Futures Past in Santiago: Religion, American Neocolonialism, and the Remaking of Eastern Cuba

Shortly after Cuba’s War of Independence (1895-1898) concluded, Oriente and its capital city of Santiago de Cuba were rebuilt. One might even say that they were re-made.  US military personnel, Protestant missionaries, American colonists, and Cuban politicians launched campaigns that offered relief to the war’s victims. But the quest for “regeneration” underwrote Santiago’s one-sided urban renewal and encouraged the creation of vast plantations in areas where peasant plots once predominated. This paper explores what Cubans and Americans imagined for the region’s future in the first decades of the twentieth century, relating efforts to bring those competing visions to fruition.  The rise of espiritismo de cordón, a religious practice indebted to a transnational Spiritist movement, offered a proposal for the future that questioned what urban planners and planters built. Cordón mobilized veterans, widows, and ex-peasants, who founded healing communities while promoting a vernacular understanding of progress.