Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition / Edition 1

by Stephan Palmié

Overview

In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.
Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as "modern" as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world's first truly "modern" locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity's achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822328421
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/19/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	414
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Stephan Palmié is Assistant Professor of Caribbean History at the University of Maryland.

Read an Excerpt

Wizards and scientists

Explorations in Afro-Cuban modernity and tradition

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By Stephan Palmie

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-2842-9

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Chapter One

"FOR REASONS OF HISTORY" Jose Antonio Aponte and His Libro de Pinturas

And if someone, in order to decode a cipher written in ordinary letters, thinks of reading a B everywhere he finds an A, and reading a C where he finds a B, and thus to substitute for each letter the one that follows it in alphabetical order and if, reading in this way, he finds words that have a meaning, he will not doubt that he has discovered the true meaning of this cipher in this way, even though it could very well be that the person who wrote it meant something quite different, giving a different meaning to each letter.-Rene Descartes, Principia

For a few day in late March 1812, the licenciado Don Jose Maria Nerey stood on the threshold of a strange and incomprehensible world. Before him, on a desk in Havana's fortress San Carlos de la Cabana, lay a large bound volume of images, partly painted by hand, partly consisting of fragments of engravings cut from books and painted fans and reassembled into bewildering collages of heterogeneous media. This curious book had been secured in the course of a raid on the home and workshop of a free black artisan and retired member of the free black militia, Jose Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra, who now stood before Nerey as the suspected ringleader of what Nerey's superiors, JudgeRendon and Capitan General Salvador Jose de Muro y Salazar, marques de Someruelos, believed was a potentially islandwide conspiracy. Since January of that year, a series of violent uprisings had shaken the eastern provinces of Cuba, and, by early March, rebellions broke out "with major excess" (de Someruelos cited in Franco 1977, 214) on several sugar plantations dangerously close to Havana. Nerey's orders were to find evidence of such a conspiracy, and the volume at hand appeared to contain the key for disclosing what the Cuban authorities feared was a vast subterranean structure of organized insurrectionary fervor.

Such fears were not unfounded. Although sporadic slave revolts had occurred throughout the preceding decades, the present situation appeared a particularly volatile one. For, to anyone aware of the relation between the French Revolution and the slave rebellions that had ushered in the destruction of French St. Domingue some twenty years earlier, the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808, the king's forced exile, the flight of the parliament to Cadiz, and the subsequent waves of nationalist agitation in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, and Quito boded ill for the internal stability of Cuba. This was particularly so because, in the preceding decades, Cuba had experienced far-reaching economic as well as social and demographic transformations that were more than incidentally related to the events that had turned the French colony of St. Domingue into the Republic of Haiti. Coinciding with the Bourbon relaxation of trade restrictions in the Spanish Empire, the elimination of St. Domingue as the world's largest sugar producer had hastened Cuba's rise from a stagnant backwater of Spanish America to the position of a booming plantation colony fully integrated into what Philip Curtin (1955) called the South Atlantic System. Yet, if the Haitian Revolution had expedited Cuba's economic ascendancy, it also exposed the dangers inherent in the dramatic demographic shifts attendant on the expansion of slave-based colonial plantation economies. If slavery had been an economically marginal institution in Cuba up until the last decades of the eighteenth century, it now rapidly rose to overriding importance and expanded to unprecedented scope. According to Aimes's (1967, 36-37) very rough estimates, Cuba may have imported a total of some 90,000 slaves between 1512 and 1789. Between 1790 and 1810, however, 135,000 Africans entered the port of Havana alone (Marrero 1971-88, 9:28). And, even though Cuba's white population was incomparably larger than that of St. Domingue had been on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, in Havana and its surrounding plantation zones it lost its demographic majority position in the early years of the nineteenth century. Slaves and free Afro-Cubans now made up 67 percent of the city's population (Torres Cuevas and Reyes 1986, 74), and it was clear that most of them were aware, not only of the Haitian Revolution, but of the political turmoil in Spain. What added to the worries of Cuba's colonial elite was the fact that, by the spring of 1812, news about Hidalgo's declaration of slave emancipation in Mexico City in 1810, the independence of Venezuela, and the 1811 debates about abolition in the exiled Spanish Cortes could easily have reached Afro-Cubans through a variety of channels. Quite clearly, the marques de Someruelos had no reason to take rumors of a black conspiracy lightly. Given the political chaos in Spain and the turmoil spreading across its colonial mainland possessions, the consequences of a well-planned slave uprising were unforeseeable.

The Capitan General acted swiftly. Within a week after receiving information that a conspiracy was afoot in Havana, individuals suspected of involvement in insurrectionary plans had been arrested, their houses searched, and their neighborhoods scoured for potential informers. One of the last who found themselves incarcerated in the course of these measures was Jose Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra. The circumstances of his arrest are not entirely clear. Aponte, it seems, was denounced by another free black militiaman, Esteban Sanchez, for having participated in secret meetings at the house of Salvador Ternero. Ternero, also a free Afro-Cuban, had had an earlier brush with the police when he participated in the riots protesting the French occupation of Spain that broke out in Havana in March 1809 (Franco 1974, 138-39). At that time, hordes of armed whites and blacks had congregated at the embankment and the Plaza de San Francisco in protest of the "crime of Bayona" and the imprisonment of Fernando VII by Napoleon, loudly asserting their loyalty to the Spanish monarch. Known since then (even though, one might say, for all the wrong reasons) as a seditious character, in 1812 Ternero himself was accused by his free black neighbor Mauricio Gutierrez of having invited him, Gutierrez, to participate in a planned insurrection.

Like Ternero, Aponte had a somewhat ambiguous record. His discharge from military service in 1810, it would seem, had occurred under less than favorable conditions. The official documents state advanced age as the reason for retirement, but, as the Cuban historian Jose Luciano Franco (1977, 12) observes, Aponte's military career may have been terminated by allegations of his association with Capitan Don Luis Francisco Bassave (Basabe) y Cardenas, the white creole leader of a nationalistic conspiracy known as the Masonic Conspiracy of 1810. Franco makes rather vague references to what he thinks may have been prior seditious activities on the part of Aponte. He thus claims that Aponte dictated an inflammatory proclamation that was posted in Havana in early March 1812 but fails to cite any evidence (Franco 1977, 19). Similarly undocumented are Franco's allegations that Aponte had authored an "extensive " piece of writing inviting Havana's white merchants to join an impending revolutionary uprising that the Catalan merchant Pablo Serra brought to the attention of the Capitan General (Franco 1977, 20). Even if so, however, it is unclear why, almost from the start of the inquest, Aponte was suspected of being the conspiracy's mastermind. To be sure, the book found among his possessions contained images that immediately drew the attention of the Cuban authorities. Most significant, from their point of view, were detailed map-like drawings of Havana and its fortifications but also images of battle scenes in which black and white armies appeared to engage each other in deadly combat. Still, all Aponte himself ever admitted was having had some knowledge of potentially seditious plans that some men with whom he was closely associated were hatching.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, torture seems not to have been applied during Aponte's interrogation, and it is tempting to infer that his interrogators had embarked on a quest for truths they thought could only be gained from the man if they preserved his bodily and psychological integrity. Nerey's task, it seems, was to engage Aponte in dialogue rather than force him to speak. And what Aponte was to speak about was, not some nefarious plan (which his interrogators apparently thought he would never truthfully reveal), but rather the images he had committed to the pages that now lay before them. In three extended interrogations lasting up to eight hours a day, Nerey made Aponte go through page after page of the book and explain the meaning of its pictorial content. For Nerey, it proved a frustrating and ultimately senseless endeavor. Although the interrogators repeatedly felt close to uncovering a cunningly encrypted masterplan, again and again Aponte's exegesis on his own corpus of visual representations foiled their search for strategic intelligence. Rather than clarifying connections between pictorial signifiers and conspiratorial referents, Aponte's reading of his own book, as it were, rendered increasingly opaque and incomprehensible what initially had appeared meaningful signs of subversion. Exploding the ostensibly indexical into a densely allegorical and strangely familiar, although ultimately incomprehensible, form of pictorial semiosis, his vision, it seems, occluded theirs.

Then, on March 29, 1812, the mysterious libro de pinturas was closed forever. After a fourth and last long round of futile questions designed to relate the ambiguous symbolism of other objects and representations found among Aponte's possessions to conspiratorial motives, on 30 March Aponte's voice also fell silent-drowned out by the increasing noise of the histrionics of power. No more time would be wasted in probing the bewildering profusion of images conjured up by "the fatuous and heated brain of the moreno Jose Antonio Aponte" (Franco 1977, 217), as the Capitan General phrased the matter. If there was method in this madness-so the high-ranking Cuban officials convoked to interpret the evidence apparently thought-it was better left undisclosed. Indeed, it seems as if the decision to silence Aponte once and for all was an attempt to restore sense by sheer violence. On April 7, without the trial proceedings having come to a conclusion, the marques de Someruelos, in language ringing with savage pathos, ordered the annihilation of Aponte and eight of his presumed fellow conspirators. Two days later, they died on the gallows, and, in a final display of violence, their heads and hands were cut off to be publicly exhibited in the barrios where they had lived.

Nor would it seem that Aponte's libro de pinturas survived this storm of violence unleashed in the service of order and certainty. We do not know whether it was destroyed along with its creator, filed away and lost in the hurried evacuation of parts of the documentary record of Spanish colonial rule in 1898, or still awaits accidental discovery in some Cuban or Spanish archive, private collection, or other repository. Yet, even though we may never physically recover the product of Aponte's imagination and artistic creativity, we are left with the paradoxical record of an eloquent absence. Created and preserved by the same machinery of power and knowledge production that annihilated Aponte, the archival record has become the medium through which his ghostly voice-warped and distorted, to be sure, by the noise of multiple interferences-now speaks to us about a world of images that we will never see.

OUR MAN IN HAVANA

Ever since the first Cuban War of Independence (1868-78), nationalist Cuban historians have claimed Aponte as a paragon of Afro-Cuban liberation and anticolonial resistance. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they have done so on the same evidentiary grounds on which the original investigators and later colonialist historians constructed what they, too, perceived as a massive threat to Spanish domination. The Spanish historian Justo Zaragoza (1872, cited in Franco 1974, 144), thus, speaks of a "formidable conspiracy" led by a man with "capacities uncommon among his race " but "such perverse disposition of character that it gave rise to the adage more evil than Aponte by which villains are designated in Cuba today." And he concludes that, owing to Aponte's "black leadership and the perfectly premeditated and skillfully executed plot, there were certain moments when the island was truly endangered." Writing from exile in the United States only five years later, the Cuban Juan Arnao (1877, cited in Franco 1974, 145), on the other hand, called Aponte "the first Cuban whose dream became the beautiful inspiration of actively rebelling against Spanish domination." With Arnao begins a long tradition of reversing the sign value of what Ranajit Guha (1983) calls the prose of counterinsurgency in which Aponte's case was first recorded. By 1940, we thus find the eminent Cuban historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (cited in Franco 1974, 145) elevating Aponte to the status of a "protomartyr of civil liberty and the vindication of the worker." More recently, Levi Marrero (1971-88, 9:34) has spoken of Aponte's case as "the most extensive and best organized conspiracy aiming at the liberation of the slaves that took place in colonial Cuba." And even the most carefully documented study so far (Childs 1998) leaves little doubt that its author concurs with the Cuban authorities' ultimate decision to treat the highly ambiguous information gathered during the inquest as evidence for Aponte's intention to stage an uprising akin to that which had ushered in the Haitian Revolution some nineteen years earlier. Given this massive consensus across time and political positions, Nerey, we might say, had truly wasted his time trying to navigate the turbulent waters of Aponte's imagination. If Aponte's guilt of the heinous crime of sedition had been a foregone conclusion then, his role as prime instigator of an emancipatory project has become so now. What the marques de Someruelos once called the products of a heated and fatuous brain have been transformed into the glorious vision of liberation.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Evidence and Presence, Spectral and Other


Introduction

1. “For Reasons of History”: Jose Antonio Aponte and His Libro de Pinturas


2. Genealogies of Morality: The Afro-Cuban Nganga as Wage Laborer, Slave, and Maroon

3. Una Salacion Cientifica: The Work of Witchcraft and Science in Cuban Modernity

Epilogue: Carnal Knowledge

Appendix: Aponte’s Library

Notes

References

Permissions

Index

What People are Saying About This

Rosalind Shaw

Wizards and Scientists is a tour de force. Palmié's material is extraordinarily interesting and original and his theoretical explorations are virtuosic. This work will become a new benchmark for scholarship on modernity and the Atlantic world.
— Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University

Robert A. Hill

Palmié unlocks and explores the fascinating world of oracle and historical divination in loving detail and with unrivaled narrative power. Wizards and Scientists is an extraordinary achievement.
— Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles

Editorial Reviews

Wizards and Scientists is a tour de force. Palmié’s material is extraordinarily interesting and original and his theoretical explorations are virtuosic. This work will become a new benchmark for scholarship on modernity and the Atlantic world.”—Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University


“Palmié unlocks and explores the fascinating world of oracle and historical divination in loving detail and with unrivaled narrative power. Wizards and Scientists is an extraordinary achievement.”—Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles

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