Making Antonio Maceo: Constructing Memory, Monuments, and Race in Cuba, 1910–16

In August of 1912, Cuban newspapers announced the results of a competition to design the first monument to Cuban independence hero Antonio Maceo.  As a Cuban of color, Maceo entered the national imagination at the confluence of national aspirations and racial anxieties, emerging as an icon that circulated the ideals and norms that would shape national formulations of race.  Indeed, as newspapers in 1912 weighed in on the winning design, Cubans were struggling to reconcile the memory of Maceo with the uprising and brutal suppression of the Independent Party of Color (PIC), a conflict ending in the massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans that summer. 

These events were more than chronologically coincidental; they were deeply connected, both in the conflicting constructions of black patriotism they represented and in how each shaped the course of the other.  This paper analyzes the discourses that emerged around the construction of the Maceo monument, and assesses how Cubans contemplated the meaning of Maceo through the trauma of the PIC uprising.  As the country grappled with the challenge to dominant ideologies posed by the PIC, the meaning of Antonio Maceo emerged as a contested terrain in which Cubans debated the relationship between racial and national identities.  Writers and politicians advanced an image of Maceo that centered on his racial identity to affirm its irrelevance and simultaneously to communicate norms of inclusion by celebrating an idealized black patriot. The PIC directly challenged this orthodoxy, advancing a Maceo whose vision for the nation was betrayed by the racism of white Cubans.  The construction of a monument to Maceo thus emerged as a focal point for the negotiation of national ideologies destabilized by the conflict and offered Cubans an opportunity to reformulate the meaning of Maceo in the wake of racialized violence.