Silver Buckles

THE TRAGEDY AND CHARM OF upper-class white Cuban Creoles reside in their belonging to a past of velvets and silver buckles not intrinsically their own. They are, as one of their intellectuals remarks, "off spring of a racial trunk whose dense foliage of ideals and medieval mysticisms did not rot in time. We were born and grew up in a house of ruined grandees."

However much the Creoles may have engaged in modern professions, or associated themselves with American business initiative, or promoted sugar production, their activities, mentality and emotions float in a vague middle world, neither Cuban nor Spanish. That world has definite con tours, a geography; yet, infolded, it despairingly attempts—despite trappings borrowed from Paris and the United States—to be culturally self-sufficient. Many members of this group affect great disdain for all things Cuban; that most vital and human about them, albeit untutored, they decry as barbaric and disgusting. They hold their father land up to the mirror of modern Europe and America and find it frayed and crude, even though they themselves, however much they may ape foreign ways, are powerless to break the mold of their own inadequate cultural compulsives.

They do add grace to Havana and a few other centers by cherishing older traditions, while Cuban life patently disintegrates before the smashing impact of northern initiative. That very grace, clung to with forlorn tenacity, crumbles before swarming, pushing American tourists demanding both coarse and snobbish joys, before the swirl of black folk in the shoddy low-roofed barrios, the pushing peseta grabbing raucousness of the poorer Spanish immigrants, and the mongrel tide of mixed offspring—Chinese, African, Spanish, challenging the chromatic range of the rainbow.

Paradoxically, they are both more of the modern world and further remote from it than their Mexican cousins, who have been fused and blended, shaped and reshaped by the hammering incoherence of a hundred years of independence. Mexico enjoys slightly more autonomous political reality than Cuba, caught in a series of static tyrannies at tempting the undignified r6le of avoiding any offense to the United States or to the powerful banking and sugar companies that are the final courts of appeal.

Thus, from the standpoint of pure patriotism, the white Creoles are a bit stodgy and unpleasant, politically more pathetic even than the actual custodians of their national sovereignty—those brutal governors for absentee American capital. Yet for all the Creole Toryism, the clinging to dubious and unreal privileges, this maladjusted group has preserved much that makes Havana delightful to eyes enjoying the rococo and mid-Victorianism stripped of sensual rigidity.

But there is something non-vital and pitiable about their distaste of actual political brutalities, their wistful consciousness of the ebb of an era and the ebb of their own cultural significance—that vacant reminiscent stare, that helpless weary flow of the hands—inarticulate resentment at threatening economic disaster and fear of the inscrutable dark future of their country. They are a class still-born into the brief epoch between—the downfall of Spanish rule and the Republic and enjoying a gilded, non-creative renascence during the sugar booms, but never at all comprehending the dilemma of race and politics involved in their country's pseudo-independence.

Such a one is my dear friend Dr. Jose Camargo. When he was an industrious sugar-planter, a large-scale colono—e absorption of the industry by the banks and the present sugar debacle—he must still have preserved the ruggedness I have observed in this hardy class of rural white Cubans who have fought so long for their patrimonies no snore successfully than he. But now his defenses have cracked on all fronts. Big law-firms, with far-reaching political and financial tentacles, monopolize most of the island's important legal business; if Camargo cannot be a colono, neither do twenty-five years of solid connections now help him much in his legal practice. Even more in youth, he must have had a fine courtesy, sensitivity about human relations, well-meaning faith—all the best-foot-forward of an inherent soul-weariness. Those likeable traits have not deserted him, but the fumbling bewilderment behind them has now oozed through the mask; and this tinge of melancholia, of frustration, has become almost Oriental passiveness—its maximum achievement the slow delicious savoring of his inordinately long Larañaga cigar. Suddenly his ideas seem pudgy; evasion casts nebulosity about him.

The younger generation—though youth prevents ultimate despair—is even more caught on the prongs; it finds even fewer doors open to it, the harsh economic circle ever narrowing. This is sad, for they have better intelligence by far than their elders; but no real economic or political leverage commensurate with their capacities. Among their peers, competence reigns and functions, but does not carry over, either in comprehension or functioning, into the administrative or creative life of Cuba. The Yacht Club balls, the various social functions, maintain properly polished grave joy. Those dapperly dressed handsome youths, with long fine hands, white skins, sleek plastered black hair, were born with the aura of self-assurance and dignity; capable for any task—facing a firing-squad, directing a Santa Clara sugar plantation, or matching wits and elegance against the best of any country—somehow they are excluded from any vital relation to the dull forces mastering Cuba for the ends of power and exploitation. Yesterday exploitation was their divinely appointed rôle—save that they imparted to it feudal éclat and noblesse oblige and leisurely appraisals not crudely greedy. But the machine age is not their toy. Their usefulness as major-domos for American capital diminishes as the pivot of political gravity shifts from them to more ruffianly militarists and mestizo riffraff, who, less intelligent, but more vigorous and aspiring, can whole-heartedly and without compunction perpetrate the atrocities of rule demanded in a country sodden with financial absenteeism.

Nor can they properly participate in the new, deeper struggles for liberty, inevitably proletarian and dark-skinned. Their participation but misdirects and vitiates that struggle, tries to swing it around the circle into a belated Fascist survival of feudal prerogatives.

Their day has been brief enough. What little expansion they enjoyed was won gradually, painfully, from Spain, subsequently by cooperation with American overlordship. They were a flash between two eras. A goodly share of them were Tories during the independence struggle, refusing to assist the fearsome ragged patriots of Maceo and Gómez; but others, despite personal sacrifice, to which they are not will ingly prone, were a valiant part of the long fight for free Cuba. Both reactionaries and libertarians won doubtful rewards from the new era, though better by far than those of the masses. Now their day is irretrievably passing.

  Blood of the Colony

The independence struggle had grown out of the iniquities and economic stupidities of the colonial régime—little changed despite previous of all the rest of Spain's New World empire. Though during the nineteenth century, had been shaken by of liberal and Republican sentiment, essentially the Spanish government and hierarchy still formed a social complex based upon monarchy and super-domination of the State, submergence of the individual to the cives romanus status—privileges but neither rights nor responsibilities. It involved feudal aristocracy; a pre-Renaissance Church denying the individual religious self-expression; a colonial system drinking the blood of subjugated peoples—Cuba, the last. was most suffering. Spain was still steeped in traditions of official cruelty, disguised by romantic sentimentalism and false chivalry and filled with racial and religious hates.

In Spain, as Elias Entralgo has pointed out in the Revista Bimestre Cubana (XVIII, 1, 132 ff.), social order is not the result of harmony between authority and liberty, but variously derivative of individualistic attraction for military chieftainship (caudillaje), tyranny, or anarchy. This was the typical cycle of Spain in the nineteenth century: Ferdinand VII (tyranny); militarism of the revolts; interludes of anarchy. Outside of the political sphere, the Spaniard shuttles between the authority of the State and the author ity of Religion.

The Indians killed off, negro slaves imported, Cuba from 1511 to 1899 was held under Spain's iron rule and was governed—more often misgoverned—by civil and military grandees. Their portraits reveal a notable series of powdered perukes, velvets, ruffs, gaudy uniforms, medallions, glittering spangles, and silver-hilt swords. From them were derived many of the traditions and customs of the better- class Cubans. The Viceroys ruled arrogantly, enriched themselves and the Church, sent back a stream of gold, sugar, tobacco and tropical fruits to the mother country. The first gold of the Americas glistens on the ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; the Escorial is lined with mahogany, ebony and other precious woods from Cuba's forests.

The Viceroys established the Inquisition, built fortresses and convents, discovered copper mines, grew tobacco, punished smugglers trying to evade the monopolistic trade-acts, established the Santa Cruzada order against vice, died of the black vomit, took the census, fought English and French buccaneers sailing over the horizon under Drake and Jacques Sores, and imported ever more and more slaves. Pleasant days of plaza promenade at the hour of retreat; high-comb señoritas in white lace mantillas, skirts spread wide in their spanking two-wheeled volantes; festivals and music and feudal intimacy, featured the life of those days.

Even after splendid living, palatial elegance and corrupt orgies where comely black wenches danced naked in hilarious balls, the Spanish governors by 1838 poured ten million pesos annually into the Spanish Exchequer, garnered in part by beating free colored men to death and driving black slaves ever more harshly under the lash.

For more efficient exploitation, caste lines were closely drawn. All offices, religious, civil and military, were plums for Crown favorites. The division between things Spanish and colonial was almost uncrossable. A Spaniard born in Spain—be he an ignorant Extremadura peasant—was superior to the native whites, whatever their category. The merest Spanish clerk was socially above the wealthiest Creole.

As the latter could achieve no distinction in government, Church or Army, gradually he came to consider himself—as early as the end of the sixteenth century—Cuban rather than Spanish. Though no idea of political separation filtered in, on occasion the Creoles vigorously defended their ideas and rights. In 1717 some five hundred of them rose in revolt to oppose a proposed tobacco monopoly. They captured Jesús del Monte, not far from Havana, before being persuaded to lay down their arms. In 1721 and 1723 two more Creole tobacco uprisings occurred. These clearly indicated growth of Creole self-consciousness—inevitable outcome of economic and political discriminations, the strict rule of favoritism, and the trade regulations benefiting only the mother country.

Too, the Creoles were held, so far as possible, in intellectual as well as economic inferiority. All books on the Index Expurgatorum were prohibited from leaving Sevilla, the one port which could have commercial or other relations with the island. The Edict of Delaciones specifically prohibited Bibles, the Alcorán, the Talmud, Luther, Molina, MArio, Voltaire, Rousseau, Voleny, Diderot, Crébillen. All  reading material was carefully given the once-over before being allowed to pass to the New World. Charles IV de cured that "learning should not be made general in America" and in 1799 (reiterated in 1802) forbade Cubans to send their children to study in the United States.

Elementary education in Cuba, mostly in private schools, had as the chief text the catechism; for the girls, mostly embroidery. The University curriculum remained very theological to the very end of Spanish rule.

Despite such restrictions, the Creole, blood-brother of his Spanish overseers, was far above the mulattoes; for not withstanding strict caste lines—interbreeding had increasingly taken place as the centuries rolled by. The lowest in the social scale, with little legal or economic protection, were the negro and mulatto slaves. All these social and racial barriers greatly complicated the cause of Cuban freedom; and not until Spanish tyranny began leveling all colonials, did these walls temporarily break down enough for the common cause of national freedom to embrace all Cubans irrespective of color or creed.  

Female Faces

Independence witnessed temporary American political domination—far more race-prejudiced than Spanish. Creole snobbery reasserted itself. But even more than under Spanish rule, the economic roots of "the aristocracy" in the productive life of the country were cut by the double-edged knife of Spanish immigrant commercialism and American economic imperialism. The Spaniards, it is said in Cuba, can take out the heart of a competitor, scrape off the fat, and replace the organ without the owner's knowledge.

Expediency and contemporizing on our part (as else where in Latin America) have alone caused casual alliance with this class by American capital as a stabilizer while the basic resources could be monopolized. Today the need for this utilization is fast disappearing. For industrialism inevitably, sooner or later, wars on medieval feudalism. It turns, when the time comes, to the less couth mestizo; as in Mexico, to Calles. Machado represents the preliminary unenlightened inauguration of this new era.

Not that the white aristocrats did not have their brief belly-full fling at wealth under the Republic. The white marble palaces of the Malec6n, the double-decked mansions of the Vedado and the luxurious villas of the Reparto attest to their expanded scale of living. They swung on the upgrade of the prosperous sugar wave during the World War and the subsequent "Dance of the Millions"—the 1920 post war orgy.

But up to that time there was as yet little to stamp Cuba as a typical tropical country exploited economically by foreign capital. Foreigners, Spaniards, Cubans, even negroes, had made and lost fortunes since the day the Spanish flag was hauled down from Morro Castle. But 1920 was the peak of dizzy credit expansion, when the card-house collapsed. American capital has gathered in the fragments until today, the iron ring of American banks, public utility interests and sugar Centrales, has been forged to an enduring yoke. Step by step the Creoles have been shoved aside.

Suddenly the Creole discovers himself a stranger in his own house. He never has had too defined a rôle in Cuban independence life, certainly none comparable to that in other Latin-American countries. He came too late on the world scene. In Mexico even today, despite this class's elimination from power and former wealth, it is fiercely traditional. The Cuban Creole has always had more grace and less efficacy than that. He should be Catholic, and is—but in a casual way more befitting a cosmopolitan gentleman unaddicted to extreme dogmatism. His churches have none of the historic interest or grandiose sumptuous ness of those in Mexico; his convents have become ware houses, smelling of tobacco, molasses and onions in bulk. Impossible to imagine Cuba shaken by a religious struggle which even up until the last decade devastated a large part of Mexico, and is still a political issue.

The Creole women, too, are between worlds; though in Cuba, as elsewhere in the Hispano-Moorish world, women's faces stare longingly from ancient balconies. But a few, for better or worse, have sought a modicum of emancipation. Swimming and sports claim such in the swank seashore clubs; a few swing golf-clubs. Others will be found—chaperoned it is true—dancing on the Plaza roof to jazz bands, where the musicians, bedecked in fake Hawaiian wreathes, bang tunes thrice removed from their African source but still bearing a trickle of twice-removed Cuban music. And a few, emulating northern sisters, have founded the Lyceum, where occasionally the military authorities permit innocuous addresses and art exhibits. Unwelcome divorce has even stuck its foot in a door never to be closed.

But those female faces of Cuba, of Latin America! Behind their lattices, in their barred windows, they hint at the Oriental seraglio, at mystery and romance. The glimpse of a shawl, the suggestion of artistic coquetry and alien ways fortifies this impression of the delightfully exotic. But the initiate knows that the system that imprisons female faces behind bars, however strange, is prosaic. As elsewhere, romance must be captured individually rather than collectively.

In time, those faces, as Mañach points out, fall into common categories: faces a bit wan from seclusion, mostof them, despite olive-hued skin, slightly pallid, wistful as though striving to be properly distinguished from a distance; faces with large black eyes wearing virginity's expectancy; matronly faces still hopeful of some break in daily monotony. Those in higher balconies seem resigned to a dream-like existence; their glance, more platonic, bespeaks merely idle curiosity. Those on the street level, since masculine eyes come closer, are more alert, more captivating; practice has made them flirtatious—souls less settled, more disturbed.

Except for certain morning shopping hours, Havana is still largely a male city. The tide of pedestrians along narrow Obispo Street with its cavernous cool dark stores, or under the Prado portals, wall-papered with magazines and multicolored lottery tickets, the idlers in the open-air cafes—nearly all are men in white linen, now and then a bright tie under a dark chin shaded by a straw hat tilted effectively. Women seated alone in the cafes are either Americans or prostitutes, the latter quiet and reserved, the former legs crossed, smoking, listening to the ambulating orchestras, but despite apparent receptivity, less courageous than their Cuban sisters in affairs of the heart.

On Thursday and Sunday nights, the complexion of the throngs changes. Then the Cuban brings out his family—bejeweled portly wife, beautiful slim daughters dressed in diaphanous organdie, eyes sparkling with pleasure and amorous expectancy, children of all ages—to listen to the café orchestras and sip naranjadas.

  Cultural Wedge

The grace and restrained ambition of Cuba's respectable levels comes precisely from this rhythm of habits of the cultured Creoles. The center (in a sense never understood by Americans caught in the haste of industrialism) is the home, for even those Vedado mansions with their elaborate high stucco ceilings, their deplorable taste for scrolled furniture in sets, marble-top tables, gold vases, portraits in gaudy gold frames, heavy hangings and general air of palatial nobility, remain intimate refuges. There in Cuba, the Auslander is more likely to be promptly admitted and banqueted than in any other Hispanic country; and he finds hospitality and courtesy, however lavish, far more sincere than elsewhere. For the upper-class Cuban is the most approachable of all the New World aristocracy south of the Rio Grande.

Despite parvenu ostentation and bad home taste, family ties of wife, children and relatives are imperatively binding. There in flowering patios, scented, and melodious with song-birds, in the cool rooms, laddered by light from almost closed shutters, the home becomes an oasis of peace during the hot siesta hours. Little disturbed by the gusts of a feminism, not yet evolved into graceful solutions, or by the factory system of haste, the Cuban can still properly savor connubial and domestic delights; both sexes escape into proper spheres with equal ease.

In these more intimate family reunions, too, a real stimulation springs from feminine sweetness, gentleness and vivacity—outstanding traits of the Cuban woman—which our American sisters could fain deny any one raised in such apparent captivity.

The Cuban woman loses pseudo-equality, gains some thing by the very narrowing of her interests. Far more than the Mexican woman, she surmounts her obstacles: her conversation is spritely and keen, for to interest men she must depend upon, besides her beauty, warmth and sweet ness, finesse rather than variety—the human foibles, nuances of sex; art and literature, perhaps.

But she also has her courage in public questions, and in hours of darkness has not hesitated to step boldly outside of her traditional rôle. During the independence wars many fought shoulder to shoulder with the men, went to jail, died in battle and before the firing squad. In 1807 they signified their adhesion to the insurgent cause by cutting off their hair; in i868 they showed their loyalty to the Yara revolution by going through the streets with their hair down over their shoulders. Such names as Marina Manresa, the filibuster Emilia Teurbe Tolón, Lola Gari Ayala de Betencourt, Teresa Mendoza de Domenech, "Manana" who accompanied Máximo Gómez, and gave birth to a daughter Celemencia, "in the smoke of battle," Magdalena Pefiarredonda, Luz Noriega, and others are legendary in Cuba for their courage and sacrifice. The companion of the martyred Cirilio Villaverde, Emilia Casanova, in 1868, founded the first feminist organization in Cuba: "The Workers Society, League of Daughters of Cuba." And during the present Machado despotism, the women of this class, above all others, have not hesitated to speak their minds, to demonstrate publicly, and to suffer atrocious imprisonment and maltreatment.

Where not submerged by American influence, central Havana bears the full impress of the Creole class. Accord ing to Hergesheimer, it has become a mid-Victorian Pompeii: "marble façades, inadmissible architecturally, yet together holding surprising and pleasant unity... Spain touched by the tropics, the tropics—without tradition—built into a semblance of the Baroque."

Tucked in the interstices, around the fringes, facing the waterfront, is the world of negro and mulatto and Chinese slums, of brothels and pornography, of dives and cabarets, ñañigo and rumba and snake-magic. But Havana's façade is Creole. The marble Malecón, the sea-wall, the La Punta bandstand ring, the Prado and the shaded Paseo de Martí with deep stone benches—here, during twilight and early evening hours, after the post-siesta visits to the clubs, circulate the social élite as in colonial days. At the horse-races, women come modishly dressed, trying to be chic and foreign and succeeding with a flourish all their own, as if for lawn-parties or soirée; not with the English sport air, ready for tramping across sloshing turf.

The Creole keeps up the Conservative tradition of the theater as opposed to the more vulgar neighborhood rumba stage. Though his class has given no new creative impulse, they sit genially in the boxes listening to stale Spanish comedies. They subscribe to poetry-readings of the visiting Spanish literati, who—just as the second-rate English novelists raid the American lecture platform—inflict their mediocre talents, with a comparable air of superciliousness on a properly impressed Latin America. Now and then our best people are found watching a hotly contested quiniela between Azules and Blancos at the exciting Jai Alai Frontón.

Thus the Creole aristocrats are a sort of cultural wedge between the Cuba of the past and the Cuba of the present, cherishing the real Spain as opposed to the new Spanish immigrant such as the Canary Island cane-field workers. Though in the elbow duties of life, Spaniard and Cuban are quite hail-fellow-well-met, scarcely distinguishable, past feuds completely buried, socially the Cuban Creoles still keep somewhat aloof—however much their smart balls may overlap—from the wealthy Spaniards gracing those ornate marble interiors of the Gallego and Asturian clubs on the Parque Central; for however self-made, the Spaniard is clanny, has not quite forgotten that he is intrinsically superior to the highest Cuban; though often he is but a poverty-stricken immigrant grown wealthy, who has made no effort to improve his culture. In social and intellectual lines, the Spanish casino and the Cuban Lyceum are practically non-communicating rivals; the first is chiefly for recreation, the latter for education.

The Creole represents the last remnant of cultured Cuba colonial and European in tradition, that had a slight glimmer after independence—a glimmer that has steadily faded. Whatever European éclat Cuban life still holds, apart from that which is American and native, is still in his hands, a charm constantly being trampled under foot by new alien forces and shaken by the more earth-rooted hosts.

To survive he must inevitably submerge his destiny with that of all Cubans; must go into the market place and politics, not to conserve his ancient privileges, but to battle for the righting of the wrongs of his country.

The younger intellectuals, even many more mature, have already, despite persecutions, lifted up a new banner of faith. The oldest of all, the philosopher Enrique Jose Varona, is as young as any of them, always ready to lend his pen to any righteous matter; Dr. Fernando Ortíz (now in exile), folklorist, jurist, economist and penologist, is a mind that would honor any country. Nor should one forget that turbulent enthusiastic spirit, the brilliant journalist, Jose Antonio Fernández de Castro, the clear, forceful insight of Roig de Leuchsenring, the indefatigable labor of that more than noble character, Félix Lizaso, reviving the work and patriotism of Martí, the poet Juan Marinello (long imprisoned, now in exile), that fine proser—the best in Cuba today—and equally fine character, Jorge Mañach. The list is far from complete. Some of these and others have found their new rôle in Cuban life courageously.

TOP
comments and letters to comments@ipoaa.com