Abstract
The first case of cholera was diagnosed in Havana on February 25, 1833. Two months later 8000 inhabitants of the city were dead. This article considers how contemporary literature interpreted the social and economic trauma of living through quarantine and lockdown. With a focus on texts by Cuban intellectual José Antonio Saco, physician Dr. Juan Francisco Calcagno Monti, and authors Ramón de Palma and Cirilo Villaverde, I argue that the social disruption that followed cholera created space for authors to reimagine the social order in Havana. Long-simmering social rifts came to the foreground. Economic factions who put their own interests above the population were critiqued. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of contagion was conflated with race, poverty, and immorality. Blaming their own vulnerability on the perceived moral and physical sickness of the city’s marginalized populations, Havana’s urban elite used cholera to justify imposing modern technologies of security and control. This historical case offers insight into how cultural texts produced by artists and authors in the response to the social, economic, and political disruptions that accompany pandemics radically reimagine the limits of community.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on cholera is extensive and offers perspectives on the disease in numerous geographic contexts. For major works on the subject, see Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present; Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910; Catherine Jean Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: a Cultural History; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866; Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography; Michael Zeheter, Epidemics, Empire, and Environments: Cholera in Madras and Quebec City, 1818–1910.
- 2.
For discussions of the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World, see: Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: the Story of the Haitian Revolution; Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution; Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution; Karen Salt, Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.
- 3.
This creole intellectual flourishing marked the emergence of nascent visions of cubanidad. These ideas would grow in influence, contributing to nationalist movements mid-century.
- 4.
This was a “loosely articulated but firmly held conviction that foul or contaminated air could be imported from overseas in vessels and goods, and under certain conditions could spark deadly disease outbreaks.” Some goods were understood to be extremely vulnerable to infection: those subject to decay, anything permeable, and items of animal origin (Barnes, 2014, 76).
- 5.
Costumbrismo was an artistic movement (both in literature and visual arts) that depicted the everyday manners and customs unique to a city or region. The form featured detailed representations of regional social behavior and people. Costumbrista stories were frequently satirical and critical in nature.
- 6.
In Havana, members of the tertulia included Jose Zacarias Gonzalez del Valle, Ramon de Palma, Jose Jacinto Milanes, Gabriel de la ConceptionValdes, Juan Francisco Manzano, Cirilo Villaverde; Anselmo Suarez Romero, Bias Oses, Jose de la Luz, and Jose Luis Alfonso.
- 7.
For a discussion of the racialization of the feminine in Cuban cultural production, see: Fraunhar, Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba; Guevara, “Inexacting Whiteness: Blanqueamiento as a Gender-Specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century”; Pilar Egüez Guevara, “Dangerous Encounters, Ambiguous Frontiers: Dance, Sex, and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.”
- 8.
This was the second novel published by Palma in 1838. In the first, Una pascua en San Marcos, Palma was openly critical of the corruption and frivolity of Cuba’s upper class. Its publication was met with censure and Palma faced arrest. His subsequent works took a subtler approach, masking his critical observations within a sentimental romantic aesthetic (Benítez-Rojo, 1986).
- 9.
Short treatments of Cecilia Valdés were published in Havana 1839. However, the canonical novelization of Cecilia Valdés was published by the exiled Villaverde in New York in 1886. While cholera was only mentioned in the text, Villaverde—free from Cuban censors and radicalized by his exile—offered a more direct criticism of colonialism and slavery in his later version (Genova, 2016).
- 10.
This invoking of the almost-white creole woman was familiar in the literature emerging from the tertulia. In José Z. González del Valle’s Carmen y Adela (1838/39), Carmen was a physically beautiful creole girl whose delicate complexion was marred by purplish shading around her eyes. This subtle imperfection marked her as having an inner impurity which manifested in her emotional excesses. In Anselmo Suárez’s Carlota Valdés (1838), the eponymous character was never able to overcome “the seal of misfortune imprinted on her forehead.” She, like Cecilia, was stigmatized by her origin as a foundling left at the Casa Cuna.
- 11.
In one of the few direct mentions of cholera in the text, Cecilia’s father noted that cholera was rampaging through Poland. He expressed his lack of concern, as “Señor Cholera will have to keep rolling right along to reach us, and by that time … who knows where you and I will be!” This correlates with Palmas’ critique of the elite’s selfish response to the threat of cholera (Villaverde, 2005, 56).
- 12.
The themes of miscegenation and incest frequently overlapped. The novella Petrona y Rosalia (1838), written by fellow tertulia member Felix Tanco y Bosmeniel, also featured intergenerational rape, the secrecy around an illegitimate mixed-race daughter, and the incestual sexual relations between siblings.
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Wade, B.M. (2022). The Blue Death: Cholera and Reimagined Community in Nineteenth-Century Havana. In: Venkatesan, S., Chatterjee, A., Lewis, A.D., Callender, B. (eds) Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1296-2_6
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