In-Love With the Other: Diary of a Spanish Voluntario's Surrender to a Cuban Mambi at the End of Empire
Marina A. Amat
American University, Washington, D.C
(Estados Unidos)
Across an expanse of land traversing two continents and a span of years reaching back to the late nineteenth century, over a century of silence and forgetfulness is suddenly interrupted. A meager two dozen photocopied pages of the diary belonging to my great, grandfather, José, reach my hands. Scattered among its pages, personal details and historical clues of a life begun in 1870 beckon me. An ancestral voice speaks to me from the past. Escúchame, says José. Intrigued, I attend to the facts of his life, I marvel at his silences. I am compelled to recollect my colonial past.
In 1884, at age 14, José boarded the steamer Ciudad Condal bound for Cuba, leaving his home in Barcelona, Spain to join his Tio José, a merchant in Puerto Príncipe. Failed struggles for Cuban independence from Spain—The Ten Years’ War (1870-1878) and The Little War (1879-1880)—were behind him, and a “fragile peace” (Ferrer 1999: 93) veiled the island. Between 1882 and 1892, nearly one hundred thousand Spaniards immigrated to Cuba, repopulating a ravaged countryside with a “loyal and pro-Spanish phalange” (Ferrer 1999: 96). Presumably, José settled in and apprenticed with his uncle. In his next entry, it is 1887, and at the age of 17, the young José joins the Spanish Voluntarios “por salvarme de la quinta,” he says.
For during the “fragile peace,” the plots for Cuban independence had continued, and so had “Spanish tactics of counterinsurgency” (Ferrer 1999: 93). José is completely silent regarding his role in the Spanish Voluntarios. Was he a pro-Spanish spy? Did he perpetrate violence against the Cuban insurgents (Mambis)? Did he sympathize with any of the many facets of the Cuban insurgency? In fact, José says nothing regarding his sociopolitical milieu. Indeed, rather than chronicle his Spanish military activities leading up to and during the Cuban War of Independence, José chronicles his heart’s desire during the war. On Februrary 24, 1895, says José,“el 24 de Febrero de 1895 principia la Guerra en la Ysla de Cuba, pero Eugenita principia a no cerle [sic] indiferente y ami cada vez me gusta mas.”
Thus begins the story of “mi pacion” [sic] for Eugenia, “mi Mambicita,” a Spanish Creole from a wealthy family of insurgents devoted to Cuban independence. In my analysis of the Spanish Voluntario’s diary, I interpret the colonial categories of Spanish Voluntario and Creole Mambi as simultaneously occupying Self/Other valences, where these categories are “problematic, contested, and changing” (Cooper and Stoler 1989: 609). These valences can be seen as “cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha 1994: 3). In 1898, by war’s end, José writes, “se abla [sic] que las fuerzas Españolas se van, dudo si me voy, decido no hirme [sic]…entraron las fuerzas Cubanas el 30 de Noviembre de 1898...” Significantly, the retreat of the Spanish army marks José’s surrender to his Mambicita and his decision to remain in Cuba, to wed Eugenia, and to formally consummate at once their passion and their cultural hybridity at a historically climactic moment—at the end of Spanish empire, at the emergence of the Cuban nation.
bio:
Marina A. Amat, MA, PhD, completed her doctorate in Anthropology from American University, Washington, D.C. Drawing from personal experience as an immigrant exiled to the U.S. from Cuba, Amat has focused much of her graduate career on people who have experienced displacement and the narratives they produce. For her dissertation research, Amat worked and volunteered in the refugee industry in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Trained in literary criticism, Spanish literature, and creative writing, Amat holds an MA in English from Trinity College, Hartford, CT, and remains interested in the stories and narratives of personal experience where cultures intersect. Amat is the founder of AMATEA, LLC, an interdisciplinary consulting firm guided by its mission to apply technology for social change. The firm employs research, evaluation, ethnographic fieldwork methods, and text analysis to offer an interdisciplinary approach to technology solutions, combining the thinking of technologists and anthropologists to create solutions that make sense to technology end-users.