton, Wheeler, and Roosevelt took the Spanish garrison of Siboney, and ended at noon on 17 July of that same year, with the surrender of the city of Santiago de Cuba.1 There were two more or less important battles: the ground battle of San Juan Hill and the naval battle of Santiago Bay. The casualties numbered 3,469: 224 Americans, 3,245 Spaniards.2 For such a short war, originally undesired by both rivals, it was, in the words of Secretary of State John Hay, “a splendid little war,” although a very bloody one.3
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Notes
Esmond Wright, The American Dream: From Reconstruction to Reagan (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 135–139; Allen Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and Jeffrey Morris, Breve historia de los Estados Unidos (México, DF, Mexico: FCE, 1994), pp. 360–361.
I take these somewhat dubious facts from Hugh Thomas, Cuba: La lucha por la libertad, 1760–1970 (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1973), pp. 512–515.
Ibid., p. 524; see also John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Walter La Feber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963).
Michel Foucault speaks of “infinite wars” when referring to “battles between nations, between races or between civilizations.” Genealogia del racismo (La Plata, Argentina: Editorial Altamira, 1996), pp. 117–137.
On the moral instrumentation of the “civic model,” see Fernando Escalante, Ciudadanos imaginarios (México City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1992), pp. 32–35.
As is apparent, in this chapter I focus solely on ethnic and religious enonces for the interpretation of identitary national discourses. Other enonces, such as gender and sexual ones, while not absent from discursive constructions, are much less visible in the first decades of postcolonial culture in Cuba. For the concepts of enonce and discourse, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1995) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
See the excellent article by Jesus Timoteo Alvarez, “Opinion publica y propaganda belica al inicio de la contienda,” in 1895: La guerra en Cuba y la Espana de la Restauracion, ed. Emilio de Diego (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1996), pp. 247–261.
M. Thomas Inge, ed., A Nineteenth Century American Reader (Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, 1989), pp. 22–24.
Ibid., pp. 25–31.
Ibid., pp. 560–575. For Crane’s literary epic, see Chester L. Wolford, The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in America (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
Don Martindale, La teoria sociologica: Naturaleza y escuelas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1971), pp. 191–201.
Eric Hobsbawm, La era del imperio (Barcelona: Labor, 1989), pp. 56–57.
See, for example, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, “La opinion en Alemania y las condiciones de la paz,” Ensayos de critica e historia (Madrid: Aguilar, 1953), pp. 780–794.
Maria Alicia Laorga, “Mentalidad y novela: Una reflexion sobre la postura de ciertos intelectuales a la altura de 1995,” in Juan Pablo Fusi and Antonio Nino, eds., Antes del desastre: Origenes y antecedentes de la crisis del 98 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1996), pp. 427–428.
J. Eslava Galan and D. Rojano Ortega, La Espana del 98: Elfin de una era (Madrid: Editorial Edaf, 1997), pp. 254–264; Eric Storm, “La generacion de 1897: Las ideas politicas de Azorin y Unamuno en el fin de siglo,” in Fusi and Nino, Antes del desastre, pp. 465–480; Luis de Llera Esteban and Milagrosa Romero Samper, “Los intelectuales espanoles y el problema colonial,” in de Diego, 1895, pp. 263–295.
See Miguel de Unamuno, En torno al casticismo (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 40–50; Angel Ganivet, Idearium espauiol (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 37–54; Luis Morote, La moral de la derrota (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 149–154.
See Rafael Rojas, “El discurso de la frustracion republicana en Cuba,” in El ensayo en Nuestra America (Mexico City: UNAM, 1993), pp. 411–417.
Jose Enrique Rodó, Ariel (México City: Espasa-Calpe, 1992), pp. 75, 78, 86–87.
Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanas ante las recientes conquistas de Europa y Norteamerica: Estructura y evolution de un continente (México: El Pensamiento Vivo de America, 1899), p. 147.
Ernst Junger, “Fuego y movimiento,” Sobre el dolor (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1995), pp. 128–129.
A century later, this clash of civilizations is still the order of the day. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
Clifford Geertz, Conocimiento local: Ensayos sobre la interpretation de las culturas (Barcelona: Paidos, 1994), pp. 55–60.
Cristobal de la Guardia, Estudio sobre el carcicter cubano (Havana: Liceo de Guanabacoa, 1902), pp. 5–15.
Ibid., p. 17.
Cristobal de la Guardia, De los vicios y defectos del criollo (Havana: Cultural S.A., 1939).
The articles by Sold and Guiral appeared in the journal Cuba conteinporcinea (vols. 2 and 4, 1913 and 1914, respectively). Between 1913 and 1927, this publication was a center for the reproduction of eugenicist discourses of Cuban identity. When I speak of minor literature here, I am not referring to Gilles Deleuze but rather to Miguel de Unamuno’s description of “minor literature” as that which has very little “will to style.” See Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1958), pp. 1224–1225.
Enrique José Varona, Textos escogidos (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1974), p. 57.
Francisco Figueras, Cuba y su evolution colonial (Havana: Isla S.A., n.d.), pp. 6, 19.
Ibid., pp. 210–217.
Ibid., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 175.
Carlos Octavio Bunge, Nuestra America (Barcelona: Imprenta de Henrich y Cia. Editores, 1903), p. 34.
Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–54.
Roque E. Garrigo, La convulsion cubana (Havana: Imprenta La Razon, 1906), p. 23.
Jose Antonio Ramos, Manual del perfecto fulanista: Apuntes para el estudio de nuestra dinkmica politico-social (Miami, Fla.: Editorial Cubana, 1995), p. 64.
Ibid., p. 65.
On the strengthening of the Hispanic identity, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba/Espaiia, Espa fia/Cuba: Historia comiin (Barcelona: Critica/Mondadori, 1995), pp. 295–300.
Francisco Garcia Calderon, La creation de un continente (Paris: Libreria de Paul Ollendorf, 1912), pp. 48–49.
Fernando Ortiz, Entre cubanos: Psicologia tropical (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987), p. 86.
Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Fernando Ortiz, La reconquista de America: Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo (Paris: Sociedad de Ediciones Artisticas y Literarias, Libreria de Paul Ollendorf, 1911), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., pp. 111, 110.
Ibid., pp. 32–33.
Ibid., pp. 39–40.
Fernando Ortiz, Estudios etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 1991), p. 10.
Qtd. in Georges Duby, Civilization latina (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1989), p. 22.
Inge, A Nineteenth Century American Reader, pp. 48–55, 68–73.
Eugenio Trías, La lógica del límite (Barcelona: Destino, 1991).
Levi Marrero, Cuba: Isla abierta (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Capiro, 1995), pp. 1–7.
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Rojas, R. (2008). The Moral Frontier. In: Essays in Cuban Intellectual History. New Concepts in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611078_3
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