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This chapter aims at demonstrating that “Sensemayá: para matar una culebra” can be viewed as an evocation of the controversies surrounding Afro-Cuban comparsas during the early decades of the Cuban Republic. The chapter argues that this particular poem can be easily read as Guillén's reaction to the bans imposed on Afro-Cuban comparsas in the twentieth century. The chapter also analyses while reading the poem that the act of the killing of the snake in the poem cannot only be understood as a symbolic annihilation of traditional carnival comparsas but also as a metaphor for symbolizing the attempts made to abolish other Afro-Cuban cultural signs.

This chapter sheds light on “La conga prohibida,” a marvelous poem composed by Felix B. Caignet. Among numerous poems which look at Afrocubanismo dealings with Afro-Cuban carnival celebrations, this is the only poem referring to and openly disapproving of governmental prohibitions of the traditional congas during the early decades of the Cuban Republic. This chapter reveals that this particular poem differs from other poems dealing with the same subject because it aspires to satirize the social and political hypocrisies prevailing in Santiago rather than just portraying an exaggerated sketch of a conga and its Afro-Cuban participants.

Independence meant the new republic of Cuba had a unique opportunity and responsibility to make public health a matter of the highest state concern. These early debates in the earliest months of the Cuban Republic reveal an ambitious and far-reaching political project to join science and statecraft and secure health as a fundamental right of citizenship. This book explains how ideas about government and personal responsibility for health emerged during the transition from colony to republic, shaped the development of new health institutions and the lives of Havana’s residents, and were contested, transformed, and taken up by ever-broader swaths of the urban population to make claims about citizenship and state responsibility. It examines the post-colonial history of Havana as urban residents confronted disease and early death during a period of dizzying political, economic, and scientific change from 1897-1935. It contends that, over time, the growing interactions between the urban poor and the agents of the expanding public health state were transformative for both. The introduction provides a brief history of medical nationalism in postcolonial Cuba, the changes and medical landscape in Havana, and expanding collective rights in Latin America. It also provides a summary of the structure of the book.

Art historian Anelys Alvarez reviews the tumultuous first three decades of the Cuban Republic (1902–30) and their impact on painting and other visual arts such as sculpture. First, she questions the conventional dichotomy between traditional (or academic) and avant-garde (or modernist) art in Cuba during this period. She then recovers several forgotten artists, such as Antonio Rodríguez Morey, María Capdevila, and Manuel Mesa, who were active on the island before the rise of modernism in the 1930s. Alvarez reappraises a whole generation of painters who served as an artistic bridge between the late nineteenth century and the first generation of avant-garde (vanguardista) painters in 1927.

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.

Chapter 3 discusses racial democracy and black activism prior to 1959, during the Cuban Republic. The historical foundations of racial ideology in Cuba offer critical information about how the revolution developed its racial discourse. Racial ideology during this period was a dominant narrative, but was not institutionalized to prohibit discussion of racism. Consequently, this period saw the development of an above-ground black voice represented through associations, clubs, press, and a black political party. These voices were silenced by the revolution and the chapter chronicles an important history of black activism and expression that was relegated to the private sphere after 1959.

This chapter provides an overview of the signing of the new Cuban constitution on July 1, 1940, a recapitulation and a confirmation of the founding of the Cuban Republic. The very first republican constitution, declaring a sovereign national existence independent of Spanish colonial rule, had been drafted and signed in 1869 in Guáimaro by Cuban revolutionaries. Delegates and audience acknowledge the new Cuban constitution to be directly a product of its own historical moment, distinct from past and future. The moments marked by the constitution were considered to be moments of national transcendence in which the debilitating factionalism of Cuban politics had been overcome by a strong, common determination to erect the structure of a stable civil society.